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How They Crushed Wikileaks

This was a time when Assange and other punks like him were running circles around governments. It seemed like the ability for the powers that be to keep secrets was over. It was just done. Thanks to Assange et al we were going to know if a cell phone company was surveying everyone. We were going to know if a government assassinated a bunch of people who turned out to be journalists. We were going to know. And between Anonymous and Wikileaks and Edward Snowden, it was happening in a way that felt like it was a force of nature, and there was no containing it. The authorities, what could they do? Information wanted to be free.


Then, it all ended. Julian Assange has been rotting away in Belmarsh prison in the UK. Edward Snowden tweets from Russia. Wikileaks. When's the last time they released anything? The Empire struck back. There were arrests, there were accusations, and the machine was surprisingly effective and merciless in containing the free flow of information and government secrets. That's what happened to all those guys. You don't hear about them much anymore. But what about Jacob Appelbaum? What about that guy? No, nothing? Name doesn't ring a bell? Jacob Appelbaum was known to the authorities as Wikileaks Associate Number Three. He was also once the toast of the cyber community, feted by European politcos, and making red carpet appearances.


Then the accusations came. And it all ended for Appelbaum. Just like that nobody wanted to talk about Jacob Appelbaum. But we do.


Host: Jesse Brown

Credits: Tristan Capacchione (Audio Editor and Technical Producer), Max Collins (Production Manager), Bruce Thorson (Senior Producer), Karyn Pugliese (Editor-in-Chief)


Additional music by Audio Network


Further reading:



Sponsors: Douglas, Indochino


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Duration:
47m
Broadcast on:
24 Jun 2024
Audio Format:
mp3
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It's an excellent mattress and it sleeps cool and are increasingly sweaty hot summers. It has E. Colight cooling gel foam on the top layer. Douglas is giving our listeners a free sleep bundle with each mattress purchase. This is a great deal. Get the sheets, pillows, mattress and pillow protectors free with your Douglas purchase today. Visit Douglas.ca/CanadaLand to claim this offer one more time. Have a look, Douglas.ca/CanadaLand. Before this gig, I had a different gig. I was a tech journalist. I wasn't the kind of tech journalist who was particularly interested in gadgets. I wasn't a tech business journalist. I didn't care about which company just got sold for a billion dollars. What I cared about was this incredible thing that was happening back then. When it seemed as if nothing would ever be the same when it came to the free flow of information. This was a time when the saga of Julian Assange was playing itself out throughout the international press. The governments and armies and the military industrial complex, Assange and other punks like him were just running circles around these guys. It seemed like the ability for the powers that be to keep secrets was just over. It was just done and we were going to know if a cell phone company was surveying everyone, we were going to know if a government assassinated a bunch of people who turned out to be journalists, we were going to know. Between anonymous and WikiLeaks and interesting collaborations with journalists like Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden leaking in from it, it was just happening in a way that felt like it was a force of nature and there was no containing it. The authorities, what could they do? Information wanted to be free. What a time to be alive. What a time to be chronicling this incredible and unstoppable force, I thought. And boy was I wrong, they shut it down. Julian Assange has been rotting away in Belmarsh prison in the UK in some sort of purgatory of legal battles and declining health. Edward Snowden, I like his tweets but he has not been relevant in some time. He's living in exile in Russia, Glenn Greenwald who I had the privilege of interviewing back in his heyday when all this was playing out, more of an outlier extreme opinion guy these days from his home base in Brazil, anonymous, WikiLeaks, when's the last time they released anything, leaked anything, made news of any kind. The empire struck back. There were arrests, there were accusations, and the machine was surprisingly effective and merciless in containing the free flow of information and government secrets. That's what happened to all those guys, you don't hear about them much anymore. But what about Jacob Applebaum? What about that guy? No, nothing. Everyone doesn't ring a bell. Jacob Applebaum, known to the authorities as WikiLeaks Associate No. 3. I met Jacob Applebaum, another charismatic young figure with the punk rock attitude and a fuck the authorities demeanor making appearances at tech events that did not look like commercial Silicon Valley tech events, tech events that looked like they were part of some kind of a political movement. Jacob Applebaum, a guy who was involved in technology that fueled the Arab Spring. I met him when he was in Toronto for a conference once, but of a prick, as I recall, did not have a very friendly attitude towards the press, but an interesting guy, whatever happened to that guy. Until recently, my understanding of whatever happened to Jacob Applebaum was some vague sense that he had been canceled for some kind of sexual impropriety or assault or allegations, I didn't really look at it too closely. And then I found out that somebody else did do that digging. Toronto's own Jamie Castner, journalist and documentary filmmaker, he spent two years gaining Jacob Applebaum's trust and getting the story of exactly what happened to Applebaum and also what happened to that whole moment, that whole movement and how was it possible to shut it all down. Getting that story was not easy. That documentary is called Nobody Wants to Talk About Jacob Applebaum. And Jamie Castner is going to join me in our Toronto studio in a moment. Wait for it. This episode is brought to you by Jacob Birch, Leah Cowan, Parth Pocar, Zach Willow, Rebecca Quash, Mackenzie Schmidt, Matt Tribe, and Caroline. I'm Caroline, an information management specialist and book nerd originally from Vancouver and currently living in Toronto. I support Canada Land because I think it's super important to have quality independent journalism that's not afraid to challenge other media narratives. I love shows like Thunder Bay and the White Saviors that dive deep into topics I think we should all know more about in Canada. And I find Jesse Brown's spicy takes highly entertaining, even if often questionable. So supporting Canada Land seems like a better use of my money than buying more video games I'm never going to play. My name is Jamie Castner and I am a filmmaker, primarily of documentaries. Most recently of a film called Nobody Wants to Talk About Jacob Applebaum. All right, Jamie, here's a clip from your film. So what are you going to talk about? Tell me about the 2010 Hope Conference. This is the first time you appear in public for Wikileaks. Hackers on Planet Earth, they would have big name talks and the plan was for Julian to come to America and to give a talk. Well, this is the Saturday keynote and let me tell you something about when I first met Julian Assange of Wikileaks. And I knew we were going to get targeted in a really big way because what was the talk about? It was about Chelsea Manning's arrest. The Pentagon will press criminal charges against the soldier who allegedly transferred classified David Wikileaks to get this classified video. Things were getting really hot at that point. Until the last minute, I made a new goal of seeing it maintained it was Julian. There is a Wikileaks presentation today. There is a Wikileaks keynote address in New York police. If they had any names on any warrants, it was for Julian. I would like to introduce Wikileaks and then surprise it was me. That's the moment where Jacob Applebaum really became the heir apparent to Julian Assange. Everyone is waiting for Assange to show his face. So the speaker comes to the stage and a hoodie takes off the hoodie and surprise it's not Assange but it's Applebaum who steps in to give the speech. He makes this speech and then they arrange a series of decoy Applebaum's expecting that the same law enforcement who were there for Assange may then target him. The lights go down. Several people in hoodies scatter in various corners and out he goes into a waiting car and is taken to the airport and flies off to Amsterdam. When this was all playing out, it was tremendously dramatic and exciting. It felt like a real life spy thriller meets cyberpunk but Jamie, let's rewind for a moment. Let's go back to the beginning. Who is Jacob Applebaum? He came from Northern California and he had the most unbelievably fraught, dramatic, I can't even think of the word childhood and upbringing. His father was a heroin addict who basically died in his arms when he was 18. And his mother is a paranoid schizophrenic. I'm sure there's probably a more correct DSM term for this now but that's the term he uses and has been in and out of institutions. Yeah. At some point I think he was three years old. He was in, I guess, an orphanage, a home-front wanted children. That's right. He was in a home-front wanted children. He developed all sorts of life hacks, he developed survival skills. He's an extremely intelligent guy. I mean, love him or loathe him, he's very smart, he's very articulate. Was he some kind of like masterful technologist? I think he was that way inclined from a youngish age. He didn't finish high school but he got early accepted in college and then he never finished college but then he went right to a PhD which actually, this is beyond where the film ends but he has now gotten his PhD in cryptology. It's like a savant, like a... Yeah, he's a very bright guy. He came from an unimaginably rough turbulent place and somehow emerged from that and became a kind of genius star in his field. And that star first rose with Tor, T-O-R project. The Tor project is volunteer operated and allows you to browse the web anonymously, untraceably and it does so by the operation of a series of volunteer operated relays across the world so that a signal bounces around and can't be traced back to the person who put in the search. There's one moment in your film that I think we should play right now. Hi, I'm Roger and this is Jacob and we're going to talk to you about things that governments and corporations have done to try to censor the Tor network. Tor is a free software project, it gives you the ability to surf the web anonymously. No logins, no passwords, no fees, it's all free software, somewhere