Jacob Appelbaum
Jacob Appelbaum

Jacob Appelbaum is an accomplished photographer, software hacker and world traveler. He works as a developer for the Tor Project. He trains interested parties globally on how to effectively use and contribute to the Tor network. As a founding member of the hacklab Noisebridge in San Francisco where he indulges his interests in magnetics, cryptography and consensus based governance. He was a driving force in the team behind the creation of the Cold Boot Attacks; winning both the Pwnie Award for Most Innovative Research and the Usenix Security Best Student Paper Award in 2008. Additionally, he was part of the MD5 Collisions Inc. team that created a rogue CA certificate by using a cluster of 200 PlayStations funded by Swiss taxpayers. The "MD5 considered harmful today" research was awarded the Best Paper Award at CRYPTO 2009. He is also an ambassador for the art group monochrom. Since his involvement with Wikileaks in 2010 he has subsequently been repeatedly targeted by US law enforcement agencies, who obtained a court order for his Twitter account data, detained him 12 times at the US border after trips abroad, and seized a laptop and several mobile phones. He is a contributor to Julian Assange's 2012 book Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet along with Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann.