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« PBS Passes Off Radical Tor Activists as Benign Privacy Advocates | Main | History and Diagnosis of Harassment by @LibertyLynx »

02/15/2014

In Which Jacob Appelbaum Falsely Accuses Edward Lucas and Me of Libel on Twitter

Appelbaum by Scott Beale

As you can see from these tweets today on my Timeline and that of Edward Lucas -- and there are hundreds more in this vain, what I predicted is occurring: The Snowdenistas are out in full force accusing Edward Lucas and me of libel for our legitimate, lawful, necessary and long overdue critical reporting on the hackers who helped Snowden. You can read Edward Lucas' book here and my book here.

No, to those persistent hecklers who keep thinking we write what we do to "sell books," don't be ridiculous. Lucas' book is only 99 cents in the Kindle Singles program. As he has ascerbically pointed out on Twitter, if you have a struggle paying 99 cents, he will send you an Amazon voucher to get it. My book is only $2.99 (which is the lowest price you can physically set it to if you are in the general program I opted for), and honestly, if you can't pay less than a latte for my book, I can't imagine how you pay for your Internet service, even.

So...I knew the attacks would come in this form, because that's all these thugs know how to do -- suddenly invoke courts and law and lawyers even though they shun the rule of law for everything else (starting with the way they hack into systems with impunity and ending with their shunning of the proper channels for whistleblowing). It really is the ultimate irony and the ultimate hypocrisy for this crew.

That this entire story -- trying to bring the Snowdenistas to account -- might end in them even getting their free-speech lawfaring lawyers at Electronic Frontier Foundation or even the American Civil Liberties Union to actually help them in mounting libel lawsuits against a blogger and a journalist would not surprise me one bit. That they will look completely hypocritical doing so and would be utterly in the wrong are probably factors these self-righteous thugs never contemplate -- that's how far gone they are.

And the way that the sinister hacker types can attack their critics best is by setting them against each other and ensnarling them in he-said, she-said sorts of polemics - and that's all part of this story now, too.

You'll notice that the person actually being attacked the most right now is Luke Harding, whose book is number one under the search term "Snowden" on Amazon.com (I'm proud to say Edward Lucas is number 3 and I'm number 6!). Harding has a paperback of his book out now as well, which a lot more people will read because it's still easier for them to read it that way than on Kindle.

Harding is ultimately pro-Snowden, but because he's slightly critical of Snowden or describes him as being a "prisoner of Russia," he's getting it in the neck the worst with everything that the anarcho hackers, skiddies, WikiLeaks creepos and crypto kids can throw at him because such Leninists always hate the people most who are essentially on their side, but just a few degrees "off".

Edward Lucas is under fire because he is far more critical of Snowden but also provides the liberal argument that certain things Snowden discovered are problematic and should be reformed. The Leninists *hate* liberals as much as their fellow leftists -- and in this setting, Lucas is liberal.

I'm more hardline on this, although I position myself firmly in the liberal tradition -- I think hackers are antithetical to human rights and a real threat to democracy, and I refuse to concede any "good" in Snowden's hack in order to return the focus back on what I think is the greater evil now, the encryption movements, not the NSA. No one has persuaded me I need to worry about an agency of a democratically-elected liberal government. And since I'm in a weaker position than well-paid journalists from real media with lawyers, and I'm just a blogger, I'm the one they will feel free to attack most. I'm aware of all that.

So the tactic is obviously going to be to discredit me to Lucas and portray me as a "crazy cat lady" and "infamous Internet troll" and hammer away at his handful of footnotes to me in his book as a way of discrediting me, in the hopes that Lucas will then disavow me. So far, Lucas has said "don't call her a cat lady, she's my friend" and has stood by his footnotes and urged Jacob Appelbaum and his possee to come up with answers to the questions in the material footnoted. Good!

I do think the only way to fight these malevolent and vicious hacker movements and their shadowy backers in the Russian and other governments is through human solidarity and through the human rights method of documenting and reporting. But I do realize that these people might succeed in bullying Lucas enough so that lawyers will tell him to remove footnotes or links in his book. I hope it doesn't come to that and they all put up a fight because I think these cowardly keyboard warriors need to have their bluffs called, hard. Fortunately, his book stands on its own anyway without footnotes to me.

As does mine. I've gone to even greater lengths to document all the open sources and all the contradictory narratives and strange coincidences -- my book is nearly four times as long as Lucas'.

