Jacob Appelbaum

Jacob Appelbaum (born 1 April 1983) is an American independent journalist, computer security researcher, artist, and hacker.

Under the pseudonym "ioerror," Appelbaum was an active member of the Cult of the Dead Cow hacker collective from 2008 to 2016, when sexual abuse allegations led to him being the only person to ever be ejected from the group.

He was the co-founder of the San Francisco hackerspace Noisebridge with Mitch Altman.

He worked for Kink.com and Greenpeace and volunteered for the Ruckus Society and the Rainforest Action Network.

In a wide-ranging interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 2010, Appelbaum revealed that he comes from "a family of lunatics... [a]ctual, raving lunatics."

He stated that his mother "is a paranoid schizophrenic" who "insisted that Jake had somehow been molested by his father while he was still in the womb".

He was taken away from his mother by his aunt when he was 6.

Two years later, he was placed in a children's home in Sonoma County.

At age 10, his indigent father was awarded custody of him.

According to him, having been introduced to computer programming by a friend's father saved his life: "The Internet is the only reason I'm alive today."

Appelbaum says that he developed OCD at a young age.

He has also stated that his father, who struggled with heroin addiction, has been murdered by poisoning.

He was among several people to work with NSA contractor Edward Snowden's top secret documents released in 2013.

His journalistic work has been published in Der Spiegel and elsewhere.

Appelbaum is also known for representing WikiLeaks.

He has displayed his art in a number of institutions across the world and has collaborated with artists such as Laura Poitras, Trevor Paglen, and Ai Weiwei.

Appelbaum was among several people to gain access to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's top secret documents released in 2013.

On 23 October 2013, Appelbaum and other writers and editors at Der Spiegel reported that their investigations had led German Chancellor Angela Merkel to confront the U.S. government over evidence that it was monitoring her personal cell phone.

US President Barack Obama denied the report.

The Der Spiegel team reported on the resulting controversy and detailed a further claim that the Embassy of the United States, Berlin, was being used as a base of operations for electronic surveillance of its German ally.

The BBC's Damien McGuinness commented that "The scandal has caused one of the biggest diplomatic rifts between Germany and the U.S."

At the scandal's peak, Merkel compared the National Security Agency with the East German Stasi secret police during an angry conversation with Obama.

On 28 December 2013, at the Chaos Communication Congress, he presented documents showing that the NSA can turn iPhones into eavesdropping tools and has developed devices to harvest electronic information from a computer even if the computer is not online.

An investigative team at Der Spiegel, including Appelbaum, simultaneously published their findings, along with a descriptive list of the surveillance devices making up the NSA ANT catalog.

The Der Spiegel team's reporting about Merkel earned the 2014 Henri Nannen prize for investigative journalism.

Appelbaum shared the prize with Der Spiegel writers and editors Marcel Rosenbach,, and.

A few days later he provoked a furor by condemning Nannen, the prize's namesake, for his Nazi collaboration, declaring that he would have his bronze bust of Nannen melted down and recast, and donate his prize money to anti-fascist groups.

On 3 July 2014, German broadcaster NDR/ARD carried disclosures by Appelbaum and others about the operation of NSA's top-secret XKeyscore surveillance software, including source code proving that a computer of Appelbaum's had been targeted.

On 28 December 2014, Der Spiegel again drew from the Snowden documents to assess the NSA's ability to crack encrypted Internet communications.

In a separate article, they described how British and American intelligence used covert surveillance to target, often inaccurately, suspected Taliban fighters and drug smugglers for killing.

Starting in 2015, Appelbaum was a Ph.D. student studying under Tanja Lange and Daniel J. Bernstein at the Eindhoven University of Technology.

He received his Ph.D. in March 2022.

Appelbaum studied at the Eindhoven University of Technology and was a core member of the Tor Project, a free software network designed to provide online anonymity, until he stepped down from his position after multiple victims came forward with sexual abuse and rape allegations in 2016.

Many of these organizations, as well as his employer Tor, ended their association with Appelbaum in June 2016 following allegations of sexual abuse.

After a seven-week investigation led by an outside investigator, Tor concluded that many of the allegations of misconduct were accurate.

Appelbaum has denied the allegations.

Various activists and others publicly supported Appelbaum, voicing concerns about due process, trial by social media, and questioning the claims, while others credit the incident with changing the information security community's attitude towards sheltering known abusers.

The affair has had repercussions in the online privacy advocacy world.

U.S. news media treated the allegations as credible, and reactions in Germany were mixed.

Appelbaum says that he tested out of high school and attended junior college briefly before he "stopped college and continued [his] education."