press review - Nomeproject

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C U R AT E D B Y TAT I A N A B A Z Z I C H E L L I
P R E S S
R E V I E W
B AY E R N 2
SEPTEMBER 18, 2015
W W W. B R . D E
B AY E R N 2
NETZAKTIVIST ZEIGT
Ü B E R WA C H U N G S P R O B L E M A T I K A L S K U N S T
1 8 . 0 9 . 2 0 1 5 V O N F LO R I A N F R I C K E
Jacob Applebaum, Aktivist für ein freies Internet, hat jahrelang Fotos von befreundeten Aktivisten in meist
privaten Situationen geschossen - von Glenn Greenwald bis Julian Assange. Er benutzt dafür einen speziellen Infrarot-Film, der mehr Informationen auf den Fotos zulässt als ein Standardfilm.
„SAMIZDATA: Evidence of Conspiracy“ heißt die Ausstellung in der NOME Gallery in Berlin. Der Titel bezieht
sich auf den russischen Begriff „Samizdat“, der Ende der 1950er Jahre in der Sowjetunion und dem ehemaligen
Ostblock die Verbreitung und Vervielfältigung zensierter Literatur auf nichtoffiziellen Kanälen bezeichnete. Übertragen auf das 21. Jahrhundert passt das Konzept zu Aspekten der Snowden-Affäre und WikiLeaks, innerhalb der
sich involvierte Personen für die Verbreitung von Informationen in Gefahr bringen.
Sechs große Prints sind es mit sieben Helden der Neuzeit: Sarah Harrison, Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald und
sein Freund David Miranda, Julian Assange, William Binney und Ai Weiwei. Der Künstler Jacob Applebaum ist
fast älter als der Aktivist Applebaum. Privat hat er immer wieder ausgestellt, aber Laura Poitras ist es zu verdanken,
dass er nun mit seinen Fotos auch an die Öffentlichkeit geht, erzählt er im Zündfunk-Interview.
„Ich habe viele Menschen fotografiert, die sich mit Technologie beschäftigen oder journalistisch mit der
Überwachungsthematik und bürgerlichen Freiheitsrechten. Eigentlich war es immer nur mein Ziel, die Porträtierten mit ihrem Bild zu beschenken. Normalerweise sind das kleine Abzüge, diese sind im Vergleich
sehr groß. Mein Archiv ist jedenfalls riesig, das müssten tausende Fotos sein.“
Jacob Applebaum
N O M E P R O J E C T. C O M
B AY E R N 2
SEPTEMBER 18, 2015
W W W. B R . D E
Das emotionalste Foto sei das von William Binney, meint Jacob Applebaum. Binney war Whistleblower lange
vor Edward Snowden, und die NSA hat mit aller Macht versucht ihn zu brechen. Aber sie schafften es nicht, im
Gegenteil. Binney reist heute trotz seiner schweren Erkrankungen durch die Welt und erzählt seine Geschichte
- unbreakable. Applebaums Foto zeigt Binney in Kämpferpose vor einem Baum, die linke Hand zur Faust geballt,
der Rollstuhl, auf den er seit Jahren angewiesen ist, steht daneben. Aber die Geste wirkt ganz natürlich, so wie
es Binneys Charakter entspricht. Kuratorin Tatiana Bazzichelli sieht gerade darin die Kraft.
„Was Menschen gegen die Überwachung tun können, hängt von ihnen selbst ab. Auf Applebaums Fotos
sieht man die Aktivisten in einer entspannten Atmosphäre. Er wollte eben keine Helden kreieren, keine
Celebrities. Man erkennt, dass auch normale Menschen eine Wahl haben.“
Kuratorin Tatiana Bazzichelli
Es geht also nicht um Helden, sondern um heroische Taten. Man kann nicht behaupten, dass Applebaum mit seiner
Ausstellung in der Mainstream-Kunst angekommen sei. Die kleine NOME-Galerie befindet sich im allerhintersten
Zipfel von Friedrichshain, hier muss man herkommen wollen. Aber zumindest zur Vernissage war es proppenvoll,
die internationale Berliner Aktivistenszene hatte sich versammelt. Die Portraits fallen sehr rotstichig aus, was am
speziellen Infrarot-Film von Kodak liegt. Er wurde entwickelt, um Landwirtschaftsflächen zu überwachen oder
versteckte Objekte am Boden zu finden. Die menschliche Haut sieht auf einem Infrarot-Foto ganz anders aus, man
sieht mehr Gefäße, man erhält also mehr und andere Informationen.
„Ich finde es sehr wichtig, diesen schwer verständlichen und technischen Überwachungskomplex, der
jeden betrifft, in einen Raum zu transformieren, wo wir die Auswirkungen auf unsere Kultur diskutieren
können. Amerikanische Medien wie CNN behaupten auf eine sehr oberflächliche Art, dass die Deutschen
sich halt der Nazis und der Kommunisten erinnern und deswegen keine Überwachung mögen. Aber
das ist nicht der Grund. Der Grund geht tiefer, nämlich dass die Betroffenen erkennen, wie die Überwachungsmaßnahmen Familien und Freundschaften zerstörten, wie sie Persönlichkeiten zersetzten.“
Jacob Applebaum
Aber fällt das unter die viel zitierte Hacker Art, die sich an der Quadratur des Kreises probiert, nämlich das
Unsichtbare sichtbar zu machen? Direkt vor Applebaum hat James Bridle in der NOME Galerie ausgestellt, der
seine Kunst „Hacks im besten Sinne“ bezeichnet, nämlich um „Prozesse zu kapern, sie zu durchleuchten und
einem Bewusstsein für komplexe Systeme zugänglich zu machen.“ Richtig berühmt ist bereits Trevor Paglen, der
mit seinem langbrennweitigen Fotos von versteckten Geheimdienstzentren Ikonografien zum Thema Überwachungsstaat erschaffen hat. Wie passen Applebaums privat anmutende Fotos hier rein? Laura Poitras, die für ihren
Snowden-Film „Citizen 4“ den Oscar erhielt und an einem Dokumentarfilm über die politische Verfolgung von
Wikileaks-Gründer Julian Assange arbeitet, sieht es differenziert.
„Es gibt gerade eine Menge Kunst, die auf aktuelle Ereignisse reagiert. Sie wird populär, und plötzlich
entsteht ein Hype, wie gerade um den Überwachungskomplex. Aber Jacob und die Personen, die er porträtiert hat: Das ist Kunst, die aus einer Gruppe kommt, die seit Jahren gegen Überwachung kämpft. Die
Entscheidung Infrarot-Film zu benutzen, der zur Überwachung eingesetzt wird, ist natürlich ein bewusster
Kommentar. Aber es ist auch eine ästhetische Entscheidung. Die Fotos sind auch einfach schön.“
Laura Poitras
Die Ausstellung „SAMIZDATA: Evidence of Conspiracy“ ist noch bis 31. Oktober in der NOME Gallery in Berlin
zu sehen.
H A N D E L S B L AT T
SEPTEMBER 18, 2015
W W W. H A N D E L S B L A T T. C O M
H A N D E L S B L AT T
THE EXILED AMERICAN
18.09.2015, BY DUSTIN VOLZ
The former Wikileaks collaborator Jacob Appelbaum has built a new life in exile in Berlin as a sought-after photographer. An exhibition of his work this month focuses on the heroes of the anti-surveillance movement.
Jacob Appelbaum, a gangly, chestnut-haired intellectual with thick glasses and a metal bar through his right ear,
extends a tentative hand and sarcastic sense of humor. In a plaintive voice, the exiled American gently warns his
interviewer, a visiting journalist from Washington, that the printed word still has meaning.
”I hope whatever you publish can help me get back home,” he says equal parts serious and sardonic. “What
you write could decide my fate. Keep that in mind.”
Mr. Appelbaum, once described to his chagrin as “the most dangerous man in cyberspace” by Rolling Stone
magazine, walked out of an art gallery in Friedrichshain, a gentrified corner of former East Berlin, where his first
solo photography exhibit would premiere the following night.
The early 30-something polymathic hacktivist, notorious Wikileaks collaborator, mass surveillance prophet and
all-around government agitator lives in the world’s fastest-growing asylum for digital fugitives, a chaotic, largely
ungoverned, indebted bed of data distrusters — Berlin.
For more than two years, Mr. Appelbaum has stayed close to his undisclosed hangout in the German capital,
unable to come home, he said, for fear of what the U.S. government might do to him.
(Full story on Handelsblatt‘s Global Edition website)
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AUGUST 23, 2015
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A R T M AGA Z I N
A R T I N VA D E R S
23.08.2015, VON LEA DLUGOSCH
Bekannt machte ihn in Deutschland vor allem sein Engagement für den Whistleblower Edward Snowden. Jacob
Appelbaum ist politischer Aktivist, Experte für Datensicherheit, preisgekrönter Journalist – und jetzt auch Künstler. Erstmals sprechen er und sein Berliner Galerist Luca Barbeni über seine bevorstehende Einzelausstellung, die
Notwendigkeit politischer Kunst und ihre Abneigung gegen die Post-Internet Art.
art: Sie sind Internetaktivist und Spezialist für digitale Sicherheit. Warum wollen Sie in Ihrer Ausstellung
nun ausgerechnet analoge Fotografien zeigen?
Jacob Appelbaum: Das liegt unter anderem daran, dass ich den analogen Film für ästhetisch überlegen halte. Ich
arbeite viel mit Infrarotfilm, der nur auf einen bestimmten Teil des Lichtspektrums reagiert und somit auch sichtbar
macht, was für das menschliche Auge nicht zugänglich ist.
Ein anderer Grund, warum ich gerne mit Film fotografiere, ist, dass er privater ist. Wenn ich ein digitales Foto
aufnehme und auf den Computer ziehe kann es sein, dass jemand anderes automatisch eine Kopie davon macht.
Wenn man dagegen analogen Film verwendet, müsste man schon in dein Haus einbrechen und ihn einscannen,
um eine Kopie zu machen. Aufgrund meiner Arbeit stehe ich seit Jahren unter Beobachtung – ich wollte es
diesen Leuten schwerer machen, in meine Privatsphäre einzudringen. Je mehr ich in den letzten zehn Jahren
unter Beobachtung stand, desto mehr Spaß brachte mir die analoge Fotografie. Es ist einer der wenigen privaten
Räume, die mir bleiben, auf die niemand Zugriff hat – es sei denn, ich entscheide mich wie jetzt bewusst dafür,
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AUGUST 23, 2015
sie zu zeigen. Das ist mir sehr wichtig. Ich mag die Idee, die Dinge für mich zu behalten, solange ich will. Im
Umgang mit Bildern bin ich generell sehr privat und zeige sie eigentlich nie jemandem.
Dennoch wollen Sie jetzt in der Ausstellung ihr privates Netzwerk aus Freunden und Kollegen öffentlich
machen.
Jacob Appelbaum: Ich zeige Menschen, die ich bewundere und mit denen ich zusammenarbeite. Ich wollte
ein Bild machen, das zeigt wie sie sind – als ein Geschenk für sie. Ich habe diese Bilder nicht mit der Absicht
geschossen, sie auszustellen – abgesehen von dem Bild von Sarah Harrison. Es war eher eine Herzensangelegenheit.
Das klingt fast ein wenig nostalgisch...
Jacob Appelbaum: Mir gefällt die Idee einer Geschenkkultur anstelle eines kapitalistischen Warenaustauschs.
Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, David Miranda, Julian Assange, Sarah Harrison, William Binney und Ai Weiwei
haben mir so viel gegeben, das jenseits von Tauschgeschäften steht. Wir handeln nicht mit Dingen. Es ging mir
aber nicht nur um reine Nostalgie, vielmehr um etwas, das jeden betrifft: Ich wollte meine persönliche Bewunderung und Anerkennung für ihre Arbeit ausdrücken und etwas an sie zurückgeben.
Die Etablierung einer Geschenkkultur verbindet man im ersten Moment nicht unbedingt mit einer – in
der Regel doch eher kommerziell ausgerichteten Kunstgalerie. Herr Barbeni, Sie handeln mit Medienkunst. Die aktuelle Tendenz der Post-Internet Art steht häufig unter dem Verdacht der Kommerzialisierung, der trivialen „Verdinglichung“ digitaler Kultur. Wie stehen Sie dazu?
Luca Barbeni: Ich möchte in keiner Weise mit der sogenannten Post-Internet Art in Verbindung gebracht werden.
Daher habe ich mich auch dazu entschlossen, Künstler wie Paolo Cirio, James Bridle oder eben
Jacob Appelbaum auszustellen. Ich bin der Meinung, dass das Label Post-Internet Art digitale Medien nur als formales Werkzeug benutzt. Die meisten der Projekte aus diesem Bereich erscheinen mir sehr kurzlebig. Sie sehen
im ersten Moment sehr spannend aus, aber es ist nicht viel dahinter.
Die Kunst, die ich hier zeige, nennen viele Journalisten Surveillance Art. Das ist vielleicht etwas zu eng gefasst, ich
sehe es lieber als politische Kunst, schließlich geht es den Künstlern darum, das Publikum mit wichtigen Themen
unserer Zeit zu konfrontieren, nicht nur mit der Kunstgeschichte. Natürlich folgen auch die Künstler, die ich zeige,
dem Weg der Kunstgeschichte, setzen sich aber mit aktuellen Problemen auseinander und präsentieren einen
anderen Blick darauf, was gerade passiert.
Wo finden Sie Ihre Künstler und wie wählen Sie sie aus?
Luca Barbeni: Es begann alles mit Paolo Cirio, mit dem ich befreundet bin. Nachdem wir uns entschieden hatten,
die erste Ausstellung mit ihm zu machen, brauchte ich für die nachfolgenden Ausstellungen Künstler, die ein gemeinsames Rahmenkonzept bilden. Nach Paolo habe ich Arbeiten von James Bridle produziert, denn er begann
wirklich starke Werke zu machen und gewann an Bekanntheit. Schließlich stellte Tatiana Bazzichelli mir Jacob
Appelbaum vor, die beiden sind eng befreundet – und seine Arbeiten fügten sich ideal in unser Konzept.
Mich faszinierte sehr, dass die Arbeiten von Appelbaum ein Gegenstück zu Paolo Cirio darstellen: Während
Paolo mit seiner „Overexposed“-Serie nichtautorisierte Bilder von hochrangigen amerikanischen Geheimdienst-
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AUGUST 23, 2015
beamten verbreitet, die für die Massenüberwachungsprogramme zuständig sind, porträtiert Jacob politische Aktivisten, die selbst Opfer der Massenüberwachung sind. Es geht um dasselbe Thema, aber aus verschiedenen
Perspektiven.
Haben Sie künstlerische Vorbilder, Herr Appelbaum?
Appelbaum: Einige der Menschen, die ich im Katalog erwähnen werde: Kate Young, die mich in die Infrarotfotografie eingeführt hat, Laura Poitras und Trevor Paglen, die mir seit Jahren künstlerisch zur Seite stehen. Es gibt
natürlich auch viele Künstler, die ich sehr bewundere und nie getroffen habe, wie H.R. Giger, der nicht mehr lebt.
Die Ausstellung im September wird Ihre erste Austellung sein. Was bedeutet das für Sie?
Appelbaum: Es ist meine erste Einzelausstellung, aber ich habe meine Arbeiten bereits andernorts gezeigt. Im Rahmen einer Parsons-Residency war ich vor fast zehn Jahren im Museumsquartier in Wien tätig. Im Whitney Museum
wurden ein paar meiner Arbeiten in die ständige Ausstellung eingezogen. Es gab dort eine Guerilla-Hängung mit
zwei meiner Arbeiten während der Whitney Biennale. Ich habe sie allerdings nicht signiert. Technisch gesehen
sind es also Fälschungen. Ich schätze, das zählt nicht.
Mit meiner jetzigen Ausstellung wollte ich etwas für die Kuratorin Tatiana Bazzichelli tun, die ich wirklich schätze.
Als ich nach Berlin kam, gab sie mir direkt die Schlüssel zu ihrer Wohnung, da wir aufgrund sehr
ernster Angelegenheiten im Bezug zu Snowden Angst hatten. Sie bot mir buchstäblich ihr Zuhause als Schutzraum an. Als sie vorschlug, mit der NOME-Galerie zusammenzuarbeiten, dachte ich: „Sie muss es wissen!“ Sie
sprach davon, die Arbeiten mit einem politischen Bewusstsein zu präsentieren und eben nicht einem Kontext von
Kunst als Markt – das fand ich spannend. Die Galerie hat mich dann sehr unterstützt und viel Arbeit investiert.
Das rechne ich ihnen hoch an. Es gibt viele Orte, an denen ich diese Fotos zeigen könnte, aber hier ergibt es am
meisten Sinn.
Schließlich wollte ich sicherstellen, dass, wenn ich eine Schau in Berlin mache, es mit Menschen sein muss, die
auch über ein Bewusstsein darüber verfügen, dass es hier um politische Themen geht, die jeden betreffen. Wir
müssen die Kulturszene erreichen, um die Politik zu verändern.
So gesehen ist das hier ein neuer Weg für Sie, politisch aktiv zu werden. Erhoffen Sie sich davon mehr
Aufmerksamkeit? Ist das Ihr Motiv?
Appelbaum: In erster Linie wollte ich persönliche Bezüge für andere Menschen schaffen. Berlin steht zur Zeit im
Zentrum der Gegenwartskunst und ich denke, es hilft dabei, mehr Menschen zu erreichen. Sie sehen die Fotos
auch, wenn sie keine Magazine gelesen haben, wenn sie den Film „Citizenfour“ nicht gesehen haben und sie die
ganze Geschichte gar nicht erreicht hat. Vielleicht werden diese Bilder zu ihrem besseren Verständnis beitragen,
denn sie zeigen auch andere Menschen als Edward Snowden. Es geht mir darum, echte aktive Revolutionäre, die
in ihrem Aktivismus erfolgreich waren, von ihrer menschlichen Seite zu zeigen. Ich möchte, dass Besucher Laura
Poitras sehen, in einer Momentaufnahme in ihrem Berliner Apartment, 2013, im Sommer der Snowden-Affäre.
Oder Sarah Harrison – ohne sie hätte Snowden nicht befreit werden können. Dank ihr befindet er sich in politischem Asyl. Auch Ai Weiwei ist involviert, weil er im Besonderen dabei hilft, Dinge zu erschaffen, die Menschen
auf ganz verschiedene Arten erreichen. Beim P2P-Projekt („Panda-to-Panda“), dass ich auch ausstellen werde,
geht es genau darum: Menschen zu erreichen, die sich für Technik überhaupt nicht interessieren.
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AUGUST 23, 2015
Bei dem „Panda-to-Panda“-Projekt werden ausgehöhlte Stofftiere mit neuen Inhalten – brisanten Daten
– befüllt und in Museen geschickt...
Appelbaum: Das „Panda-to-Panda“-Projekt haben Ai Weiwei und ich in Peking gemacht und Laura Poitras hat
es für die „New York Times“ dokumentiert. Mit diesem Projekt machen wir die Leute quasi zu menschlichen
Kurierboten illegaler Informationen – oder mutmaßlich illegaler Informationen. Wir verwenden ein Kunstobjekt
als Vermittler, um über diese Dinge sprechen. Und stellen Sie sich mal vor, wie es aussieht, wenn die Polizei in
eine Galerie einbricht, um einen Pandabären zu zerstören. Selbst Menschen, die sich sonst nicht für das Thema
Überwachung interessieren, werden denken: „Das ist eine Gräueltat“.
Was hat es mit dem verschwörerischen Titel Ihrer Ausstellung auf sich: „Samizdata – Evidence of Conspiracy“?
Appelbaum: Es geht hier nicht um irgendwelche obskuren Verschwörungstheorien. Vielmehr hat jede einzelne
der in der Ausstellung gezeigten Personen dazu beigetragen, was wir heute wissen: Was wir immer für Verschwörungstheorien hielten, ist längst ein gängiges Geschäftsmodell.
„Samizdat“ ist ein russisches Konzept. Es besagt: Ich mache es selbst, ich vermittle es selbst, ich werde selbst dafür verhaftet. Genau so funktioniert investigativer Journalismus seit Wikileaks und den Snowden-Akten. Es ist traurig, aber so ist es. Es gab Menschen in den USA, die Snowdens Hinrichtung gefordert haben. Daneben wird gegen
eine Reihe von Menschen, mich eingeschlossen, dort unter Spionage-Verdacht ermittelt, was die Todesstrafe nach
sich ziehen kann. Diese Vorstellung birgt einen Härtegrad, für den das Wort „Samizdat“ notwendig erscheint. In
der modernen Zeit muss es dann natürlich „Samizdata“ heißen. Schließlich gibt es Daten, die wir nicht länger
teilen dürfen, kennen dürfen, besprechen dürfen, obwohl das zur grundlegenden Freiheit unseres Lebens zählt.
Man macht sich nicht sonderlich beliebt, wenn man sie in Deutschland zitiert, aber Ulrike Meinhof hat zu diesem
Thema mal etwas Interessantes gesagt: „Protest ist, wenn ich sage, dass ich etwas nicht mag und es nicht mehr
mitmache. Widerstand ist, wenn ich auch andere Menschen davon abhalte, etwas mitzumachen.“ Aus diesem
Ansatz heraus wurden für die Ausstellung sechs Menschen, sechs Darsteller gefunden, die ein Modell für friedlichen Widerstand zeigen sollen.
A R T- AG E N DA
SEPTEMBER, 2015
W W W. A R T - A G E N D A . C O M
A R T- AG E N DA
JACOB APPELBAUM
S A M I Z DATA : E V I D E N C E O F C O N S P I R AC Y
NOME Gallery is pleased to present SAMIZDATA: Evidence of Conspiracy, Jacob Appelbaum’s first solo show in
Germany, curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli. In cooperation with Disruption Network Lab.
The title of the show references the Russian word “samizdat,” an important form of dissident activity throughout
the former Soviet bloc in which censored literature was clandestinely reproduced and distributed. Transferred
to the 21st century, the activity also resonates with aspects of the Snowden Affair and WikiLeaks as regards the
distribution of information that places involved people at risk.
With SAMIZDATA, Jacob Appelbaum presents artworks that are a critique of the progressive loss of liberty,
evolving from within a context of investigative journalism and document-leaking aimed at the higher goal of
transparency.
For the first time, the artist is showing a series of six color infrared photos as cibachrome prints, portraits of his own
network of colleagues and friends: Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and David Miranda, Julian Assange, Sarah
Harrison, William Binney, and Ai Weiwei. The works were originally created as a sign of admiration and respect
for the portrayed people and for their work that led to the “Snowden Affair” and beyond.
Appelbaum uses color infrared photography film, originally produced to detect camouflaged targets and for use in agricultural surveillance and forensics investigations, to produce pictures that reveal more information than standard film.
A R T- AG E N DA
SEPTEMBER, 2015
W W W. A R T - A G E N D A . C O M
The second exhibition piece is P2P (Panda to Panda), a collaboration with internationally acclaimed artist Ai
Weiwei, commissioned by Rhizome and the New Museum in New York in 2015. For the work, the two artists
shredded NSA documents once given to Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald and stuffed them into panda bears
in Ai Weiwei’s home town of Beijing. Inside each panda, Ai and Appelbaum placed a micro SD memory card
containing a surprise. The pandas were then smuggled out of Beijing and traveled around the world, thus building
a human network of smuggled information: Samizdat/a.
Panda to Panda makes reference both to a slang term for the secret police in China and to peer-to-peer communication (P2P), a distributed communications architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers.
The third work, Schuld, Scham und Angst (Guilt, Shame and Fear), consists of pieces of jewelry filled with mixed
media, shredded journalistic notes and classified, unredacted documents from the Summer of Snowden and the
following years. The title relates to the emotions of journalists working with these materials: “fear,” the feeling
that leads to the shredding of documents; “guilt” and “shame,” in cognizance of the fact that journalists, too,
have become collaborators in a culture of secrecy. The work was created in collaboration with Manuela Benetton, Berit Gilma and Lusi Tornado.
Jacob Appelbaum is a postnational independent computer security researcher, journalist and artist. He lives and
works in Berlin.
SAMIZDATA: Evidence of Conspiracy is presented in collaboration with the conference by Disruption Network
Lab, “SAMIZDATA: Tactics and Strategies for Resistance,” curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli at Kunstquartier Bethanien. The two-day conference (11–12 September 2015) brings together hackers, artists and critical thinkers who,
in light of the Snowden revelations, apply the concept of resistance and social justice from many different angles.
Among the participants will be Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras, Jaromil, Jørgen Johansen, Theresa Züger and
Sophie Toupin.
W I R E D. C O M
SEPTEMBER 3, 2015
W W W.W I R E D . C O M
W I R E D. C O M
J AC O B A P P E L B A U M AT N O M E G A L L E R Y
03.09.2015, BY BRUCE STERLING
Germany, curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli.
In cooperation with Disruption Network Lab.
The title of the show references the Russian word “samizdat”, an important form of dissident activity throughout
the former Soviet bloc in which censored literature was clandestinely reproduced and distributed. Transferred
to the 21st century, the activity also resonates with aspects of the Snowden Affair and WikiLeaks as regards the
distribution of information that places involved people at risk.
With SAMIZDATA Jacob Appelbaum presents artworks that are a critique of the progressive loss of liberty,
evolving from within a context of investigative journalism and document-leaking aimed at the higher goal of
transparency.
Harrison, William Binney and Ai Weiwei. The works were originally created as a sign of admiration and respect
for the portrayed people and for their work that led to the “Snowden Affair” and beyond.
Appelbaum uses color infrared photographic film that was originally produced to detect camouflaged targets and
for use in agricultural surveillance and forensics investigations, to create pictures that reveal more information
than standard film.
containing a surprise. The pandas were smuggled out of Beijing and traveled around the world, thus building a
human network of smuggled information: Samizdat/a. “Panda to Panda” makes reference both to a slang term
for the secret police in China and to peer-to-peer communication (P2P), a distributed communications architecture
that partitions tasks or work loads between peers.
The third work, Schuld, Scham und Angst (Guilt, Shame and Fear) consists of pieces of jewelry filled with mixed
media, shredded journalistic notes and historical, unredacted classified documents from the Summer of Snowden
and the following years. The title relates to the emotions of journalists working with these materials: “fear”, the
feeling that leads to the shredding of documents, “guilt” and “shame” in cognizance of the fact that journalists,
too, have become collaborators in a culture of secrecy. The work was created in collaboration with Manuela
Benetton, Berit Gilma and Lusi Tornado.
Jacob Appelbaum is a post-national independent computer security researcher, journalist and artist.
He lives and works in Berlin.
DEUTSCHLANDFUNK
SEPTEMBER 9, 2015
W W W. D E U T S C H L A N D F U N K . D E
DEUTSCHLANDFUNK
Ü B E R WA C H U N G G E F Ä H R D E T F R E I H E I T
9.09.2015, VON OLIVER KRANZ
Jacob Applebaum unterstützte die Enthüllungsplattform WikiLeaks und half Edward Snowden. So geriet er ins
Visier der US-Behörden. Seit drei Jahren lebt der Internetaktivist im Exil in Berlin. Dort präsentiert er sich nun als
Künstler.
Julian Assange steht nachdenklich unter einem kahlen Baum, Glenn Greenwald wird liebevoll von seinem Freund
umarmt, Laura Poitras räkelt sich auf einem Sofa. Jacob Appelbaum hat Freunde und Weggefährten fotografiert in privaten, fast intimen Situationen. Ungewöhnlich ist nur, dass die Fotos sehr rotstichig sind:
„Das ist Filmmaterial, das früher bei der Luftüberwachung eingesetzt wurde. In der Landwirtschaft machten Infrarotaufnahmen Insektenschwärme sichtbar, beim Militär ging es ums Aufspüren getarnter Objekte. Dieser Film zeigt
uns Dinge, die wir normalerweise nicht sehen.“
Mit diesem Hintergrundwissen wirken die Fotos in der Ausstellung beunruhigend. Privates wird mithilfe von Überwachungstechnik ausgespäht – das ist Jacob Appelbaums großes Thema. Er hält regelmäßig Vorträge, bei denen er illegale Geheimdienstpraktiken anprangert und Wege aufzeigt, wie man sich der Überwachung entziehen
kann. Auf der Basis seiner Ideen wurde der Tor-Browser entwickelt, mit dessen Hilfe man sich anonym im Internet
bewegen kann. Mit Kunst hatte er bisher eher selten zu tun, doch das wird sich ändern.
„Ich glaube, es ist sehr wichtig, die Diskussion in den Bereich der Kunst zu verlagern. Einer der Gründe ist, dass
es permanent Versuche gibt, die Presse mundtot zu machen. Im Augenblick ist es nicht so schlimm, wie während
der Snowden-Affäre, aber es ist nicht leicht, das Thema auf der Tagesordnung zu halten. Julian Assange von
DEUTSCHLANDFUNK
SEPTEMBER 9, 2015
W W W. D E U T S C H L A N D F U N K . D E
WikiLeaks sitzt immer noch in der ecuadorianischen Botschaft in London fest. Er ist dort schon drei Jahre. Sarah
Harrison, die Edward Snowden bei seinem Flug nach Moskau begleitet hat, lebt in Berlin im Exil – genau wie
ich. Das ist kein Thema, das vorbei ist.“
Im Exil in Berlin
Nachdem Jacob Appelbaum in den USA mehrfach verhört wurde, wagt er es nicht mehr, in seine Heimat zurückzureisen. Er hat in Deutschland eine Aufenthaltsgenehmigung beantragt. Er ist 32 Jahre alt und stammt aus
Kalifornien. Seine ersten Computerprogramme schrieb er schon als Teenager. Bekannt wurde er, als es ihm im
Jahr 2008 gelang, kryptographische Schlüssel nach dem Abschalten eines Rechners aus dem Arbeitsspeicher
auszulesen.
„Ich habe ganz naiv gedacht: Wenn wir das aufdecken, dann wird das Problem gelöst. Aber ich habe nur die
Geheimdienste darauf aufmerksam gemacht. Das war für mich eine wichtige Lektion. Ich habe gelernt, dass Forschungsergebnisse nicht immer so angewendet werden, wie man sich das als Forscher wünscht.“
Die amerikanischen Geheimdienste waren Jacob Appelbaum schon damals unheimlich. Sein Vater war drogenabhängig und wurde von der Polizei überwacht. Das Vorgehen der Behörden erschien dem jungen Jacob unangemessen hart. Ob auch Antisemitismus im Spiel war? Sein Vater jedenfalls war Jude und beschwor seinen Sohn
immer wieder, an den Holocaust zu denken.
„Er hat gesagt, wenn der nächste Holocaust geschieht, wird es deine Schuld sein, wenn du ihn nicht aufhältst. Er
hat seine jüdische Schuld bei mir abgeladen. Und das hat funktioniert, in dem Sinn, dass ich nicht einfach hingehe
und bei Facebook arbeite.“
Aufforderung zum Whistleblowing
Jacob Appelbaum hielt Vorträge, in denen er zum Whistleblowing aufforderte, also zum Bekanntmachen geheimer Dokumente. Er unterstützte die Enthüllungsplattform WikiLeaks und half Edward Snowden. So geriet er ins
Visier der US-Behörden. Seit drei Jahren lebt er in Deutschland.
„Ich bin sehr glücklich, dass ich hier sein kann –, vor allem weil ich das Gefühl habe, dass die deutsche Bevölkerung sich die massenhafte Überwachung nicht gefallen lassen will. Es gibt einen NSA-Untersuchungsausschuss
im Bundestag. Das wäre in den USA undenkbar. Natürlich erfährt die Öffentlichkeit nur einen Bruchteil von dem,
was dort besprochen wird. Aber es ist ein Anfang.“
Jacob Appelbaum ist Optimist. Schritt für Schritt, sagt er, wird sich die Gesellschaft verändern. Dafür will er kämpfen – mit Vorträgen, Zeitungsartikeln und nun auch mit der Ausstellung. Als Künstler hat Appelbaum zwar noch
nicht allzu viel zu bieten – zu sehen sind nur sechs Porträtfotos und ein mit geschredderten Geheimdokumenten
ausgestopfter Pandabär – aber die Botschaft ist klar: Überwachung gefährdet Freiheit. Und dieses Thema ist
immer noch hochbrisant.
N AT I O N A L J O U R N A L
SEPTEMBER 18, 2015
W W W. N A T I O N A L J O U R N A L . C O M
MASS SURVEILLANCE AS ART
18.09.2015, BY DUSTIN VOLZ
He’s not as well known as Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, but Jacob Appelbaum is a key member
of an international team of digital privacy Avengers.
BERLIN—”I hope whatever you publish can help me get back home,” Jacob Appelbaum says as he shakes my
hand, wry cynicism masking what sounds like a hint of sincerity in the exiled American’s voice.
I had just finished a winding hour-long interview with Appelbaum—a chestnut-haired intellectual once de
scribed, much to his chagrin, as “the most dangerous man in cyberspace” by Rolling Stone—and he was leading
me out from an art gallery in the trendy Friedrichshain, a gentrified corner in former East Berlin where his first solo
photography exhibit was premiering the next night.
The polymathic hacktivist, Wikileaks collaborator, mass surveillance prophet, and all-around government agitator
couldn’t help but needle me again before we parted ways.
“What you write could decide my fate. Keep that in mind.”
For more than two years, Appelbaum has lived in Berlin, the world’s fastest-growing asylum for digital fugitives, a
chaotic, largely ungoverned, indebted bed of data distrusters. In that time he has stayed close to his undisclosed
hangout in the sprawling city, unable to come home, he said, for fear of what the U.S. government might do to
him.
He was on a two-week business trip to Stockholm in 2013 when the initial batch of files released by former
National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden hit the public. At the time, Applebaum was known as a
collaborator of Wikileaks, the secretive group of anonymous hackers whose well-aimed disclosures about gov
ernment and corporate secrets have convinced much of the world that the conspiracy theorists were largely right
after all. While he wasn’t involved in the first Snowden stories, the media blast generated so much heat that Ap
plebaum decided a return trip to the United States might be a bad idea.
Before the Snowden bombshell, Applebaum had already been harassed at airports by U.S. officials for his involve
ment with Wikileaks, which in 2010 dumped an enormous batch of highly confidential diplomatic cables reveal
ing, among other things, embarrassing details about how the U.S. government cuts deals with other countries on
issues ranging from the war on terror to nuclear proliferation. Earlier that year, the group released 39 minutes of
military video showing U.S. personnel in 2007 conducting airstrikes in Baghdad on a group of men that included
two Reuters journalists, mistaking them for terrorists.
So when Snowden went viral, Appelbaum figured the Obama administration wasn’t about to ease its crackdown
on leakers like him. He decided to stay put in Europe, and made his way to Berlin, the birthplace of the Chaos
Computer Club, a hacker’s group, and a hip, rela tively affordable nexus for everyone from data-privacy aficion
ados to outright fanatics. “I voted for Obama twice, second time hoping he was a secret Muslim socialist,” Ap
pelbaum cracks. “Didn’t pan out.”
Since Appelbaum’s arrival, Berlin has pulled in even bigger heavyweights in the data world, people who have
become famous for challenging the establishment, much to the ire of their governments: documentary filmmaker
Laura Poitras, the U.S. journalist and key gatekeeper of Snowden’s massive data trove; Sarah Harrison, a British
Wikileaks editor who accompanied Snowden from Hong Kong to Moscow after his initial thunderbolt of leaks
SEPTEMBER 18, 2015
made him a global celebrity and the U.S. government’s most-wanted fugitive; and now, dissident artist Ai Weiwei,
who suffered brain injuries from a beating given by Chinese police and spent years living under house arrest in
Beijing for his subversive works.
Their refuge in the city of 3.5. million is no coincidence. Profanity-laced graffiti jeering the National Security
Agency populates Berlin’s historic cobbled sidewalks, and posters praising Snowden or urging pedestrians to
“fight for your digital rights!” are plastered all around town. In a privacy-obsessed country where many view
Snowden as a hero, even a minor god, his associates in Berlin have assumed positions as high priests, visible rep
resentatives of his controversial gospel.
Right in the thick of that action is Appelbaum, who has worked closely with Poitras on a number of explosive
Snowden-fueled stories published in German media that have revealed not just the extent of NSA spying but how
complicit some German officials have been in the U.S.-led surveillance game.
While the U.S.-German cooperation is presented breathlessly, it is by no means a surprise. After Sept. 11, 2001,
the two countries worked closely together in the aftermath of the attacks, quickly tracing the group of terrorists
around Mohammed Atta to a Hamburg neighborhood. But the Twin Tower attacks are now 14 years old, and
while U.S. cooperation back then was welcomed by a frightened German populace, it has since become a de
cided negative among a growing segment of the German public that has been alienated by the U.S. invasion of
Iraq, the detentions in the Guantanamo prison in Cuba, and the NSA’s tapping of Angela Merkel’s cell phone.
That last one Appelbaum can take credit for, as he helped write the blockbuster story in the German magazine
Der Spiegel claiming that Merkel’s phone was monitored—perhaps without President Obama’s knowledge or
consent. The incident, which the Obama administration has never publicly acknowledged, reportedly infuriated
the German chancellor.
“The Merkel story is something that I’m most proud of because it got people like [Sen.] Dianne Feinstein to say,
‘Whoa, whoa, whoa,’” he says, referring to the California Democrat, a former chairwoman of the Senate Intelli
gence Committee and a vocal defender of most surveillance operations.
But today, the loquacious Appelbaum wants to just talk about his art. Mostly.
The photographer has assembled intimate portraits of his authority-challenging comrades—Poitras, Harrison,
Weiwei, Wikileaks cofounder Julian Assange, Snowden-favored journalist Glenn Greenwald, and former NSA
analyst-turned-whistleblower William Binney—each bathed in an infrared glow. The technique, which results in
an unmistakable resemblance to surveillance footage, was accomplished using cibachrome prints and shooting
with a discontinued Kodak Color Infrared camera—a process Appelbaum likes to boast is “fully analog.”
“A key part about this is the process and the film itself—it is a surveillance film,” Appelbaum tells me. “That said,
I am partial to the color red. I really like it. and I think that it signifies passion, and I think that passion is something
that all the people in the show share.”
Appelbaum also likes black. He wears a gray button-up, black jeans, black shoes, a black belt, and a conspicuous
black tie during our interview. His trademark thick horn-rimmed glasses—also black—rest easily on his face,
doing little to mask the darting intensity in eyes. A metal bar punctures two holes into the upper cartilage of his
right ear. Even forced to dress up, he has the unmistakable look of a cyberpunk.
His art show, which opened Sept. 11 and runs until Halloween, is titled Samizdata: Evidence of Conspiracy, after
a Russian word referring to the dodging of censors to share illicit material within the Soviet bloc—think Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. It is hosted at the NOME Gallery, which opened earlier this year and has
a strong bend for anti-authoritarian—and, some might say, anti-American—social commentary. NOME’s previ
SEPTEMBER 18, 2015
ous two exhibits, Paolo Cirio’s Overexposed and James Bridle’s The Gloma r Response, both took critical aim at
the U.S. intelligence community, offering unflinching examinations of senior officials like CIA Director John Bren
nan and FBI Director James Comey, and of the level of redactions present in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s
landmark torture report.
For Appelbaum, though, his artwork developed organically. All of the photos were taken before the concept of
a gallery materialized, except for a shot of Harrison, the British Wikileaker. Harrison’s portrait, which finds her
sitting on a rock and, head cocked a bit, looking softly into the camera, also happens to be Appelbaum’s favorite,
because it balances her qualities as both “a total badass motherfucker” and “the pixie of Wikileaks.”
The photographs “show the people in the way that I think of them,” Appelbaum explains. The most striking
demonstration of that edict rests in the portrait of Binney, which finds the former NSA official standing, with one
fist clenched, in front of a tree in Berlin. Surveillance nerds will be immediately struck by the photo, because Bin
ney doesn’t have legs in real life. He lost them to diabetes years ago.
„A key part about this is the process and the film itself—it is a surveillance film. ” – Jacob Appelbaum
Later that evening at the gallery, Appelbaum is giving a walk-through for a small gathering of press and some
friends. He seems a little less comfortable in front of a larger group, speaking more deliberately and evenly as
he describes each photograph.
Greenwald’s portrait, taken in 2012 in Rio de Janeiro, shows the combative journalist in a softer light. His partner,
David Miranda, has his arms draped around him as the two stand beside one of their many dogs in the rain forest.
“As an artist, I think it’s really important to be cognizant of the things you promote. So I don’t take pictures of
people smoking because I think it’s disgusting. And I don’t want children to go out and smoke cigarettes. But I do
want children to be homosexuals,” says Appelbaum, who has identified himself as “queer” in past interviews.
“Glenn Greenwald and David Miranda are totally fierce and fantastic men; they’re beautiful,” he continues.
“They’re the hottest gay couple alive, so if you argue with me that’s fine—but they’re still going to be the hottest
gay couple alive.”
He stops in front of the Binney portrait, which he says is his second favorite after Harrison’s.
“He’s one of the only honorable people to ever work in the intelligence community,” Appelbaum says. “He’s
one of the very few Americans that makes me not ashamed to be American.”
Applebaum sighs deeply and pauses. He looks suddenly vulnerable for a brief moment before recollecting him
self and moving on to Ai Weiwei’s portrait.
Weiwei is both a subject and a bit of collaborator in Appelbaum’s exhibit, thanks to the inclusion of an ador
able plush panda. Along with several other pandas, its cotton innards were gutted by Appelbaum and Weiwei
during a meet-up in Beijing earlier this year—captured, naturally, on film by Poitras—and replaced with shred
ded Snowden documents. The project’s title, “Panda to Panda,” is a reference to the slang term used to refer to
China’s secret police. It’s abbreviation, P2P, doubles as shorthand for peer-to-peer communication—a kind of
decentralized networking digital activists like to use to avoid detection.
If the exhibition is an intimate window into the lives of the world’s most famous digital-privacy Avengers, Appel
baum might best be understood as the Captain America of the group—except obviously lacking in the patriotism
department. While adept at many things, his most potent contribution to the team may be his rah-rah evangelism
for the cause, which anyone who has listened to his confident, long-winded dissertations on the moral imperatives
of privacy can attest are compelling and easy to buy into. It was a skill that served him well as a core developer
of the Tor Project, an online browser that keeps users anonymous.
Appelbaum is also the common link for the movement’s disparate members, who are spread out on several dif
SEPTEMBER 18, 2015
ferent continents in varying degrees of exile. He bridges the gap between more radical elements, like Julian As
sange, who believes nearly no secret is worthy of redaction, and the more considerate views held by Greenwald
and Poitras. (An example of that tension: When Greenwald and Poitras, keepers of the Snowden trove, refused to
publish the name of a country in which the NSA was recording nearly all phone calls, Wikileaks condemned the
omission in a Twitter rant. Not satisfied to merely vent, Wikileaks announced days later that “Country X” was in
fact Afghanistan.)
Appelbaum bristles at the notion that his photographs rise to that level of navel-gazing—that it exists as choreo
graphed flattery for a team of international super-dissidents. The exhibit, he says, depicts “individuals that work to
gether for very positive goals, very much work in tandem together—but they wouldn’t call themselves a group.”
Instead, he offers, “they represent a network, and these are the nodes of that network. I’m not reflecting back on
our movement, but rather this is a trend in civil society, from China to the Ecuadorian embassy in London to New
York City to Berlin. It goes around the world.”
„Glenn Greenwald and David Miranda are totally fierce and fantastic men; they’re beautiful. ”
– Jacob Appelbaum
After I had faked my way through 20 minutes of our interview focusing on his art—during which Appelbaum
seems to get annoyed more than once at my naivete—I turned to politics. I ask what he thinks of the U.S. pres
idential campaign and Hillary Clinton.
Clinton would be great for advancing lots of social causes and making health care more affordable and could
be an overall effective leader, Appelbaum concedes, before adding that her election would also “be the worst
outcome for me personally” and anyone else who tries to expose government secrets.
“Can you imagine a presidential candidate that will try to hunt down Wikileaks people more seriously?” he asks.
“If Hillary Clinton becomes president, it’ll be great news for my mother, and I think that alone is worthwhile. But
it will be my own death sentence.”
Appelbaum’s lawyers have advised him to not return to the United States. Due to a long-running Justice Depart
ment investigation into Wikileaks, his past affilia tion with the group could spell trouble for the thirty-something
ex-pat from California. The Justice Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding the
investigation.
Earlier this year, Google informed Appelbaum that it was compelled to hand over his personal account data to
the U.S. government for the purposes of the investigation. In a lengthy rant on Twitter, Appelbaum posted select
screenshots of Google’s 306-page legal disclosure.
“Ten pages into this legal document and I’m convinced that I’m never going to return to my home country,” Ap
pelbaum tweeted at the time. “What the actual fuck.”
Appelbaum doesn’t think any of the presidential candidates would have much sympathy for leakers—or that any
would do much to rein in the NSA. Other than Clinton, he dismisses the rest of the presidential candidates as “a
grab bag of hilarity,” expectedly taking his time to pillory Donald Trump and his “Make America Great Again”
slogan. (“What a hat!,” he exclaims with a laugh, admitting he’d like to own one for comedic effect.)
I ask whether he feels differently about Sen. Bernie Sanders, the self-described socialist running for the Demo
cratic nomination, or Republican Sen. Rand Paul, both of whom have been consistently and vocally opposed to
overbroad NSA data collection.
“Rand Paul might be great on the NSA, but how is he on other things, like the death penalty?” He admits a liking
for Sanders but quickly notes “he could do a lot better on racism,” citing the candidate’s handling of Black Lives
Matter protesters who interrupted him during a recent campaign event.
Appelbaum takes pains to stress that he and those featured in his art are not just critics of mass-surveillance re
gimes but people who believe they are at the vanguard of fighting for civil liberties, of which spying remains a
SEPTEMBER 18, 2015
crucially important battle front—one that he expects to rage on for decades.
“Reining in the NSA is a really weird subissue,” he says. “If you look at the gay-rights movement, it took a really
long time for that to become a mainstream issue. And I’m thinking the NSA issue, it’s mainstream in a lot of ways
but it’s real hard to understand.”
„If Hillary Clinton becomes president, it’ll be great news for my mother, and I think that alone is worthwhile. But it will be my own death sentence. ” – Jacob Appelbaum
The next day, the panda is wearing a T-shirt. “Fuck the NSA,” it reads in bold black letters that adorn it, baby-sized and powder blue. Tatiana Bazzichelli, the show’s curator, explains that one of Appelbaum’s friends stopped
by earlier and brought it as a gallery-warming present.
I came back to the gallery for the public opening to see the bigger crowd and because Appelbaum told me that
Poitras—whom I’d been trying to get in touch with since I arrived in Berlin—would stop by.
Connecting with her is no easy task. On top of being intensely private, Poitras was keeping busy. I’d heard she
had been spending most of her time recently in New York, readying a preview for the city’s annual film festival
of a new documentary series she is launching called Field of Vision. “Asylum,” the first episode of the project,
is a portrait of Wikileaks’s Assange, following him as he publishes the diplomatic cables that rocked the world
and ends up marooned in London’s Ecuadorian embassy, where he has been holed up for the past three years.
Poitras is also preparing an “immersive film environment” that will debut in February at New York’s Whitney Mu
seum of American Art. Appelbaum instructed me to pay attention to the Whitney installation when I asked what
we might see next come out of the Snowden archive.
Despite steady rain, the exhibit’s opening showing is impressive. The small gallery is crowded with dozens of
people, and another 20 are outside enjoying free alcohol and smoking cigarettes.
Much of the crowd is monochromatic, dressed, like Appelbaum, all in black. A majority of conversations I over
hear are in English. I spot Appelbaum—now wearing a red shirt but still tolerating the unnecessary black tie—
with a glass of wine in hand, laughing boisterously with a couple of friends who came out for his big night.
Now that it’s here, he looks relieved. He stops every few minutes to snap photos with his smartphone of various
guests— the anti-surveillance activist’s desire to document the moment is unrestrained. Later in the night, he will
bound over to me and jubilantly tell me that four of the portraits have already been sold.
True to Appelbaum’s promise, Poitras arrives, and I catch her moments after she enters. She doesn’t recognize me
at first, but after I jog her memory of a past interview she warms up. “Is this on the record?” she asks after I’ve
already put my notebook away. I tell her no, and we exchange pleasantries briefly before she is pulled away.
I waited 90 minutes before having another chance to talk to her. The Oscar-winning filmmaker who quarterbacks
the release of Snowden files in major media organizations around the world is a coveted celebrity in this room,
and a never-ending line of fans all seem to have a hug to give and a story to catch up on.
Finally I see Poitras alone, gazing into the flowers that surround Weiwei’s portrait. This has been the first time all
night she has had more than a moment to check out the art.
After agreeing to a brief interview, she comments that the gallery is an “extraordinary document of a decade
that changed history.” She said she has been urging Appelbaum to share his art with the world for years and is
happy he is finally obliging.
We are interrupted twice by friends of Poitras who approach and give her a celebratory hug. I quickly ask about
her lawsuit against the Justice Department seeking records related to the dozens of times she was detained at
airports, but she doesn’t have an update. On the surveillance-reform law that Obama signed into law earlier this
SEPTEMBER 18, 2015
year, which effectively ends the NSA’s bulk collection of domestic phone metadata, she says it is a nice start but
quickly adds, “I don’t think U.S. citizens are the only ones who should have a right to privacy.” She demurs on
taking much credit for the law’s passage, despite the clear line of momentum that traces back to the first Snowden
revelations. Soon my time is up, as another friend of hers interrupts to share a quick laugh and pull her back into
the crowd.
I see Appelbaum once more before I leave, and he admits a great sense of relief now that the exhibit has opened.
But he keeps the night in perspective. “Never once during this process did I think I was going to be raided,” he
says when I ask how the stress compared to writing a big expose on the NSA.
„I don’t think U.S. citizens are the only ones who should have a right to privacy. ” – Laura Poitras
I don’t know if Appelbaum will ever return to the United States. Watching him in Berlin, I’m not sure he really
needs to. He has found a home here and just started a Ph.D program at the Eindhoven University of Technology in
the Netherlands, “primarily focusing on mathematics to thwart spies for the next thousand years.”
It is unclear whether Applebaum is being sensible and reacting to the likelihood of real arrest and incarceration
if he sets foot on American soil, or whether, like many people who inhabit the digital-rights sphere, he is being
a tad paranoid.
But unlike Poitras, Appelbaum doesn’t have a protective shield that comes with the notoriety of winning an Oscar.
And he knows he’s not Snowden, an international celebrity he believes will be able to return home one day in
a way that brings him home with “a ticker-tape parade.” Former Attorney General Eric Holder said this summer
that the “possibility exists” of such a scenario, though the Obama administration—which has prosecuted more
individuals under the Espionage Act than all previous presidencies combined—poured water on the idea when
it responded to an online petition calling for Snowden’s pardon.
“What would I come home to? To what justice system?” Appelbaum asks near the end of our interview. “The
FBI tried to talk to me in Europe, tried to get me to go to the U.S. embassy to discuss ‘safely returning home’ on
‘neutral ground.’ It’s so ridiculous; it’s ridiculous bullshit on so many different levels.”
Pondering his new life in Europe, Applebaum is still processing his abrupt, unplanned departure from the United
States. Berlin, he says, “is a wonderful place. It’s wonderful on so many levels.’’
But the separation is clearly painful too.
“I kind of wish I had said goodbye to my mother, if I ever see her again in my life. That stuff weighs very heavily
on me,” he says. “It would have been nice to pack my house, get some extra underwear, and take some photos
of my dead father with me.”
Dustin Volz is currently on assignment in Berlin through the Arthur F. Burns Fellowship, a two-month reporting
program in Germany run by the International Center for Journalists. A version of this story was also published in
Handelsblatt Global Edition.
HPD
SEPTEMBER 14, 2015
W W W. H P D . D E
HUMANISTISCHER PRESSEDIENST
S A M I Z DATA – B E W E I S D E R
V E R S C H WÖ R U N G
14.09.2015 VON SABINE BOCK
BERLIN. (hpd) Am vergangenen Donnerstag wurde bei der NOME Galerie in Berlin-Friedrichshain die Ausstellung
„SAMIZDATA: Beweis der Verschwörung“ eröffnete. Es ist die erste Einzelausstellung von Jacob Appelbaum in
Deutschland. Sie wird vom 11. September bis 31. Oktober 2015 in Deutschland von Tatiana Bazzichelli in Kooperation mit dem Disruption Network Lab präsentiert und kuratiert.
Der Titel der Ausstellung bezieht sich auf den russischen Begriff „Samizdat“, der Ende der 1950er Jahre in
der Sowjetunion und dem ehemaligen Ostblock die Verbreitung und Vervielfältigung zensierter Literatur auf
nichtoffiziellen Kanälen bezeichnete. Übertragen auf das 21. Jahrhundert passt das Konzept zu Aspekten der
Snowden-Affäre und WikiLeaks, innerhalb der sich involvierte Personen für die Verbreitung von Informationen in
Gefahr bringen.
Mit SAMIZDATA präsentiert Jacob Appelbaum Kunstwerke, die eine Kritik am fortschreitenden Verlust von Freiheit
darstellen; höheres Ziel dabei ist es, vor dem Hintergrund und im Kontext des investigativen Journalismus und des
Leakens von Dokumenten mehr Transparenz zu schaffen.
Zum ersten Mal zeigt der Künstler eine Serie von sechs farbigen Infrarot-Fotografien in Form von Cibachrome-Drucken, Porträts seines eigenen Netzwerkes von Freunden und Kollegen: Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald
und David Miranda, Julian Assange, Sarah Harrison, William Binney und Ai Weiwei.