Here's a summary of what is happening on Twitter: Of all people, John Young of Cryptome (@cryptomeorg) came forward with an attack on Lucas' book, even though he himself is critical of WikiLeaks and Snowden and has published criticism of Snowden -- albeit from that weird anarcho/technocommunist/whatever perspective that he holds about all these issues ("All property is theft," is one of his beliefs which says it all.)

Interestingly, the very passage he zoomed in on as "moo" and "Cold War cud" is not from me or Lucas, but Streetwise Professor, or Craig Pirrong, a libertarian finance professor at the University of Houston. I cited him in my book and blog, as did Lucas, for the simple fact that he deserves credit. He was the first blogger to publish the information that Snowden and Appelbaum, the tech helper of Greenwald and Poitras, were in Hawaii at the exact same time.

Let's look at the chain of how this information came to Craig Pirrong -- the professor at University of Houston who is viciously attacking me and accusing me of falsehoods now (more on that in another post), but with whom I used to chat with in a friendly way back at the time a group of us were studying the Snowden affair.

Craig Pirrong got the link to this video of Jacob Appelbaum *himself* doing a pre-emptive and guilty-sounding denial of the strange coincidence of himself and Snowden at the same time in Hawaii.

Without Appelbaum himself making this curious speech -- which was posted to YouTube by his fans -- none of us would likely have ever have noticed any of this! The person who brought this video to the attention of bloggers is a media researcher in the Netherlands. That person gave me permission to use her real name and credit her with this simple research fact (in my latest book update) -- she was the one who noticed it and send the link to others, including to LibertyLynx, a libertarian Twitter account who mainly writes on Russia and hackers (and who is joining Pirrong in outrageous attacks on my in recent weeks, accusing me of being a certain stalker who has in fact harassed me and others viciously.)

LibertyLynx may or may not be Craig's alt, we don't know. He claims not. He claims this is a colleague or assistant or something of his and is infuriated when people don't believe him, but Liberty and her nest of similar Liberty Twitter accounts do sound exactly like him -- although they build a careful legend as a persona.

None of this matters. The fact is, the video is out there, anyone can watch it, they can read Streetwise Professor's blog about it, and then my transcription of the relevant part here, and ask their own questions.

After seeing this video and studying what Jake and his friends had to say on Twitter -- about 20 of them were there --- Pirrong and others came upon the other fact, that Appelbaum was there at the Spring Break of Code, announced in February for March (hastily), all-expenses paid, by the pseudonymous Moxie Marlinspike, about whom he also had lots to say (he has been following the hackers around Tor and other circumvention/encryption programs just as I have.)  He even found an instagram of Appelbaum's close friend Christine Colbert from Hawaii.

I researched further and found this strange tweet from Colbert about Rubik's Cubes on the very day that Glenn Greenwald just told us (changing the date yet again in his multiple narratives) was May 30, 2013. Funny, that. I also found that Colbert was so close to Appelbaum such as to be at Burning Man with him, but more importantly, to be at his side at his father's funeral.

Now maybe she just likes Rubik's Cubes and that tradecraft-looking thing is just a coincidence. And maybe all of these hackers just went on a spring break and never talked about Edward Snowden or anyone like him. But the coincidences are there, and they increase, as I demonstrate in my book.

So I believe all of this deserves a second and third look, and further investigation to see if in fact Appelbaum or any of the others at the Spring Break of Code met with Snowden, or -- another scenario -- *discussed the existence of Snowden under Verax or any other name* such as to help him in any way or to coordinate with him in any way the hack he made of the NSA when he deliberately joined Booz, Allen, Hamilton with that plan in mind, which he told forthrightly to the South China Morning Post as we all know.

Dates matter. Snowden could have met the Spring Breakers or somehow been in communication with them online, or through even other third parties -- and THEN gone for training at Ft. Meade and hacked there and then hacked at the Hawaii facility of the NSA. The dates of Snowden's travel are confirmed by his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, in her blog. Appelbaum claims he only contacted Snowden online in May. That's when he made the detailed vetting of him (which is really what it was) and "journalistic work" (to be able to describe it all as "journalism") for Der Spiegel, ultimately published in July.

Locations matter. Appelbaum is saying that we don't realize Hawaii is made up of islands. Um, is he kidding? Honolulu, where Snowden was, is only about 90 miles from Maui, where the Spring Break of Code was -- a short plane flight. It was possible for Snowden to have made both that short plane flight *and* the long overseas flight to Ft. Meade and the training. It's also possible for Appelbaum or anyone else in the Spring Break of Code to stop in Honolulu on their way to Maui.