between a quarter of a million and half a million users. Tor makes it very difficult in particular for a government to see what you're searching for on the internet. It's currently the largest anonymity network in the world that is publicly available and free of cost. If you build a circuit that goes from California to Iceland. As I recall, the Tor browser became a really well known thing because of its use during the Arab Spring. Yes, it has good and bad associations, I guess it's also known or closely associated with the so-called dark web and nefarious trafficings of various things, but it also became well known through the Arab Spring and Jacob Applebaum I believe was right at the center of that and in fact on the ground in those countries at that time helping protest movements circumvent the government forces that were trying to prevent them from communicating with each other and prevent them from protesting the regimes that were in place at that time. The regimes had blocked off Facebook and Google and the Tor allowed a kind of backdoor for protesters and revolutionary groups to communicate with each other and that's what really put Tor on the map in many ways. I think that from where we're standing now, it might be hard for people to remember that there was a time when all these technologies were like, like Hillary Clinton was supportive of them. Jacob Applebaum, his paycheck came from the US State Department. They saw this as a way of spreading democracy around the world. There was this moment where everybody in journalism and government was trying to figure out what is this movement, is it fish or fowl, isn't the free flow of information and some of these ideals of this movement compatible with our values of bringing democracy around the world and freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Is this maybe going to empower people throughout the Arab world to have a voice and organize and overthrow despots? There was a lot of excitement and tens of millions of dollars of funding. It was in fact funded by the US State Department. Aside from the Tor browser itself, there was a whole huge community around it. You're a kind of computer genius and you understand how surveillance works. You either go into the corporate world or you become a revolutionary or you work for an intelligence service and all of these kind of mixed and matched and blended together and made the strange bedfellows in all sorts of ways. This became the central point of congregation of these various and disparate aspects of this movement which on one hand is pushing for privacy. It's also being embraced and looked at carefully and in fact funded unbeknownst to many people by US intelligence services. I got the sense that they were geeks first. They were not revolutionaries first. They were not like hardcore political and the geekery could take them into Silicon Valley money making. It could take them into working for the government as spooks or it could take them into being these counterculture revolutionaries and some of them kind of play between and Applebaum is working for the State Department making a tool when Hillary Clinton thinks that tech is going to bring democracy to the world. She's essentially sending him his paycheck but his fealty I think ultimately, maybe originally you know I'm better than I do was with this revolutionary political fire brand kind of a culture. Well his background was as an activist and he had a rich and varied background professionally not to mention personally but I think he worked for the Greenpeace type organization. You know environmental activist, his environmental activism at the beginning of was concurrent with the beginning of his technological development. So those things I think were always hand in glove with him. For Applebaum at least his profile just kept going up first with the Tor project and then with his work for Wikileaks. I mean Julian Assange will always be like the primary face of Wikileaks but Julian Assange was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and with him out of sight somebody had to represent Wikileaks in the press at conferences and that somebody that face of Wikileaks became Jacob Applebaum. And in that role he became associated with one of Wikileaks's biggest leaks one of the biggest things they've ever released something that they called collateral murder. So what was collateral murder? A collateral murder was a video that was part of the trove released by Chelsea Manning or then Bradley Manning and released by Wikileaks which shows a US helicopter actually shooting down civilians in Baghdad including two Reuters journalists with a voice over that sounds like they're playing a video game basically as these human beings fall to the ground. For more than two and a half years the wire service Reuters has been trying to find out what happened to their two staff members on this street in the suburb of New Baghdad. Wikileaks says this is what happened. Very chilling. You just hear these very dispassionate conversation between these two American military operatives saying should we light them up and the public sees the reality of what warfare it looks like and what their government is doing in their name. Any journalist covering the United States and its military would want that scoop. Well it's been very interesting to see how the mainstream press like the New York Times and the Guardian have danced this dance with Assange and