Jacob Appelbaum : The American Wikileaks Hacker | Culture News

Jacob Appelbaum: The American Wikileaks Hacker | Culture News | Rolling Stone
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“There are degrees of privacy,” he says. “The normal thing nowadays is to conspicuously report on one another in a way that the Stasi couldn’t even dream of. I don’t do that. I do not enter my home address into any computer. I pay rent in cash. For every online account, I generate random passwords and create new e-mail addresses. I never write checks, because they’re insecure — your routing number and account number are all that are required to empty your bank account. I don’t understand why anyone still uses checks. Checks are crazy.”

When he travels, if his laptop is out of his sight for any period of time, he destroys it and then throws it away; the concern is that someone might have bugged it. He is often driven to extreme measures to get copies of Tor through customs in foreign countries. “I studied what drug smugglers do,” he says. “I wanted to beat them at their own game.” He shows me a nickel. Then he slams it on the floor of his apartment. It pops open. Inside there is a tiny eight- gigabyte microSD memory card. It holds a copy of Tor.

Jacob Appelbaum: The American Wikileaks Hacker | Culture News | Rolling Stone
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If you e-mail your friend directly, the Guard’s network could easily see your computer’s IP address, and discover your name and personal information. But if you’ve installed Tor, your e-mail gets routed to one of 2,000 relays — computers running Tor — scattered across the world. So your message bounces to a relay in Paris, which forwards it to a second relay in Tokyo, which sends it on to a third relay in Amsterdam, where it is finally transmitted to your friend in Tehran. The Iranian Guard can only see that an e-mail has been sent from Amsterdam. Anyone spying on your computer would only see that you sent an e-mail to someone in Paris. There is no direct connection between San Francisco and Tehran. The content of your e-mail is not hidden — for that, you need encryption technology — but your location is secure.

Jacob Appelbaum: The American Wikileaks Hacker | Culture News | Rolling Stone
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He explains that we have to take a cab to pick up his mail. Like being a strict vegan or a Mormon, a life of total anonymity requires great sacrifice. You cannot, for instance, have mail delivered to your home. Nor can you list your name in your building’s directory. Appelbaum has all of his mail sent to a private mail drop, where a clerk signs for it. That allows Appelbaum — and the dissidents and hackers he deals with — to use the postal system anonymously. Person One can send a package to Appelbaum, who can repackage it and send it on to Person Two. That way Person One and Person Two never have direct contact — or even learn each other’s identities.

Jacob Appelbaum: The American Wikileaks Hacker | Culture News | Rolling Stone
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His aunt took custody of him when he was six; two years later she dropped him off at a Sonoma County children’s home. It was there, at age eight, that he hacked his first security system. An older kid taught him how to lift the PIN code from a security keypad: You wipe it clean, and the next time a guard enters the code, you blow chalk on the pad and lift the fingerprints . One night, after everyone had gone to sleep, the boys disabled the system and broke out of the facility. They didn’t do anything special — just walked around a softball field across the street for half an hour — but Appelbaum remembers the evening vividly: “It was really nice, for a single moment, to be completely free.”

Jacob Appelbaum: The American Wikileaks Hacker | Culture News | Rolling Stone
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Hello to all my friends and fans in domestic and international surveillance," Appelbaum began. “I am here today because I believe we can make a better world. Julian, unfortunately, can’t make it, because we don’t live in that better world right now, because we haven’t yet made it . I wanted to make a little declaration for the federal agents that are standing in the back of the room and the ones that are standing in the front of the room, and to be very clear about this: I have, on me, in my pocket, some money, the Bill of Rights and a driver’s license, and that’s it. I have no computer system, I have no telephone, I have no keys, no access to anything. There’s absolutely no reason that you should arrest me or bother me. And just in case you were wondering, I’m an American, born and raised, who’s unhappy. I’m unhappy with how things are going.” He paused, interrupted by raucous applause. “To quote from Tron,” he added, “’I fight for the user.’”

Jacob Appelbaum: The American Wikileaks Hacker | Culture News | Rolling Stone
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He beckons me over to one of his eight computers and presses several keys, activating Blockfinder. In less than 30 seconds, the program lists all of the Internet Protocol address allocations in the world — potentially giving him access to every computer connected to the Internet. Appelbaum decides to home in on Burma, a small country with one of the world’s most repressive regimes. He types in Burma’s two-letter country code: “mm,” for Myanmar. Blockfinder instantly starts to spit out every IP address in Burma.
Blockfinder informs Appelbaum that there are 12,284 IP addresses allocated to Burma, all of them distributed by government-run Internet-service providers. In Burma, as in many countries outside the United States, Internet access runs through the state. Appelbaum taps some keys and attempts to connect to every computer system in Burma. Only 118 of them respond. “That means almost every network in Burma is blocked from the outside world,” he says. “All but 118 of them.”

These 118 unfiltered computer systems could only belong to organizations and people to whom the government grants unfettered Internet access: trusted politicians, the upper echelons of state-run corporations, intelligence agencies.

“Now this,” Appelbaum says, “is the good part.”

He selects one of the 118 networks at random and tries to enter it. A window pops up asking for a password. Appelbaum throws back his head and screams with laughter — a gleeful, almost manic trill. The network runs on a router made by Cisco Systems and is riddled with vulnerabilities. Hacking into it will be trivial.

It’s impossible to know what’s on the other side of the password. The prime minister’s personal e-mail account? The network server of the secret police? The military junta’s central command? Whatever it is, it could soon be at Appelbaum’s fingertips.

So will he do it?

“I could,” Appelbaum says, with a smile. “But that would be illegal, wouldn’t it?”

Jacob Appelbaum: The American Wikileaks Hacker | Culture News | Rolling Stone
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Appelbaum tells me about one of his less impressive hacking achievements, a software program he invented called Blockfinder . It was not, he says, particularly difficult to write. In fact, the word he uses to describe the program’s complexity is “trivial,” a withering adjective that he and his hacker friends frequently deploy, as in, “Triggering the Chinese firewall is trivial” or “It’s trivial to access any Yahoo account by using password-request attacks.” All that Blockfinder does is allow you to identify, contact and potentially hack into every computer network in the world

Jacob Appelbaum: The American Wikileaks Hacker | Culture News | Rolling Stone
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Appelbaum has dedicated his life to fighting for anonymity and privacy. An anarchist street kid raised by a heroin- addict father, he dropped out of high school, taught himself the intricacies of code and developed a healthy paranoia along the way. “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.” We have transferred our most intimate and personal information — our bank accounts, e-mails, photographs, phone conversations, medical records — to digital networks, trusting that it’s all locked away in some secret crypt. But Appelbaum knows that this information is not safe. He knows, because he can find it.