Appelbaum says this: "In mid-May, documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras contacted me," Appelbaum said. "She told me she was in contact with a possible anonymous National Security Agency (NSA) source who had agreed to be interviewed by her."

But in her interview with Peter Maass in the New York Times Magazine, Poitras said she turned to Appelbaum for help with encryption in dealing with Snowden -- from whom she first heard in December 2012. She won't get more specific on her first substantive contacts with Snowden after he approached her after he struck out trying to get Greenwald to use encryption. And that's no accident. She says it is "for legal reasons." I'll say. If she is shown to be in contact with Snowden earlier than she says, i.e. March and April when he was deliberately getting a job in order to hack, and not May, when he was fleeing after hacking, she looks bad in terms of what a prosecutor might do with this, as does Appelbaum. They all know that. That's why they scream at anyone probing at this particular area -- but of course, that's no reason to not probe harder.

That's what my book does.

These people seem to think they are the only ones who can construct narratives and hit hard with them and undermine national security in the process -- and then they seem to think that anyone who criticizes them gets to be batted viciously away with threats of specious libel suits. Despicable!

Then there's the question of the appearance of the public keys where Snowden, Poitras and Appelbaum all appear to be associated in March and April 2013-- i.e. earlier than in May, which is what they said. John Young knows that. That's why he published it. We all get it. But as I've pointed out in connection with the other Snowden keys story, we don't know if this is definitive. Smart hackers don't use this public posting method when exchanging public keys. They do it in person or more securely locally.

Oh, so now we're back at looking whether they did meet in Hawaii directly or through third persons to exchange keys, as hackers often do to stay out of the view.

So far, in this barrage of a discussion on Twitter, Appelbaum has not denied anything specific. He's just thrown up his hands and cried "libel" and "slander" (actually, libel is print and slander is verbal). He makes it appear that he "denies all of it" but when you ask him specific questions, he won't answer them. Perhaps he will deny each and every aspect of this story, in which case, we can print his refutations, but that would hardly close the matter as he is not a reliable source. Having dealt with him on a number of other subjects and debates, I've found him to evade, obfuscate and prevaricate in the manner than culture-jamming anarchist hackers always do. This is an old story for me.

So let's bear down on what John Young actually focused on: Craig Pirrong's conjecture. When I read Lucas' book which I purchased for my Kindle, this didn't stand out for me, because I just saw him merely linking to Pirrong to give him credit, and then putting a particular version of events forward for discussion -- he clearly marks it as a hypothesis and as conjecture. It is Craig's right to publish conjecture, and Lucas' right, too, in good faith -- which is what he does have here-- to try to reconstruct a very murky picture in which both evasive known people and people with pseudonyms will not tell us what they know about the exact dates of when they began working with Snowden, and how -- or when they first heard about the existence of this NSA hacker fugitive called Snowden/Verax.

But even so, I have to say that I don't see that the half of Craig's version that deals with the first contact with Snowden makes sense. I didn't accept this version and didn't reprint this passage in the same way in my book. Pirrong says in "Be There. Aloha. Convergence in Hawaii" the following:

With regard to (b) I advance the following conjecture: Snowden was in contact with Appelbaum first, and well before January, 2013, and Appelbaum directed Snowden to Poitras.  It would be natural for a computer geek and hacker like Snowden to know of, and to reach out to, Appelbaum.  Far more natural than to reach out to Poitras first.

Under this conjecture, the timing works out.  Snowden, Appelbaum, and Moxie work out their basic plan in late-2012 or early-January, 2013.  Appelbaum activates the plan to disseminate the information via Poitras by putting Snowden in touch with her and near simultaneously Moxie initiates the SBoC to give him cover to travel to Hawaii (and perhaps too a team of unwitting accomplices that could help him cover his activities while there).   They all converge in Hawaii a couple of months later, and then or soon thereafter Snowden steals over 10K documents from NSA.

I’d be more than interested in reading an alternative explanation of this hacker convergence that shaves better with Occam’s Razor than the one I advance above.  Means, motive, motivation, and opportunity all line up.

Pirrong has the habit of being very definitive and authoritative-sounding when he advances notions (he shares that personality trait with Snowden) and he can be hugely nasty if you don't agree with him, even if you are on the same side of the issue -- as I've found.