Wikileaks over the years sometimes trading on the value of these scoops and sometimes trying to run as far as they can to distance themselves from him. The issue I think of whether people like Assange and Applebaum I learned through the course of this are described as journalists versus hackers is part of whether you're saying they're doing something that they should be punished for or they're doing something that's in the public good. To them this kind of question of nomenclature is it can be if not life or death at least freedom versus life in prison. Returning to the collateral murder clip what is Jacob Applebaum's connection to that release? This is part of the game of Cat and Mouse of making a film about someone whose work has been so secretive of necessity is that he would not tell me everything he did and I can understand why but I still had to keep asking. I'm not sure if he had direct involvement in the collateral murder video or not but what I do know is that around that time which is let's say 2010 things were starting to really heat up for Assange and Assange was supposed to give a keynote address at one of these big hacker conferences in New York called Hope, Hackers on Planet Earth and a kind of stunt was pulled in which everybody thought Assange was going to show up for this thing and he was wanted by the US at this point for the association with Chelsea Manning and collateral murder so it was assumed correctly that there were law enforcement people in the room for this keynote address. This really is a shoot the messenger campaign this is you got a source within the American military who's leaking you information Assange in this role is the journalist accepting the information and disseminating it and the American security apparatus decides to define him as not a journalist but somebody who is essentially conspiring to betray American military secrets so this is this is treason and you know and he's been charged with treason although incidentally he's not an American citizen. The feeling you know covering this at the time was this is so fun because it's a whack-a-mole game where like you know you think this is just this one guy no this is this is the technology itself that you're up against this is a movement like they're not going to be able to control this this is a completely new kind of thing it's distributed it's global it's not about a person it's about a whole new way that information is going to move from now on and I don't think I've been more wrong about anything in my life. Well it's very interesting to see how quite old-fashioned techniques have proven effective in divide and conquer and make an example of the leader and cut the head off you know to counterinsurgency methods seem to have proven quite effective and I think that I'm talking mainly about Assange but it applies to Apple Bomb 2. The Apple Bomb case which sort of mirrors the Assange case was when I was not familiar with backing up to Apple Bomb at his height he was not simply somebody who was associated with this wonderful freedom fighting tour software not somebody who was just enrolling Stone magazine but like he was welcomed by European Parliament to give speeches this was like the new democratic freedom fighter and this was something everybody was paying attention to he was winning press awards his fame was growing by leaps and bounds but then comes collateral murder and the tides turn against this this whole movement. Actually in his case his star continued to rise beyond that and in some ways because of that because the world was divided yes the US government thought releasing collateral murder was a bad idea and started pursuing those involved and have not stopped pursuing those involved. Many of whom are named in one way or another in the indictments against Assange as a precursor to being able to go for them next. All of their documents are like Assange and co-conspirators they're leaving the door open for all these other exactly they call them it's Apple bomb for instance is identified as WLA three wiki leaks associate three and the lawyers have explained to me that that's exactly what you said it's yet another warning shot across the bow to these people saying we're coming to get you next. So what did he face? The collateral murder in a funny way yes it made life difficult for him it convinced him that it was necessary to move out of the states and a decision that was compounded by the release of the Snowden leaks a few years later, can we talk a bit about Edward Snowden tell me about when when you first became aware of him. Well he wants to know. Inquiring minds yeah well yeah I'm sure lots of dear Jay people want to know the answer that question Laura told me that she had something we needed to talk about. At the time Jake tells me what's he involved with that. He was involved with that yeah he was working with the journalist and documentary maker Laura Poitras as I understand it. So she of course is the documentary maker who made citizen for which is the documentary about Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald that won the Oscar for best documentary so what was that relationship. Well I believe it existed on many levels they had a personal relationship they were romantically involved but they were also collaborating they were also collaborating on journalism and as I understand it he was the kind of tech mind that helped her understand and maneuver what was happening once Snowden dropped into her lap. This was another incredible bombshell that the public absolutely had a right to know that they were being spied on by the NSA in collaboration with Verizon. Yeah and this is when you talk about when is it journalism or when is it breaking the law you know in the kind of work that Tor was doing to try to help as Jake described to me anti-Chinese activists in Tibet be able to circumvent the Chinese firewalls to communicate freely that was funded by the State Department lauded as a blow for freedom when its revelations coming from your own spies about how your own cell phone companies are turning over your data to your government illegally well we know that Snowden is in exile in Russia now so that's what he got for his troubles. Okay let's go back to Applebaum. Okay. Collateral murder comes out the government turns on Applebaum and now he's persona non grata. There's the stage where it adds to his allure and fame and appeal because now he's a bit of a freedom fighter who is like a fugitive from America still showing up on these stages. Yeah and in Germany this did wonders for his cred you know he became even more of a celebrity there. He's winning these journalism prizes for his work with portraits and in the wake of the Snowden leaks he has four covers of Der Spiegel in a row cover stories you know the main German news magazine including one on how the NSA was spying on Chancellor Merkel. Remember that one when Obama had to apologize to Angela Merkel for like the story that we have been spying on your phone allies I mean these are incredible revelations. Amazing stories and he's you know rewarded for it dancing around the most powerful people in the world and putting the lie to them and you have this incredible footage of him giving these speeches and he's sort of this Robin Hoodish kind of figure you're not going to destroy this guy's reputation by calling him a dissident right a rebel you're only going to make him stronger as they've learned what could actually destroy this guy's reputation. Well I think we found out. This episode of Canada Land is brought to you by Douglas Douglas is not a person I mean there are people named Douglas but the Douglas I'm referring to is a mattress it's not one mattress it's many Matt in fact there are more than 200,000 Canadians who trust their Douglas mattress in this country of ours. 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rape allegations what happened next to apple bomb would apple bomb have been risking his freedom to show up on the Oscars red carpet well it wasn't at the Oscars that he was sharing red carpets with Laura Petrus but it was at Ken when she was releasing this film risk this is the follow up this is the follow up to citizen for it was based on exclusive access that she had to a wiki leaks which perhaps one can assume apple bomb helped her get here's a clip from that documentary the one that we're talking about Laura Petrus's documentary risk oh hello can't please speak to Hillary Clinton I'm quoting from the office of Julian Assange this is an emergency this is not the film I thought I was making I thought I could ignore the contradictions I thought they were not part of the story I was wrong when I got home my apartment door was open did I forget to close it or are they sending me a message it's a film in which Assange looks like a paranoid creep and apple bomb comes off as a shining star of the movement for acts one and two and then suddenly what we're about to talk about next is sort of splashed on screen so he's at can with Laura Petrus everything is hunky dory this is 2016 and then suddenly a website is published under the URL Jacob Apple bomb dot net and it features a bunch of different pictures of him and then a bunch of pseudonyms of people who are telling stories about his alleged abuse of them on that website there was a story by someone called Kiwi and that was me and I recounted truthfully and honestly my professional experiences with jig how he would humiliate people at work publicly at conferences with meetings with potential funders for projects many times he would yell at me many times he would threaten to get me cut out of the field I spoke about that sort of thing many of the stories there are much worse but that was what I contributed and these stories range from shouting at someone at a business dinner to non-consensual backwashing I believe at an orgy and on down the spectrum to a rape accusation this website comes out and suddenly you know the bottom falls out of his world and people are spray painting rapist on the building where he lives in Berlin you know his his life as he knew it is over and he resigns quote unquote from the tour project in a kind of cloud of disgrace and infamy he's helping her make this film and then the allegations come out against him and then suddenly the film changes there's a new version of it in which he's portrayed as a probable rapist the story I've heard is that when this film premiered it was a positive enough portrayal of Wikileaks and Julian Assange and his associates and apple bomb is sort of a major secondary player let's say in that film and then by the time it was released in the state six months later as I understand it it was recut and it portrays Assange as a creep and has a new piece in it about apple bombs accusations it puts the website full on the screen and in voice over the filmmaker says something like these accusations come