HPD
SEPTEMBER 14, 2015
W W W. H P D . D E
Die Arbeiten waren ursprünglich als Zeichen der Bewunderung und des Respekts für die porträtierten Personen
und ihre Arbeit entstanden, die schließlich zur „Snowden-Affäre“ geführt hatte und noch darüber hinaus geht.
Jacob Appelbaum nutzt für die Fotografien farbigen Infrarot-Film, der ursprünglich für das Aufspüren von getarnten Zielen entwickelt und in der Agrarüberwachung sowie in forensischen Untersuchungen eingesetzt wurde. Mit
dem Infrarot-Film entstehen Bilder, die mehr Informationen als Standardfilm enthalten.
Das 2. Ausstellungsstück ist P2P „Panda to Panda“
Es ist ein in Kooperation mit dem international gefeierten chinesischen Künstler Ai Weiwei entstandenes Projekt,
das im Jahr 2015 von Rhizome und dem New Museum in New York in Auftrag gegeben worden war. Für diese
Arbeit schredderten die beiden Künstler NSA-Dokumente, die einst Laura Poitras und Glenn Greenwald zugespielt worden waren, und befüllten damit in Ai Weiweis Heimatstadt Beijing Pandabär-Plüschtiere.
In jedem Pandabären befindet sich zudem eine Micro SD-Speicherkarte, auf der Weiwei und Appelbaum jeweils
eine Überraschung abgespeichert haben. In einem kurzen Interview am Eröffnungstag der Ausstellung erklärte
Jacob Appelbaum in deutscher Sprache: “Zwanzig Pandabären wurden aus Beijing herausgeschmuggelt und
reisten um die Welt, wobei sie ein menschliches Netzwerk des Daten-Schmuggelns SAMIZDATA bildeten.”
„Panda to Panda“ nimmt Bezug sowohl auf einen umgangssprachlichen Ausdruck für die chinesische Geheimpolizei, als auch auf die sogenannte Peer to Peer-Kommunikation (P2P), eine dezentralisierte Anwendungsstruktur,
die Aufgaben oder Arbeitspensum auf verschiedene Teilnehmer, sog. „Peers“, verteilt.
Die 3. Arbeit „Schuld, Scham und Angst“
Sie besteht aus Schmuckstücken, gefüllt mit verschiedenen Materialien: geschredderte Notizen von Journalisten,
historische sowie nicht redigierte geheime Dokumente aus dem Sommer der Snowden-Enthüllungen und den
darauffolgenden Jahren. Der Titel bezieht sich auf die Emotionen von Journalisten, die mit diesen Materialien arbeiten: „Angst“, das Gefühl, aus welchem heraus die Dokumente geschreddert werden; „Schuld“ und „Scham“
in dem Bewusstsein der Tatsache, dass auch Journalisten zu Kollaborateuren in einer Kultur der Geheimhaltung
geworden sind. Die Arbeit wurde in Zusammenarbeit mit Manuela Benetton, Berit Gilma und Lusi Tornado hergestellt.
„SAMIZDATA: Beweis der Verschwörung“ wird in Zusammenarbeit mit einer Konferenz SAMIZDATA: Taktik und
Strategien des Widerstandes von Tatiana Bazzichelli präsentiert. Die zweitätige Konferenz (11.–12. September
2015) im Kunstquartier Bethanien bringt Hacker, Künstler und Kritiker zusammen, die im Kontext der Snowden-Enthüllungen die Konzepte von Widerstand und sozialer Gerechtigkeit aus verschiedensten Blickwinkeln
beleuchten. Unter den Teilnehmer sind Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras, Jaromil, Jørgen Johansen und Sophie
Toupin.
THE LOCAL
SEPTEMBER 14, 2015
W W W.T H E L O C A L . D E
THE LOCAL
H AC K E R P H OTO G R A P H E R T U R N S
LENS ON DISSIDENTS
1 4 T H S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 5 , B Y D E B B I E PA C H E C O
Privacy activist Jacob Appelbaum’s new Berlin art exhibition aims to show Julian Assange and other famous dissidents in the internet privacy debate in a new light.
Appelbaum’s ‘SAMIZDATA: Evidence of Conspiracy’ at NOME Gallery includes a collection of infrared portraits in
which he has captured some of the most high-profile figures in the debate over privacy and internet surveillance.
Emerging Network
The title of the show refers to the Russian word samizdat, an underground publishing system that distributed dissident writing in the former Soviet Bloc.
One of the goals of the Samizdata exhibit is to illustrate what Appelbaum calls, “a kind of emergent network”
that has sprung up, an informal counter-surveillance group if you will.
“I mean it’s clear when all these people are viewed together that they are part of something…So, in a sense being
able to show them together as individuals also shows this sort of implicit network that exists,” he told The Local.
The photographs include portraits of his colleagues and friends, like Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, Citizenfour documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange shot with infrared film of a type
used for aerial surveillance.
THE LOCAL
SEPTEMBER 14, 2015
W W W.T H E L O C A L . D E
Anonymity online
The 32-year-old Appelbaum could have also added a picture of himself to the exhibit.
He’s built an international reputation as a privacy advocate and security expert, a winner of the Henri Nannen
prize for journalism for helping reveal NSA surveillance in Germany, and a Julian Assange and Edward Snowden
ally.
Appelbaum describes himself as “living in exile in Germany” because he says he’s faced repeated harassment
by the U.S. government thanks to his privacy activism.
For Appelbaum, the idea of anonymity online isn’t something to fear. “Anonymity online is to be at liberty,” he
says, seeing he see the internet as a place where one should be able to freely associate and form one‘s own
thoughts. “There will always be bad actors but sometimes those bad actors wear good cop badges.”
Humanizing his subjects
He also says the exhibit is meant to humanize his polarizing subjects and to illustrate how he sees and wants
you to see them. In the portrait of Julian Assange, taken in 2012, the WikiLeak’s founder looks rather poised and
stately.
“I consciously wanted to display a proud person where we were still on the edge of understanding how far this
was going to go,” says Appelbaum. With the more whimsical photo of Ai Weiwei standing in a tree and looking
up at the sky, Appelbaum describes it as a rare image of the artist. “Because he’s in the tree, he puts his phone in
his pocket...[N]ormally what he‘s doing is he‘s using his phone to film people filming him or photographing him.
He’s always recording,” he says.
“You know, there‘s a weird dynamic that exists with people that work on exposing surveillance…[T]here‘s a fascination with it.”
‘Samizdata’ runs to Saturday October 31 at the NOME Gallery in Berlin. Along with the portraits, Appelbaum‘s
exhibit also includes works stuffed with shredded Snowdon documents, like ‘Panda to Panda’, a collaboration
Appelbaum created with artist Ai Weiwei.
BERLIN ART LINK
SEPTEMBER 18, 2015
W W W. B E R L I N A R T L I N K . C O M
BERLIN ART LINK
HUMBLE HEROES:
J AC O B A P P E L B A U M AT N O M E
18.09.2015, BY ALENA SOKHAN
The space of internet and communications technologies is divided between two contradictory social experiences: one is the sense of increasing alienation and loneliness that is felt by a hyper-networked society, and the
other is the genuine honesty and freedom of expression that emerges from within the safe anonymity of the internet. What Jacob Appelbaum’s exhibition Samizdata: Evidence of Conspiracy shows is how both these trends
are not absolutely true: meaningful friendships can be built around and through digital media, and the internet is
actually a highly policed and scrutinized space. His exhibition at NOME reveals a remarkable network of digital
media activists who have developed a unique and intimate friendship through their efforts to protect the privacy
of the internet as well as human freedom and dignity in a new political medium.
The exhibition shows eight photographs of people who can only be called heroes in the field – Ai Weiwei,
Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald with David Miranda, Julian Assange, Sarah Harrison and William Binney. There
are also two installations in the exhibition. In ‘P2P (Panda to Panda)’ Appelbaum collaborated with Ai Weiwei
to stuff plush panda bears with shredded NSA documents in order to smuggle them across borders and also to
smuggle these documents into museums as cultural artifacts. The second installation is ‘Scham, Schuld, und Angst’,
small vials containing shredded bits of unredacted and classified documents have been made into necklaces. The
documents are journalistic material from Edward Snowden‘s leaks that Appelbaum and other journalists chose not
to disclose to the world as it would constitute a real threat for national security.
Appelbaum is a Renaissance man of the Information Age. He is a journalist, privacy activist, artist, a hacker who
has been involved in highly subversive work like representing and promoting the Tor Project, representing Wikile-
BERLIN ART LINK
SEPTEMBER 18, 2015
aks, filtering the top secret documents released by Edward Snowden to determine which are safe for publication,
as well as appearing in Poitras’ documentary ‘Citizenfour’, he is an active member of the hacker and activist
group Cult of the Dead Cow, co-founder of the collective Noisebridge, as well as a contributor of varying degrees to Kink.com, Greenpeace, Ruckus Society, Rainforest Action Net, and monochrom, among others.
Having lived under surveillance for something over a decade, every digital pixel Appelbaum touches is threatened with being watched and analyzed. So with a tragi-comic irony, Appelbaum uses color infrared photography,
originally developed for aerial surveillance since the process could detect camouflaged objects and people, in
order to protect his own friendships from surveillance. The photographic process that Appelbaum used in order
to photograph and print the images is entirely analog; a rare thing as the world’s last remaining supplies of both
the cibachrome printing paper and the infrared photographic film are soon to be used up. Appelbaum has been
using his remaining amount of film in order to take photographs of his friends in the past years.
