Appelbaum in Europe

Not sure why I didn't post this before -- research still needed.

So along with wondering if Edward Snowden was ever in the UK when Sarah Harrison was, I was wondering if Jacob Appelbaum was ever in Geneva when Snowden was there working as a contractor -- which seems to be 2007-2009.

Appelbaum travels extensively and gives talks everywhere:

TEDx Talk in Flanders
November 2012

University of Luxembourg

February 14, 2012

FrontLine Club
October 24, 2012

Berlin
March 23, 2013

Berlin
June 4, 2012

But I didn't see Geneva per say, or any thing nearby in 2007-2009, even though some of these locations are a short flight away or even drive from Geneva.

Well, the Rolling Stone did say this in September 2010:

He demonstrates this to me when I meet him, this past spring, two weeks before Wikileaks made headlines around the world by releasing a video showing U.S. soldiers killing civilians in Iraq. I visit him at his cavernous duplex in San Francisco. The only furniture is a black couch, a black chair and a low black table; a Guy Fawkes mask hangs on a wall in the kitchen. The floor is littered with Ziploc bags containing bundles of foreign cash: Argentine pesos, Swiss francs, Romanian lei, old Iraqi dinars bearing Saddam Hussein's face. The bag marked "Zimbabwe" contains a single $50 billion bill. Photographs, most of them taken by Appelbaum, cover the wall above his desk: punk girls in seductive poses and a portrait of his deceased father, an actor, in drag.

Well, these days, of course, you can use Euros everywhere. Why would you get Swiss francs if you weren't in Switzerland, though?

Back in 2010, when this Rolling Stone interview was made, Appelbaum says what he reiterated in Berlin last month:

"I don't want to live in a world where everyone is watched all the time," he says. "I want to be left alone as much as possible. I don't want a data trail to tell a story that isn't true."

Well, if you don't want a data trail to tell a story that isn't true, you can make truthful statements and back them up.

 

The fact that Appelbaum will not return to the US because he knows analysts have located him in Hawaii at the same time as Edward Snowden was in Hawaii and they find this suspicious and he thinks they will not buy his story that he was only having birthday scuba diving trips off islands. Well, I don't buy the story either, and it all comes back to this: if he could lie about Collateral Murder and claim that the soldiers could actually see children in a van and deliberately shoot children in a van -- an outrageou lie -- then he can lie about absolutely anything at all.

 

The Rolling Stone makes it seem -- based on his own victimology -- that he is questioned at the US border and his phone and computer confiscated for this views or his writings. Nonsense. He is questioned as a hacker who has directly supported WikiLeaks, appearing to speak in the place of Assange in July 2010 at the HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference when Assange wouldn't risk travel to New York,  and has worked closely with Assange (Assange gives him co-authorship on his book). So it's not surprising that the feds want to know if he helped hack anything or move any hacked files and what he knows about the close connection to the publisher/hacker WikiLeaks to their hacker/sources.