Jacob Appelbaum speaks at 30th annual congress of Chaos Computer Club December 2013. The official videos are here if you don't mind those hacker creeps getting your URL:
Jacob Appelbaum's blockbuster talk at the aptly-named Chaos Computer Club's 30th annual Congress (#30c3) has stirred up a lot of interest in him which was missing before -- I guess it takes stepping on the Apple fanboyz tails to get them to focus.
Hackers Hack Apple Gadgets
Of course, this is not a new war story; those with short memories about these hackers may have forgotten how the CCC bragged that they had hacked into Apple's shiny new fingerprint-ID touch phone inSeptember.
Of course, when the CCC vandalizes products and accesses them in ways the manufacturer never intended -- that's called hacking, by the way -- it's only in the public interest for "privacy" and it's publicized only as a public safety bulletin, right guys? *Cough*.
But the Apple stuff tackled by the cosmically-named Appelbaum isn't really the news story here, although it guarantees that we'll see it through a few more news cycles for sure.
And the list of (now very outdated -- it was 2008, remember) used gadgets that the NSA supposedly has to spy on people -- which are now likely available on the international illegal arms black market for Bitcoins after Jake's talk -- aren't even the news although we can talk about that later. Like what hacking tools are in Jake's own tool box that are little different than these toys?
If Not from Snowden, then...From Whom?
The real news story of this talk as I already blogged here and here is that these are not confirmed Snowden documents. Nowhere in the Der Spiegel article are they claimed to be; Greenwald emphatically says on Twitter that they are not claimed to be and he didn't give them to Appelbaum. Later in his TL you can see him commenting with a knowier-than-thou remark to the effect that geez, everybody thinks hacking only gets done by Snowden, like he's the only one."
And maybe they are Snowden documents (an even closer reading of Greenwald indicates that he doesn't say they aren't Snowden docs; he just says he wasn't involved -- clever! and that they don't say they are Snowden docs) -- and maybe they aren't. Maybe Jake has direct access to Snowden and maybe Snowden didn't give everything to Greenwald and maybe Snowden still leaks or maybe Appelbaum got their own set of documents from other hackers, maybe even in their midst. We may never know, but it pays to ask.
Jake Has His Own Source in the NSA
A shocking point in Jake's talk that no one seems to have noticed is that he claims to have his own source within the NSA and other intelligence agencies.
Gosh, the rot goes deep if that's the case -- that there are actually people in the NSA who aren't already working for the GRU willing to talk to Jacob Appelbaum. Of course, this isn't THAT far-fetched to conceive -- the Navy has still-employed developers that still work on Tor and even presented a paper on Tor's vulnerabilities (sorry kids) at the same conference in Berlin that Appelbaum gave a paper at and no doubt they talked (I haven't confirmed that they actually went and gave the paper but I'm trying to; they were listed on the program.) Tor is still getting 60% of its funding from the Department of Defense, even though it has snotty little employees who say things to me on Twitter like "Congress should go dire in a fire" and casually offer pro-tips and biz dev ideas for how Silk Road --one ofTor's biggest customers! -- should have better secured itself better from the feds.
We don't know if these are fresh and current contacts Jake claims to have in the NSA -- how could they be if the manual is from 2008, guys? We also don't know if in fact Russian intelligence is using the same caper they used in the CCC's old KGB collaboration case of the past, where they deployed their own moles within US intelligence to double track the German hacker they had coopted to check his work -- and also pin everything on him, one might add. Snowden could work that way too. But we can only get so far with this part of the story today, so let's press on to the other news value of this talk:
Anarchists Call for Sabotage, But is Someone Fighting Back?
The WikiLeaks/Snowden saga dynamics and Jake's claims of protection for his brand of "journalism" are an important part of this story -- for my money, more important than this or that claim about this or that gadget that might do this or that thing -- remember, one of the claims is that the NSA can transmit bursts of energy to zap people ("What if I told you that the NSA had a specialized technology for beaming energy into you...") . We're all doomed -- PS that zap is what killed Hugo Chavez.
And those dynamics, as we saw, in a separate appearance at 30c3, involved a Wizard-of-Oz like big-screen appearance from The One (Julian Assange), with properly reverant introductions from Appelbaum and Sarah Harrison (who spent nearly five months in Moscow with Snowden, then fled to Germany, remember, and says she can't go home to the UK for fear of questioning unde the anti-terrorist act).
Assange's purpose seemed to be to convince everyone he's still really behind everything, but since the video link kept cutting in and out (sabotage?) it sort of undermined his thesis. No matter, because there were two news pegs:
1) Assange, and Appelbaum, call on all systems administrators of the world to sabotage their networks which are all part of the mass surveillance security state with which Big IT is in bed (remember these people are anarchists; they are not "transparency activists"; they are not "privacy activists," they are anarchists. It's funny how Appelbaum's recruitment of people out of intelligence agencies to turn against their employees of last year at 29c3 (which worked great -- he got Snowden!) -- is never mentioned, and this even further call not just to hack and leave -- but sabotage too -- will also never get notice.