out against apple bomb he leaves the tour project under a cloud and a friend of mine tells me that he abused her and he and I were involved briefly and that's done with that character uh-huh and I'll admit it was part of what intrigued me about this story I mean that's just staggering I mean just to kind of get my head around what you just told me like having reached those heights in short order an anonymous website comes with like a grab bag of character assassination ever since then apple bomb has been persona non grata his former lover re edits the documentary to kind of just deal with him short shrift he's out and the community that once celebrated him and invited him to every conference turns its back on him his home is spray painted and he's been living in exile ever since now we need to drill down on these allegations a little bit here and I don't want to be blind they're dismissive of life absolutely not there are actual human beings who put their name on serious allegations against him eventually some of them came out with their own name yes did you ever find out is it known who published this website what I have been told but not been able to verify or not been able to raise the question with the people themselves because they have assiduously avoided me and most other attempts to interview them and it's worth noting that that uh no accusations were ever brought to the police there was no investigation there were no charges laid so these are allegations but ones which absolutely I take extremely seriously and we must say that he he um protests his innocence and absolutely has he ever been charged he has never been charged there have never been any charge technically legally he is he is an innocent person yes and yet the the the woman who made the most serious allegation against him am I corrected that she she's standing by her version of events she hasn't published anything to the contrary ultimately what I did I did wind up turning to two excellent acclaimed very serious journalists in Germany one of whom covered the story extensively at the time for uh deep site a major paper and the other covered it for the guardian they basically came to the conclusion that these people's stories didn't line up uh that the most serious allegations against him were not credible when I became romantically involved with Jacob I clearly told him I wasn't interested in group sex or having sex in front of other people I blacked out and when I came back into consciousness Jacob was having sex with me in the living room with his friends watching so that's the right allegation most of the witnesses from those days no longer want to talk this is obviously very emotional for me so you're doing great thank you but one does finally agree to discuss the night in question one of the reasons why I was determined to like talk about this in public was because the the painting that was drawn from Chelsea in her anonymous blog post is just simply not what happened at that night at the apartment it became a movie night I don't remember if that was the plan or what but by the time the movie started the couch was laid out it was my two friends and then Chelsea and Jake so those two couples were there on the couch together under a blanket and then I was just off to the side it was a projector on this on the wall so it was like making the room fairly bright and what was her degree of participation I guess in whatever was or wasn't going on well I mean there wasn't anything going on I mean as far as I knew we were all casually hanging out watching a film and two different couples were cuddling with themselves separate from each other there wasn't anything substantial that happened it was just a very relaxed movie night there was nothing that eluded me to think that they were either naked or having sexual relations under the blanket like the vibe that she was describing like it was very malicious it was very hate like not hateful but like it was terrible she made it sound like if anyone with if any bystander had been like in that apartment that someone should have like like yelled and stopped like you know what you're doing is wrong but like the vibe of that night was just completely the opposite my conclusion is from talking to all the eyewitnesses that Chelsea seemed fine that she seemed comfortable that she was a wolf with Jacob so I couldn't corroborate the rape allegation it was nothing nothing like what was described on the website even remotely that they weren't having sex they were watching a movie so the Jacob Apple bomb that you met was just incredibly paranoid no matter what happens even if there's a videotape of it it was murder Julian and I used to joke about that Laura and I used to joke about that too no matter what happens even if there's a note no matter what I would never commit suicide if it ever happened in such a way it was murder we used to joke about those things until we actually had friends that were found dead from suicide so do you have any other questions for me when you meet him you enter this world that is so unfamiliar to most of us you know he's walking around Berlin and he's saying okay those people are on a surveillance team those people are on a surveillance team and you're like really I mean maybe they're just buying gelato you know maybe they're just like pushing a stroller you know maybe that is a real baby in there or I guess he figures he was important enough they'd spring for a