Jacob Appelbaum

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

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. 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.

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.

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.