An interesting discussion emerged on Twitter about how to understand the stresses and strains and double-crosses and "Who's on First?" of Team Snowden. In one of the last chapters of my book Privacy for Me and Not for Thee, in a section called "Team Snowden Breaks Up?" I address what appears to be a falling out between Glenn Greenwald and Jacob Appelbaum about the timing and detail of the publishing process regarding Snowden's documents.
No doubt there were other strains in the relationship, but when the fight erupted into the public, it seemed to indeed be severe. From the looks of the tweets, Appelbaum appeared to be blackmailing Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, and James Ball, a former WikiLeaks staffer now at the Guardian, by threatening to publish e-mails he had with Ball unless Rusbridger authorized the publishing of a piece on Tor -- Appelbaum's own software project where he is still listed as the main promoter.
The prominent author Louise Mensch made the point that Appelbaum's threat forced the Guardian to publish a piece they were still vetting -- and forced them to truncate the piece.
While that may be the case, I read the material differently -- we're looking at the same set of tweets you can see linked in the text below. I think Appelbaum strutted around and tried to indicate he could threaten the Guardian, but they one-upped him. For one, they were planning to publish the piece anyway; for two, their publishing of it the very next day indicated that he just wasn't in the loop in their plans. For three, the fact that Bart Gellman published an even more elaborate piece with a 39-page manual on how to crack Tor from the NSA -- sending a snarky little winking Tweet to Appelbaum -- indicates that he, too, already had the documents in the pipeline but just wasn't moving as fast as the more radical hacker throught he should.
Appelbaum only looked bad even with his fellow radical hackers, however. As we can see in this passage, Smari McCarthy even challenges Jake to dump the document -- if he has it. But he clearly doesn't.
Mensch believes that what we see here is a pattern of blackmail -- Greenwald threatened his resignation if his very first story on Snowden wasn't published by 5 pm that day.
An yees, we saw again that with the story involving Greenwald's partner, David Miranda -- a threat on the record which Greenwald tried to dismiss as a translation problem with covering his remarks to the Brazilian press, and a threat that he and his supporters constantly deny. Many in the journalist community, however, saw it as what it was -- a dead man's switch type of threat against the UK government.
And now with the Tor story, there seems to be the same kind of blackmail from Appelbaum -- and the point then seems to be that the Guardian has gotten itself in too deep with its radical journo and hacker friends, and is being whipsawed by them.
I don't think two is enough to make a pattern (re: threats to the Guardian; three if we count the threat to the UK government). Given how strenuously the Greenwald team denies this, we have to make the argument persuasive. I don't think "blackmail" is what Appelbaum is accomplishing here. I think he's merely showing himself to have been sidelined.
If there's an argument to be made to the contrary, then we need to find the tweets of James Ball or various other journalists that seemed to bargain with Appelbaum (if that's the recollection). But what it looks like here is that after Appelbaum spouts, Ball emerges calmly to tell him off, and invoke his closer following of Snowden's wishes, implying -- again -- that Jakes has fallen outside the fold.
In any event, comments and corrections are welcome -- this section is already revised for "Version 3" in adding the tweet threatening to dump Ball's email, and more changes can be made, although I don't want the book to get too out of sync.
3. Team Snowden Breaks Up?
The constantly changing by-lines on the Snowden leaks appearing in various outlets (sometimes Poitras, sometimes Greenwald, sometimes others, like Bart Gellman of the Washington Post); the contradictions increasingly noted in the stories; and growing peer pressure from the coder community indicated cracks were emerging in the original Team Snowden. This raises the question as to whether the uneven cooperation and outright skirmishes between the “Fifth Estate” geeks – radical activists favoring indiscriminate, total dumping of state and corporate files – and the Fourth Estate – adversarial journalists sympathetic to them but filtering the raw materials – may ultimately undermine the journalistic cause.
On October 3, 2013, Appelbaum erupted on Twitter with blunt protests against Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian. Appelbaum claimed that the Guardian was cooperating too much with the British government and afraid to publish documents which Snowden had supposedly leaked on Tor. Appelbaum specifically accused Greenwald and James Ball of sitting on the Tor story, then was besieged on Twitter by various hackers who wanted to know what exactly his beef was. He only hinted darkly that the Guardian was now somehow “turned” by UK intelligence and was being overly cautious now about their releases, agreeing that Rusbridger was “the worst face of the anti-surveillance revolution.”
The Twit fight heated up when James Ball appeared and calmly stated that he and the Guardian were not holding backon the material, but following Snowden's wishes and vetting the documents carefully. The dispute attracted the attention of Foreign Policy's Elias Groll and Katelyn Fossett, who ran a blog about it on October 3.
Appelbaum then even threatened to leak his emails with James Ball on the Tor story, but he seemed to relent a bit, commenting, “I'm debating dropping @jamesrbuk's emails related to the topic but that is unkind if they are going to publish soon.
Smári McCarthy, an activist in ThoughtWorks, the Pirate Party and other radical Internet groups, debated Appelbaum in this thread, basically trying to see if Appelbaum had enough knowledge of the Snowden document to leak it himself, pre-emptively. He didn’t.
A memo also appeared October 3 on the alternative news service Cryptome, which as we know has been critical of Assange in the past, notably about his unconscionable exploitation of Tor to start WikiLeaks. It listed the further gripes that some in the hackers’ community had started to assemble about the entire process of journalistic vetting at the Guardian, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Der Spiegel and ProPublica . They saw the mainstream media as gate-keepers and filterers of the raw, organic Snowden leaks.
Then on October 4, a story on revelations about the NSA’s Tor surveillance appeared under a byline by Greenwald, Ball and Bruce Schneier, the prominent cybersecurity expert who had now openly embraced the hacker’s cause and joined the EFF. A source mentioned prominently in the story was Roger Dingledine, Appelbaum's fellow Tor developer.
Was the appearance of the Tor story coerced by Appelbaum’s accusations? It hardly seemed possible to run a story of this complexity on a day's notice.
Or had it been prompted by a series of sensational arrests related to Tor, in a desperate bid to resurrect the reputation of the chief tool used by WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden along with thousands of activists around the world? That seemed to be its chief message.
Maybe the appearance of the story the day after the threatening tweet merely indicated that Appelbaum was out of the loop, now sidelined as Greenwald’s tech guru. Maybe he simply hadn’t known his former colleagues were going to publish the piece anyway – as he seemed to begin to realize even during the Twitter debate when he threatened to leak Ball’s e-mails.
The Guardian piece mentions briefly that Tor was used by a suspected head of a child pornography ring but fails to note the even bigger story of the day, the closing of the black-market drug site Silk Road, also heavily reliant on Tor, when its alleged mastermind, Dread Pirate Robert (Ross Ulbricht) was arrested and also charged with ordering a hit on a federal agent who turned out to be involved in a sting operation. Was this, then an indication that the story was rushed after Appelbaum’s pressure?
Then Barton Gellman of the Washington Post tweeted to Appelbaum a link to his story on Tor with a wink – and a patronizing call for patience. That suggested that both the Guardian and Washington Post were planning on the Tor story all along – but just weren’t consulting with Appelbaum closely on it.
As noted, in the child pornography case, the FBI was said to disable half of Tor’s reported 3200 nodes or computers used as relays and then essentially electronically spill “dye” on many other users to out them, causing mass apprehension among Tor users, some of whom were activists in places like Iran and China trying to avoid government detection and persecution. On social media and discussion lists like Stanford’s LiberationTech, Appelbaum fended off recriminations for days.
The purpose of the story in the Guardian seemed to be about proving the contradictory claims that the NSA has back-doors “everywhere,” but that Tor, created and still funded by the Department of Defense was different, and still good to use for anonymous communications and browsing. Yes, there are complex technical reasons for this having to do with the nature of encryption standards and how they can be undermined, and the nature of Tor’s obfuscation especially if used with PGP encryption.
Even so, Schneier seemed to deliberately avoid discussing (or didn’t know about) any of his own industry’s recent critiques of Tor – especially the scholarly works prepared by its original developers still involved in the project from the Navy.
A few days later, Ken Auleta’s celebratory profile of Rusbridger appeared in the New Yorker. It was indicative of the liberal tide of support for the Guardian which was not something Appelbaum could stop, even with his insinuations that the British paper “sat on” Snowden revelations.
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