Jake in his own talk openly calls on programmers not just to leave the CIA or NSA, but to actively hack it -- "get the ball and bring it out" he says, to wild applause. Like it's a game of football.
2) Some wag in the audience (and "the Internet" will surely tell us who soon enough) asked him a provocative question:
"How did you get Snowden out of the US?"
Business Insider -- one of the few papers to be critical in covering the Snowden story -- was quick to pick up that odd locution which may have been a CIA-planted provocation, or maybe just a clueless git who didn't realize that Snowden was smuggled from Hong Kong, not the US; he got from Hawaii to Hong Kong on his own steam, without apparently Sarah doing his trip planning.
Assange didn't miss a beat and pronounced this a loaded question, and indicated that there legal questions related to answering it. Michael Kelley of BI seemed to think this was an indication of Assange's awareness of his culpability -- that Grand Jury inquiry into WikiLeaks is still open and running -- that if he were seen to move Snowden around here and there that might be booked as more than "journalism," especially if from the US -- but I think the reference is to *Snowden's* own legal protection -- Assange always likes to style himself as a big protector of sources. Of course, that didn't work for Chelsea Manning, and lots of other people he never redacted out of the cables.
The Thin Line Between Hackers and Journalists
There are lots of technical issues to pick over in Jake's talk, but let's come to where I think the really big challenge is, and the long-term news value that won't go away: a defiant bid for moving the goal posts even further for journalistic impunity in anarchist attacks on the US government.
Appelbaum puts forward a number of theses that Greenwald tries to style -- in his approving tweets -- as great altruistic deeds that are a model for all those working with hacked materials.
Nonsense.
(BTW, it seemed that Appelbaum publicly broke with Greenwald when he accused him of sitting on stories from Ed -- stories that in fact later got published, but without Jake as the tech byline, and other tech specialists like Schneier as the byline. Oopsies. Jake also seemed to be in the WikiLeaks gang accusing Greenwald of selling out and commodifying Snowy's stash to millionaire ebay guy Pierre Omidyar. But nothing is ever what it seems with these people, and it may be that they patched things up, or Greenwald knows that Appelbaum is such a cunning reptile with such l33t skills that he is now praising him to keep on his good side. No matter.)
Real adults who care about the rule of law and liberal democratic states that aren't so open that they are enabling their own hacking to death by anarchists bent on their destruction have to begin asking some questions now about this so-called "journalism" which we are hearing so much about, especially from Jake, who is a hacker but tells you 10 times in this talk about his "investigative journalism" and his article that appeared (with two other people having to help write it) in Der Spiegel so as to invoke the journalistic "Pentagon Papers" cover.
Jacob Appelbaum, True American Patriot!
o Appelbaum says that he has "very large editorial process" redacted out the names of NSA spies and their home addresses and telephone numbers which were in this material [wild applause from the audience] (!). Gosh, thanks. (And don't think that wild applause is about his civic-mindedness it's that the NSA was pwned by this kid.)
o But he had a really, really hard time doing this because he didn't really agree that this was the right thing to do. "When we redact the names of people who engage in criminal activity in drone murder, we are not doing the right thing, but I think we should comply with law in order to continue to publish," he says. So look out! This is blackmail. Political blackmail. Thuggish coercion to try to impose an anarchist movement's will -- not for the good of society.
o Appelbaum also has the names of the alleged victims of the NSA's surveillance. But he won't let all those script kiddies who think they can get validated this way know if they're on the list (sorry to disappoint) just in case any of the targets are legitimate. This made him very uncomfortable (he assumes they are all innocent) but just in case there was that rare case of a terrorist the NSA legitimately pursues, "we didn't want to make that decision" to expose the fact that they were targets. Gee, thanks Jake.
To put these bursts of civic decency and generosity *cough* into perspective, I invite you to read this very interesting debate between Jeremy Duns, the author who has been critical of the Snowden case and confronted Appelbaum (@ioerror) on Twitter. He marvels -- as all decent people in the humanities of good will should marvel at the criminality of the machine-induced hacker mind should marvel -- at how casually Appelbaum rejects basic principles of civilization.
Here's one:
The utopian ideal that we should live in a world with "no spies" is presumably going to include him, and his friends, right? And his kit of surveillance tools which he uses to keep tabs on people he thinks are keeping him under surveillance, perhaps pre-emptively, right? And we're to unilaterally close down our spy shops even though Russian, Chinese, Iranian, Sudanese etc. intelligence aren't going to be doing this, let alone Al Qaeda.
So here's where I take a stand.
