against the surveillance of the state, and in particular the NSA, they

Hacktivist | 53 against the surveillance of the state, and in particular the NSA, they not only attempt to hide their own identities but also use encryption to obscure their messages. Their goal is to free their movements “of any interference from law-enforcement.” In this mind-set, accord- ing to Fitzpatrick, “they believe government intelligence agencies will stop at nothing to stop them from absolute encryption.” Tor software was a means to defeat the NSA, but for it to be suc- cessful, there needed to be such a proliferation of Tor servers that the NSA could not piece together IP addresses. The problem was that the Tor Project, as they called it, was still a very tiny operation in 2012. It employed fewer than a hundred core developers, who were located mainly in Germany, Iceland, Japan, Estonia, and the United States. Its staff worked mainly out of a single room in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The guiding spirit behind the Tor movement in the private sector was Jacob Appelbaum, a charismatic twenty-eight-year-old who had grown up in Northern California. Like Snowden, he had dropped out of high school. Appelbaum identified himself to his followers on © the Internet as a “hacktivist” battling state surveillance. For him, as © for many in the hacktivist culture, the main enemy was the NSA. After all, the NSA had a vast army of computer scientists working to defeat Tor software. Appelbaum was well connected in this cul- ture, having been the North American representative for WikiLeaks before he moved to Berlin in 2013. He also managed WikiLeaks’s cyber security when it released the classified documents it obtained from Manning in 2010. He was so well regarded among hacktiv- ists that Assange chose him as his keynote speaker replacement at the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) convention in New York City. Assange told Rolling Stone, “Jake [Appelbaum] has been a tireless promoter behind the scenes of our cause.” For its part, Rolling Stone titled its profile of Appelbaum “Meet the Most Dangerous Man in Cyberspace.” (Assange needed a replacement for this particular event because he feared if he came to New York, he would be arrested for releasing the Manning files on WikiLeaks.) In Berlin, Appelbaum went to extreme lengths to protect him- self from American surveillance. For example, when George Packer interviewed him for The New Yorker in 2014, he insisted on meet- | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 53 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019541