Highbrow Hackers: Eavesdropping on Jacob Appelbaum and Bill Binney in the Whitney
As patrons snaked around the corner of 75th Street and Madison Avenue to visit the Whitney Museum on April 20th, a disembodied voice called out to the crowd. “We live in a dangerous world. Living in fear makes us secure,” she said. Her voice sounded a bit like Apple’s Siri, if Siri had studied abroad in Europe. “Attention: Do you really know what your neighbors are up to? Really? Do you?”
Many people in line didn’t even know what the Whitney was up to. Downstairs, Jacob Appelbaum and William Binney were preparing a “teach-in” on the U.S.’s omnipresent surveillance state. Appelbaum is best known as the American face of Wikileaks (“Today is the 500th day of Julian Assange’s detainment without charge,” he reminded the crowd), which prompted the U.S. government to obtain a secret court order to obtain Appelbaum’s email contacts, according to the Wall Street Journal. He’s also the chief evangelist for the Tor Project, a network that allows people to use the Internet anonymously. “Anonymity is almost a fetish with me,” he told the crowd.
Binney, on the other hand, is the kind of guy who once lived in relative anonymity. A former codebreaker and group director for the NSA, Binney quit the agency after 9/11, when it started to focus on domestic targets. He served as a key source in April’s Wired expose about the government’s massive data collection center outside Salt Lake City. Talking to the press transformed Binney from the kind of guy who Appelbaum once fought against to an exalted ally. “He left the NSA because each and every one of us was being targeted by the NSA as Americans on American soil, talking to other Americans. That scares the shit out of me,” Appelbaum said.
Outside, a bald, soul-patched man in a black suit was plucking people out of line, telling them they had been detained, and escorting them to a holding area in the Whitney courtyard. He occasionally put his fingers to his ear and listened to his earpiece, looking like a Secret Service agent who took one too many performance art classes. Inside, a few hundred of people gathered amidst the faint smell of body odor. Several of them had pink hair. They looked at the detainees, who were smiling nervously as they were frisked, through glass windows.
As Appelbaum and Binney took the stage, they were a study in hacker contrasts. Appelbaum had both ears pierced, all clad in grey and black except his bright red shoes. Underneath an asymmetrical turtleneck he wore a t-shirt that read “Keep the Internet Free From Government Control.”Binney was next to him in light-wash jeans and white tennis shoes. He was droopier and more nervous than Appelbaum, fidgeting nervously with a Fiji water bottle and flailing his left leg as he spoke. Appelbaum looked like an activist; Binney looked like a spook.
For the next 70 minutes, the two men did their best Odd Couple, egging each other on to trade war stories and dire warnings—and they had plenty of each. “All this time I thought I was paranoid—I wasn’t paranoid enough,” Appelbaum said. Behind him, a man recorded Appelbaum and Binney on his digital camera.
Appelbaum has been detained at airports about a dozen times, says his phone was remotely rebooted while on the phone with a friend under Air Force investigation, and had his bank account closed for “unknown reasons.” Binney, meanwhile, told a story of FBI agents raiding his home while he was in the shower. “The guy came in, pointed a gun at me—it didn’t upset me because I’ve been shot at before. He didn’t have his finger in the trigger. It didn’t really upset me. I just said, ‘Do you suppose I can put some clothes on?’”
Both men were adamant that surveillance isn’t just an issue for government antagonists, but for everyone in the audience. “A lot of people say, ‘Well I’m not doing anything, so it doesn’t matter.’ But you may not be doing anything now but you can’t say anything contrary to the administrative position because you may become a target,” Binney said. “The KGB, the Stasi, the SS, and the Gestapo they could never have dreamt of having such an ability to monitor the population. That’s the real threat.”
Over the last decade, investigative reports and whistleblowers have laid bare the NSA’s campaign to index America’s data. There was the Times’ revelation of its warrantless wiretapping of the George W. Bush years, a former AT&T technician’s disclosure that the NSA had installed a commercial traffic analysis system to track people using AT&T’s network in San Francisco, and most recently, Binney’s disclosure to Wired’s James Bamford that the San Francisco tracker isn’t the only one, and that the NSA is not just tracking phone calls, but also emails. The NSA is assembling all of this data in a 1 million square-foot facility in Utah.
Taking Binney’s cue that there are NSA listening posts across the country, Appelbaum passed sheets of paper through the crowd. On them was a list of eight “Possible domestic NSA interception points”—seven of them AT&T offices, one of them Verizon. “This was given to me by someone who, I have no knowledge of their identity,” he said. He encouraged the audience to get jobs with the telecom companies, infiltrate these offices, and reveal the truth.
Inside the room, an iPhone showed AT&T’s 4G service to be quite strong.
For those not willing to undergo a midlife career change to take down the panopticon, Appelbaum had other advice. Quit it with the social networking, for one. “Think about Facebook and recontextualize it instead as Stasibook. You are reporting on your friends. And even though it helps you to get laid, there is a cost which we have to think about.” A few minutes later, @mollycrabapple tweeted from the room: “Photo: List of possible NSA interception points given at @ioerror’s brilliant Whitney lecture tmblr.co/ZdteayJ-JK6L”
At the end of the event, as the Whitney tried to close, Appelbaum encouraged everyone to stay. “Occupy the Whitney. This is your one and only chance before something terrible happens to both of us, potentially. I’m kidding. But whatever happens to either of us, no matter what, even if there’s a video tape, it was murder. No, Seriously.” The crowd did not know whether to laugh. A woman held up her smartphone and took Appelbaum’s picture.
