Second, a question: exactly what is it that people think Jacob Appelbaum did to make him Public Enemy #1 of any government? He's not an especially important Tor contributor. Tor is not only funded by the US Government, but it began as a project at the Naval Research Lab.
He's a spokesperson for Wikileaks, and Wikileaks has gotten itself engaged in serious legal issues with the US Government, but he's far from the only person who's done that, and it's not at all clear why anyone should believe he's ever had an important operational role with WL (as opposed to being an advocate).
Why would Appelbaum be singled out for "black ops" like this while Glenn Greenwald is spared? Greenwald had an operational role in leaking intelligence secrets from the US Government; not only that, but he's still sitting on a large cache of documents and gradually leaking them out.
A Wired article today suggested that Appelbaum had "close to rock-star status" in the hacker community. Which community would that be? His reputation in the security hacker is minimal; he's known primarily for being known.
What's so important about Appelbaum that he'd be a state-level target? For any government?
It's clear that his force of personality -- his "rock-star status", his "known for being known", etc. -- was able to censor talks at 30C3 (if Nick Farr's story is true, which I think it is). Is it so unlikely that this is the only time he did something like that? There are other reports of him passing off research as his own when it was actually by other people, and people being advised to let it go and not draw his ire. He's able to silence people in the security community, which is very powerful.
It's implausible that he himself is an enemy for his own work, but that's not what a mole or informant is for. It's somewhat more plausible (though, again, I think still unlikely) that he was a long-time informant, and his goal was to provide coercion about specific things being done in the security community and to silence specific voices.
Where are those reports though?
And a couple of months ago, Appelbaum talked about how he and others are unfairly characterised as "mere activists" and denied the protections journalists get[0]. I say talk, some would say he made a passionate plea, others a bride-burning rant (his demeanour towards The Guardian was vicious).
Which community would that be?
It's not hand-wavey to be able to give a voice to ideas, provide insight through speaking and interacting with a crowd, and people make careers off of this sort of activity in many fields, and not just technology. It's the same sort of dichotomy you'll see in other hard sciences, where there are experimentalists and theorists.
So he's not shocking audiences by injecting malicious payloads and keylogging the shit out of people, or deploying wi-fi pineapples or pen testing corporate clients. There are other vectors into the field, and sometimes skill sets are multi-disciplinary Venn diagrams.
You'd suggest that he's a Paris Hilton, but there's more to it than that.
We don't have to speculate about this, because we already know that major social networking sites received court orders (with gag orders) to turn over his information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks-related_Twitter_cour...
I don't buy the conspiracy angle myself, but I don't really know enough that I'd place a bet either way. Clearly he is targeted by state-level actors, however.
It suggests to me that this particular cohort of Internet message board nerds shouldn't be trying to debate this particular topic.
Uh, maybe because he could roll over on Assange?
I have personally witnessed mysterious people engage Jake in conversation, try repeatedly to get him to admit to committing fraud in the course of his security research, and even try to literally hand him incriminating evidence presumably to get his prints upon it.
There are quite a lot of people in the security research field (or whatever you want to call it) that really dislike Appelbaum, so I am not at all surprised that he gets messed with.
One is working for spooks, whether harmlessly or not. It's just not Jake that's the one. Strange the conspiracy theories focus on him instead of Tor.