The Rights of Journalists Are Not Limitless
Many liberals and specifically liberal journalists are really scared of saying -- or even asking questions about! -- that anything that Greenwald, Poitras and Appelbaum --- and for that matter Bart Gellman and James Risen -- are doing is wrong ethically, let alone legally, because then that might lead to what they view as a chill on free expression and free media, and even legal repercussions.
They also may fear the terrible backlash from activist-journalists and their anarchist hacker helpers who try to bully and shame and heckle and harass them to death if they raise an eyebrow about any of the ethical or legal ramifications of their facilitation of hacking.
So this very thin membrane has developed were the rules work like this: -- as long as you don't physically do the hacking, you are safe in journalism land (and note that "hacking" is a word that hackers themselves like to very narrowly define and dumb down so that it is never evil). Also, as long as you don't actually tell the hacker what would be useful to hack, you are safe in journalism land. As long as you don't get involved in moving those files around -- that after all, do contain the names of agents and their home addresses and phone numbers, and their victims and their identifying data, too, as Appelbaum confirmed -- you're also safe in journalism land too. Well, in the UK, were laws against terrorism are stricter and libel laws are stricter, you can't move and possess those files with impunity or you will be arrested like David Miranda was at the airport, or you will be questioned and told to destroy files like Alan Rusbridger was at the Guardian.
But you can spirit out those files to the US, where there is a looser interpretation -- at least so far -- about possessing the work files of your leaker that you ostensibly only need to do your journalism -- as long as occasionally you have lunch with an intelligence official and pretend you're cooperative.
If you threaten a dead man's switch -- that if you are put in jail someone will spill all these beans -- as Greenwald has definitely done although he denies to furiously -- then you are still safe in journalism land, although you might be branded finally as an activist journalism.
Stretching the Definition of Journalism to the Breaking Point
But what if you thin out this membrane even further, stretching it to the breaking point, by saying that you've kept to the letter of the law -- barely, for now -- but you really don't believe this law is just. Why should you keep private the names of people from a system that does drone killings? Why, isn't there a higher law that suggests you should name all these representatives of the Stasi-like mass surveillance state? (Notice how these hackers always speak of the Stasi, the now-defunct East German police, and never the KGB, whose agent is still head of Russia. Wouldn't want to hurt any feelings now, would we...)
Now, this is where I think you are not only firmly in activism land and far from the borders of ethical journalism, and not in a place called "ethical hacking" because it's not ethical to harm the intelligence agency of a liberal democratic state. That's my position.
And that's why I think your investigation, and even arrest and interrogation would be in order. You have gone too far. You can't keep hiding behind the cloak of journalism. You can't keep invoking the Pentagon Papers decision forever. Crime is crime. Food Lion established that you cannot commit offenses -- lying on your employment application, trespassing, secretly videotaping without consent and so on -- for the supposed greater glory of your journalism. There are other cases.
The rights of journalists are really important to protect in a liberal democratic society under the rule of law. I'm a big believer and practitioner of the First Amendment and I think we have to go a long ways not to jail reporters. Glenn Greenwald, even with his talk of dead man switches and his aggressive adversarial stance to the US, does journalistic work protected by law.
But Jacob Appelbaum and others like him who show up at the CCC, which has openly hacked Apple products and has a history of KGB collaboration and an openly antagonistic stance of war against the NSA; who brag about their direct ties to NSA agents; who show manuals they got from who knows where of gadgets they claim (without proof) are used for some mass surveillance and not legitimate targeting; AND who say that they have names and information about agents and their supposed victims that they really think they should leak, but are kind enough not too for now -- I think they've gone too far.
I'm not afraid of the damage to press freedom to stake out that position because the ramification of letting it continue is that then we turn over press freedom to the whim of thugs -- and the aggressive heckling I am undergoing now by Appelbaum's hacker thug pals on Twitter now, threatening me with libel suits because I call out the criminality of Tor -- is proof enough of that harsh reality that deserves it's own Homage to Catalonia.
If we accept that hackers get to endlessly hack liberal states -- the Obama Administration is the most liberal state we've had in our history -- then we don't get to have liberal democratic states that we have chosen democratically, with checks and balance and separation of powers, with oversight by elected representatives and the courts. Instead, we have thuggish and brutal anarchists working by the Bolshevik "ends justify the means" to get their sectarian way.
Appelbaum thinks that by skating up against this very, very thin ice but not quite breaking through that he is a hero, and Glenn Greenwald and thousands of people wildly clapping in the CCC hall agree. I don't. I think it's beyond the boundary and it's time to call it.
What, you should depend on the good will of someone whose "Your Personal Army" Anonymous friends and hacker thugs on Twitter endlessly heckle bloggers like me and threaten us with libel suits for telling the truth about their lack of ethics and even criminality?
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