Many people in line didn’t even know what the Whitney was up to. Downstairs, Jacob Appelbaum and William Binney were preparing a “teach-in” on the U.S.’s omnipresent surveillance state. Appelbaum is best known as the American face of Wikileaks (“Today is the 500th day of Julian Assange’s detainment without charge,” he reminded the crowd), which prompted the U.S. government to obtain a secret court order to obtain Appelbaum’s email contacts, according to the Wall Street Journal. He’s also the chief evangelist for the Tor Project, a network that allows people to use the Internet anonymously. “Anonymity is almost a fetish with me,” he told the crowd.
Binney, on the other hand, is the kind of guy who once lived in relative anonymity. A former codebreaker and group director for the NSA, Binney quit the agency after 9/11, when it started to focus on domestic targets. He served as a key source in April’s Wired expose about the government’s massive data collection center outside Salt Lake City. Talking to the press transformed Binney from the kind of guy who Appelbaum once fought against to an exalted ally. “He left the NSA because each and every one of us was being targeted by the NSA as Americans on American soil, talking to other Americans. That scares the shit out of me,” Appelbaum said.
Outside, a bald, soul-patched man in a black suit was plucking people out of line, telling them they had been detained, and escorting them to a holding area in the Whitney courtyard. He occasionally put his fingers to his ear and listened to his earpiece, looking like a Secret Service agent who took one too many performance art classes. Inside, a few hundred of people gathered amidst the faint smell of body odor. Several of them had pink hair. They looked at the detainees, who were smiling nervously as they were frisked, through glass windows.
As Appelbaum and Binney took the stage, they were a study in hacker contrasts. Appelbaum had both ears pierced, all clad in grey and black except his bright red shoes. Underneath an asymmetrical turtleneck he wore a t-shirt that read “Keep the Internet Free From Government Control.”Binney was next to him in light-wash jeans and white tennis shoes. He was droopier and more nervous than Appelbaum, fidgeting nervously with a Fiji water bottle and flailing his left leg as he spoke. Appelbaum looked like an activist; Binney looked like a spook.
For the next 70 minutes, the two men did their best Odd Couple, egging each other on to trade war stories and dire warnings—and they had plenty of each. “All this time I thought I was paranoid—I wasn’t paranoid enough,” Appelbaum said. Behind him, a man recorded Appelbaum and Binney on his digital camera.
Appelbaum has been detained at airports about a dozen times, says his phone was remotely rebooted while on the phone with a friend under Air Force investigation, and had his bank account closed for “unknown reasons.” Binney, meanwhile, told a story of FBI agents raiding his home while he was in the shower. “The guy came in, pointed a gun at me—it didn’t upset me because I’ve been shot at before. He didn’t have his finger in the trigger. It didn’t really upset me. I just said, ‘Do you suppose I can put some clothes on?’”
Both men were adamant that surveillance isn’t just an issue for government antagonists, but for everyone in the audience. “A lot of people say, ‘Well I’m not doing anything, so it doesn’t matter.’ But you may not be doing anything now but you can’t say anything contrary to the administrative position because you may become a target,” Binney said. “The KGB, the Stasi, the SS, and the Gestapo they could never have dreamt of having such an ability to monitor the population. That’s the real threat.”
Over the last decade, investigative reports and whistleblowers have laid bare the NSA’s campaign to index America’s data. There was the Times’ revelation of its warrantless wiretapping of the George W. Bush years, a former AT&T technician’s disclosure that the NSA had installed a commercial traffic analysis system to track people using AT&T’s network in San Francisco, and most recently, Binney’s disclosure to Wired’s James Bamford that the San Francisco tracker isn’t the only one, and that the NSA is not just tracking phone calls, but also emails. The NSA is assembling all of this data in a 1 million square-foot facility in Utah.
Taking Binney’s cue that there are NSA listening posts across the country, Appelbaum passed sheets of paper through the crowd. On them was a list of eight “Possible domestic NSA interception points”—seven of them AT&T offices, one of them Verizon. “This was given to me by someone who, I have no knowledge of their identity,” he said. He encouraged the audience to get jobs with the telecom companies, infiltrate these offices, and reveal the truth.
Inside the room, an iPhone showed AT&T’s 4G service to be quite strong.
For those not willing to undergo a midlife career change to take down the panopticon, Appelbaum had other advice. Quit it with the social networking, for one. “Think about Facebook and recontextualize it instead as Stasibook. You are reporting on your friends. And even though it helps you to get laid, there is a cost which we have to think about.” A few minutes later, @mollycrabapple tweeted from the room: “Photo: List of possible NSA interception points given at @ioerror’s brilliant Whitney lecture tmblr.co/ZdteayJ-JK6L”
At the end of the event, as the Whitney tried to close, Appelbaum encouraged everyone to stay. “Occupy the Whitney. This is your one and only chance before something terrible happens to both of us, potentially. I’m kidding. But whatever happens to either of us, no matter what, even if there’s a video tape, it was murder. No, Seriously.” The crowd did not know whether to laugh. A woman held up her smartphone and took Appelbaum’s picture.