Not one to be intimidated by titles, I'd have to question this part of his theory merely because Snowden himself tells it a different way. He says he contacted Poitras after reading about her border travails and seeing her film on the NSA.

Now, when I point this out, naturally -- naturally! -- Pirrong says, well, how can we believe Snowden when he has lied about so many other things, i.e. stealing passwords, which he has been exposed on? Then Pirrong implies that to criticize him, um, I'll do anything, even side with Snowden. (That's how he gets. It's really loony and sick, ultimately).

But I assure everyone that I'm not interested in carrying water for Snowden whatsoever, I just take certain things at face value because I don't see another Occam's Razor answer.

Poitras, don't forget, published not just anything, but a video with the NSA's respected mathematician Binney, who left the agency. Snowden would have been very interested in that, given his views and determination to leak files at that time. The video appeared in August 2012 on the New York Times' website.

Meanwhile, Pirrong's theory of Snowden to Appelbaum to Poitras is only based on "like to like," i.e. that it's more likely for a hacker like Snowden to contact another hacker like Appelbaum.

And one could point out in defense of Pirrong's argument, although he himself doesn't make it, that in December 2012, Appelbaum made an open call on IT workers to leave the government -- the "dark side" and come over to his anarcho-crypto movement. He made this on December 27, 2012 at 29c3 in his speech "Not My Department."

Snowden might have seen that and contacted Appelbaum; but he might have seen Poitras' film first and then been moved to contact her, too -- he said that her arrest 40 times at the border -- and her determination to continue her work -- impressed him.  Since it looks like Snowden contacted Poitras earlier in December AFTER he first tried to get to Greenwald  (and maybe tried to get to Greenwald even in November), Pirrong's theory of his "first contact" with Appelbaum doesn't quite fit.

I don't think it really matters substantively whether Snowden got to Appelbaum first because obviously Poitras brought in Appelbaum as he was her crypto helper, by her own admission. To fuss endlessly on this as "wrong," much less "libelous" is to miss the entire suspect story and its larger contours.

It doesn't matter if Pirrong's version on this isn't right (I don't think it is); it doesn't even matter if they never met in Hawaii (I think something happened there because of his pre-emptive nervousness and the tweet with the Rubik's cube, but maybe it was only talk about Snowden early, not a meeting).

What matters is that there is something up here, or Greenwald wouldn't have so furiously batted away Walter Pincus and Zach Green on this so early on, and try to keep people from looking at this.

Then there's the keys.

I cited the keys first here, and then Streetwise Professor put them in this blog.

And hey, John Young is the one who published the story of the keys first. It's awfully funny for him, of all people, to come forward and start claiming Edward Lucas was chewing a Cold War cud and mooing a "security state" story when in fact John Young himself obviously wondered about this funny coincidence back then.

I also note in my book that the appearance of John Young's publication on Cryptome happens a mere week after the email went out inviting the human rights activists to meet Snowden at the airport (he himself didn't make that connection or tell us what key words he searched with).

My theory explained in my book is that possibly someone leaked this Lavabits email of Ed's (we can find it published on RapGenius, so somebody did that), then someone could use it to search with. They could have used other search terms, but it's this search term of this email, that may not have been known before the Moscow Sheremetyevo meeting that is material to the story of the keys on Cryptome.

That's what it looks like to me, anyway. And as Craig would say, I'm happy to see any other Occam's Razor that shaves as close.

I also want to point out that I've been publishing my concerns about Appelbaum and Snowden for eight months. I've had numerous blogs on this subject, over and over, notably this and this. I publish this to Twitter and speak openly on Twitter constantly.

During this entire time, I never saw Appelbaum come by this blog, or answer me on Twitter. He has me blocked, but obviously he looks up the people who talk about him.

I saw some of Appelbaum's posse -- he prefers to have his fanboyz do his fighting for him -- claim that Edward Lucas is at fault for not sending multiple queries to Appelbaum on Twitter, or sending him queries via email to solicit his refutations.

But honestly, it is not possible to send Appelbaum email, as I myself discovered. If you look at the web address he has on his Twitter account, it's "down," i.e. you can't access it. Down permanently. Yet somehow, he uses that server address to send emails to the list Liberationtech, as I've seen constantly, as I'm a member of that list myself. When debating him before, I've attempted to send things to that email, and it doesn't work. I don't know what's "up" with this, but I've always openly discussed him on open blogs and open Twitter because in my view, you should never, ever enter into private little convos with these people. They only use such contacts to try to manipulate and entrap some more or make deals which they themselves don't keep. The only way to flush these people out is to constantly deal with them in the open and never go into private side conversations and deals.