real baby but it was a question for me all along is he paranoid or are they really out to get him now my understanding is that the u.s. justice department at one point offers Jacob apple bomb a deal kind of a get out of jail quick card amnesty which is really interesting because he had not been because he's never been charged with anything but they basically said if you want to make sure that that stays the case and and have full amnesty here's a deal that will make those hypothetical problems go away at a certain point the department of justice offered him a deal and it is an interesting when you say what are the charges against him well all of this happens in this is the kind of gaslighting of the whole process these things happen they're they're sealed indictments done by a secretive grand jury and you don't know what's in the box you know until it's opened and like a son sure facing 175 years for espionage and the prospect of alluding to these people to these associates that there may be such an indictment against them is part of what breaks their spirit and breaks up the movement you don't know what we got on you you don't know what you got on you is almost worse but this is confirmation if he's wondering like am i am i just fantasizing this whole thing and they're saying no no we will give you amnesty against everything that we're gonna do to you otherwise and what does he have to do in return he has to tell them everything he knows about Julian Assange and Wikileaks and this offer from the department of justice came up while we were filming so had there been any doubt in my mind prior to that which i think after after a couple of years working with him i believed enough of it was true but this was the absolute confirmation when you haven't even been told what the charges against you are but they're offering to drop them if you rat out your comrade i think you know you're not imagining the hot water you're in and what was his response to that offer uh well he told them to go fuck themselves i believe in so many words and so the us government said they'd like to know if i'd be interested in coming in from the cold everything would go away i could come back to america and they said uh you know essentially just one thing we just need you to testify against Julian Assange so i told them that i will die on foreign soil before i ever let you get your fucking Nazi hands on me i'm so glad you clapped i think of the cast of characters who represented what seemed to me to be an unstoppable new force and how information moves and the inability for governments to keep secrets and i think of Edward Snowden who is exiled to Russia Julian Assange who apparently has gone mad in his imprisonment or you know de facto imprisonment or so the only people you know who write about him say yeah and then we have Jacob Applebaum right they were surprisingly effective at stopping this thing Jamie do we know who is behind this i was not able to find a smoking gun in this story there have been suggestions of FBI associations of this accuser or that accuser and and you know glimpses of evidence there have been you know allegations of CIA associations of of this journalist or that one but i wasn't able to find it and in the end to me it's it's kind of a unique and cautionary tale even without that one of the journalists i interviewed Angela Richter in the piece who's covered Assange and and collaborated at one time with Applebaum as she says in the film you know if this was not orchestrated by the u.s. secret services it may as well have been they must be sitting back eating popcorn and enjoying the fallout because basically this scandal destroyed that whole movement it destroyed the whole movement around tour you know the browser still exists but the movement for all intents and purposes no longer does and the kind of surveillance the tour existed to protect against is is now just a part of our lives yes i mean this is the other odd and horrifying thing is is after all of these revelations after all these risks taken by whistleblowers and journalists somehow we have the information and we've forgotten about it i don't know if it's it's because of the news cycle or because we're too dependent on the technology to bother worrying about what cookies are or how they might be used against us as far as i can see wiki leaks which for a time had a barn burner of a release every other week and now just seems to be like an Assange advocacy organization yeah they're kind of fighting for his life next year my team and i spent over two years chasing more than 40 people to talk about jake tour people alleged victims friends foes and only the handful you've met agreed and pretty nervously okay okay now why should people be afraid to speak freely in a community dedicated to internet freedom i think we'll leave it at that for today are you sure because i can keep going for another hour yeah i don't think i can no jimmy castner thank you for talking to me today thank you for having me at least somebody wants to talk about jake about the bomb that is your canada land i hope you liked it listen if you are not a supporter of canada land today could be the day where you decide to start paying for the news and information that you value you value it just by virtue of the fact that you spend time with us and decide to get information from us and i know you value your own time value the 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