Supposedly -- we're told by various "Internet lawyers" like Andrew Norton who are fighting for Jake -- under British libel law, a judge could say that if an author didn't approach a subject in good faith for a comment about an allegation, i.e. on email, and only approached with one tweet, why, he's somehow in violation.

Nonsense, even under more strict British libel law. Edward Lucas is in good faith here. He did try to contact the subjects and they don't reply. For Appelbaum to claim that he was "swimming in Thailand" when he went on vacation and didn't see the tweets is patently ridiculous as he was tweeting the whole time he was in Thailand and we all saw it.

I have, too -- for example my email to Christine Colbert got no answer -- the one I used from her blog which she herself provides. She's never commented on multiple tweets, either. Appelbaum has never commented except to make shrill, blanket accusations as he has now. Greenwald has never answered. Ewan MacAskill has never answered. Ben Wizner has never answered.

What do you do with people like this who dissemble and are so unscruplous and won't debate fairly? You can only keep documenting them, keep challenging and hoping for the best.

There is no libelous material here in my book or Lucas' book. These are legitimate efforts to challenge people who themselves have made untenable claims and have mounted an outrageous assault on US and UK national security.

With regard to (b) I advance the following conjecture: Snowden was in contact with Appelbaum first, and well before January, 2013, and Appelbaum directed Snowden to Poitras.  It would be natural for a computer geek and hacker like Snowden to know of, and to reach out to, Appelbaum.  Far more natural than to reach out to Poitras first.

Under this conjecture, the timing works out.  Snowden, Appelbaum, and Moxie work out their basic plan in late-2012 or early-January, 2013.  Appelbaum activates the plan to disseminate the information via Poitras by putting Snowden in touch with her and near simultaneously Moxie initiates the SBoC to give him cover to travel to Hawaii (and perhaps too a team of unwitting accomplices that could help him cover his activities while there).   They all converge in Hawaii a couple of months later, and then or soon thereafter Snowden steals over 10K documents from NSA.

I’d be more than interested in reading an alternative explanation of this hacker convergence that shaves better with Occam’s Razor than the one I advance above.  Means, motive, motivation, and opportunity all line up.

- See more at: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=7524#sthash.AzDo9trm.dpuf

With regard to (b) I advance the following conjecture: Snowden was in contact with Appelbaum first, and well before January, 2013, and Appelbaum directed Snowden to Poitras.  It would be natural for a computer geek and hacker like Snowden to know of, and to reach out to, Appelbaum.  Far more natural than to reach out to Poitras first.

Under this conjecture, the timing works out.  Snowden, Appelbaum, and Moxie work out their basic plan in late-2012 or early-January, 2013.  Appelbaum activates the plan to disseminate the information via Poitras by putting Snowden in touch with her and near simultaneously Moxie initiates the SBoC to give him cover to travel to Hawaii (and perhaps too a team of unwitting accomplices that could help him cover his activities while there).   They all converge in Hawaii a couple of months later, and then or soon thereafter Snowden steals over 10K documents from NSA.

I’d be more than interested in reading an alternative explanation of this hacker convergence that shaves better with Occam’s Razor than the one I advance above.  Means, motive, motivation, and opportunity all line up.

- See more at: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=7524#sthash.AzDo9trm.dpuf

With regard to (b) I advance the following conjecture: Snowden was in contact with Appelbaum first, and well before January, 2013, and Appelbaum directed Snowden to Poitras.  It would be natural for a computer geek and hacker like Snowden to know of, and to reach out to, Appelbaum.  Far more natural than to reach out to Poitras first.

Under this conjecture, the timing works out.  Snowden, Appelbaum, and Moxie work out their basic plan in late-2012 or early-January, 2013.  Appelbaum activates the plan to disseminate the information via Poitras by putting Snowden in touch with her and near simultaneously Moxie initiates the SBoC to give him cover to travel to Hawaii (and perhaps too a team of unwitting accomplices that could help him cover his activities while there).   They all converge in Hawaii a couple of months later, and then or soon thereafter Snowden steals over 10K documents from NSA.

I’d be more than interested in reading an alternative explanation of this hacker convergence that shaves better with Occam’s Razor than the one I advance above.  Means, motive, motivation, and opportunity all line up.

- See more at: http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=7524#sthash.AzDo9trm.dpuf

Posted at 07:00 PM |

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