While Appelbaum’s repertoire of activities could put most people to shame, he comes across with a humility
that pervades and even clouds the entire exhibition. His photographs focus on celebrating people whose work
he respects, all friends of his, and also acknowledging his own inability to do more. This position of humility is
remarkable and simultaneously frustrating, since it seems the place of art to celebrate accomplishments not play
them down.
The photos situate the whistle-blowing, information tech heroes in simple everyday scenes in an effort to make the
personas more relatable to the audience. This is particularly revealing of the state of contemporary heroism: while
heroes in previous ages are openly celebrated, heroes in the new virtual political space need to be humbled and
made more accessible to people. One reason for this is that these people don’t take the shape of the traditional
heroic figure: they are hackers, appearing as nerdy, intelligent types who fight for freedom with computer files,
smuggling documents through airports, armed with legal cases and news reports.
Attempts to acknowledge the work of these people has mostly fallen on the glazed eyes of a disinterested public.
As John Oliver’s interview with Snowden showed, our culture as yet lacks an ability to recognize the sacrifices
of these people and the significance of their work for human dignity and personal freedom. John Oliver interviewed random people on the streets of New York to find out what people knew of Snowden’s information leaks
that began in 2013. The answers he got were distressing – people not knowing who Snowden was, people
confusing Snowden with Wikileaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange, or people believing Snowden was essentially
a traitor to the country by carelessly revealing classified documents to the rest of the world. What Oliver’s segment showed was that the majority of people simply did not care enough to educate themselves about Snowden,
and the general lack of care stemmed from people’s inability to understand how their own life and freedom was
affected by government surveillance programs. This lack of care is massively detrimental, it impedes the work of
these activists and devalues what they have done.
The exhibition reinforces this problem of awareness and care by deliberately focusing on personas who acted
as precursors to Snowden’s revelations. People like William Binney, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras and Glenn
Greenwald called out upper level abuses of power and surveillance programs, and argued for the protection of
human dignity long before Snowden’s revelations. Appelbaum recalls how before Snowden revealed the irrefutable proof of government civilian surveillance, these people were dismissed and even ridiculed as unhinged
conspiracy theorists. Even now their work is largely unacknowledged in public discourse, though they effectively
prepared the ground for Snowden.
BERLIN ART LINK
SEPTEMBER 18, 2015
In certain photos subtle aspects indicate the unseen sacrifices these people have had to undergo. The Guardian
Journalist Glenn Greenwald and his partner David Miranda are one such case. The latter was detained for nine
hours in Heathrow Airport for suspected terrorism and over 50 thousand classified UK intelligence documents
that he was carrying for Greenwald were confiscated. In the court case that followed, judges ruled that the detainment was lawful, though they admitted it was an ‘indirect’ interference of press freedom for the interests of
national security. Appelbaum’s photo shows the couple standing together in the Brazilian rainforest, a warm and
pleasant scene in sharp contrast to the personal attacks, threats, and dangers the two have experienced. Similarly,
Julian Assange looks statuesque in the fading sun, though at the time the photo was taken he was actually wearing
a ankle monitor while under house arrest. Appelbaum explained that he chose this photo because Assange still
looked young and fresh, in shocking contrast to the harrowed and aged figure that he now appears.
William Binney’s photo is particularly tragic. In 2007 a dozen armed FBI agents stormed Binney’s house while
he was coming out of the shower and held him at gunpoint, then confiscated his computer, discs, and records.
The stress of this unwarranted invasion into his home aggravated Binney’s health issues and led to his second
leg being amputated. The photo shows Binney standing upright, actually on his two prosthetic legs, with only his
wheelchair slightly out of focus in the background to speak for the physical and emotional trauma he sustained.
The concept of Samizdata takes its name from Samizdat, the remarkable underground process of distributing
banned texts that emerged in the Soviet Union in order to bypass censorship. People were imprisoned simply by
possessing certain books, so the rare existing copies had to be passed discreetly through friends or left in public
places in the hopes that some other sympathizer would come across them, and entire books were copied out by
hand. Samizdata is a term for information that could result in legal prosecution for possession, sharing and spreading. Like Samizdat, Samizdata has value only insofar as the general public actively participates in animating it by
reading and sharing. The life and significance of these documents and files is based on people actually paying attention to them, without which they will be lost in the black hole that is the second page of Google search results.
Samizdata is not as flashy and exciting as other content on the web is, but it should not need to be. It is hugely
relevant to every single person who uses the internet or a telephone. That is why there is something frustrating
and disheartening to see these activists making an effort to humble their work, or needing to justify to us why we
should care about their efforts. But this perhaps is the voice of a cynic endlessly complaining about the hopeless
state of affairs today. It should not take away from the fact that the exhibition is a strong, informative collection
of beautiful images of people who have done some remarkable things for the privacy and human dignity on the
internet.
S P I K E A R T M AGA Z I N E
OCTOBER 13, 2015
W W W. S P I K E A R T M A G A Z I N E . C O M
“ I S T H AT W H AT W I L L M A K E
THEM COME FOR US?”
1 3 . 1 0 . 2 0 1 5 , B Y X AV E R V O N C R A N A C H & T I M O F E L D H A U S
If the art world has the image of a non-transparent, nepotistic closed circle, what happens when hackers claim
their place in it? And more importantly why go into art when you could hack the system? Jacob Appelbaum,
internet activist and journalist, played an important role in the publication of the Snowden documents and the revelation of the spied-on mobile phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel. The 33-years-old hacker talks with us about
his first solo art exhibition in Berlin and why this city is a magnet for freedom fighters.
You define yourself as a “post-national independent computer security researcher.” What does someone
like you do? And secondly how does this translate into an art gallery in Berlin?
That depends on who asks me that question. I am an artist. But I also work as a journalist, and as a researcher.
To each different world I do different stuff. The terms “post-national” and “independent” I take very seriously. I
OCTOBER 13, 2015
don’t define myself based on the boundaries in which I was accidentally born. Obviously I have lots of cultural
baggage, but my values, especially what’s reflected in the show, move away from national borders and really
into a more universal approach. Because of their actions, most people I photographed for this show live now in
different countries than where I took their pictures. There is Glenn Greenwald from the US, but photographed in
Brasil; Laura Poitras, also from the US, in Berlin; Julian Assange, the Australian, near London. But I am not showing
my whole archive. This is a selection of a few photographs that I thought were fitting.
You present a series of six colored infrared photos. What is the special technique behind this?
It’s a color infrared film, which was used for aerial surveillance, since it detects more information than the human
eye can see. What you see in this show are Cibachrome prints of these pictures, a fully analogue positive slide
printing technique.
Why didn’t you take a photo of Edward Snowden?
This is not a show about Edward Snowden. It is important to honor the fact that he didn’t want to be the centre of
attention. We should generally have more portraits of Snowden, because regardless of what he likes or not, he is
for many people a historical figure. But I wanted to show a network of resistance that is transcending the so-called Snowden-Affair. Showing Laura Poitras not behind the camera, as a documentary filmmaker, but as a person
working on exposing these issues. Creating heroes out of people is not the goal. It is to show that every person,
when put in extraordinary circumstances, can make a choice to make the world a significantly better place.
Why did you choose the field of art to work in now? Do you really believe that it helps anyone?
Yes, I am convinced that art in general of course helps. I hope that other people will bring their children, and they
will see these people, and they will have in some ways an idea that you can resist and even survive. It is important to inspire people to recognize that. Art does inspire and art does change. I wanted to show some historical
documents that in some way can help to have a discussion.
What does the title of the exhibition „SAMIZDATA“ mean to you?
Samizdat is a Russian concept that represents information that is illegal and not possible for someone to easily
acquire. So samzizdata is a link towards this concept, which is well known to people who grew up, for example,
in the GDR. It is meant as a homage and as a warning.
In the show are also two panda-sculptures, the P2P-Project.
The idea of samizdata is exactly what the panda sculpture, which I created together with Ai Weiwei, directly
represents. The stuffed panda bear toys contain shredded Snowden materials. These pandas were smuggled
out of Beijing and they traveled around the world. Sharing this illegal information, for which someone could be
potentially sentenced with life in prison or receive the death penalty: could that be anything other than a kind of
samizdat? And to share it on a USB or a SD card, or over the internet, that is samizdata.
It is clear that if we lose privacy, we lose agency. For instance, Sarah Harrison, an investigative journalist whose
portrait is in the show, made the choice to help Snowden seek asylum in Moscow. This choice means she cannot
return to Great Britain.
OCTOBER 13, 2015
Sarah Harrison, Laura Poitras, Ai Weiwei and yourself all live in Berlin. Why here?
It’s a really good question, which I could not answer for a good reason. I can’t tell you why I am here, but I can
tell you what is so inspiring about this city: Berlin is a very special place with a very strong spirit of resistance. The
history is ever-present as is the sense of responsibility. We are able to work much more freely here and we need
a base of operations to work on, without fear of undercover police raids.
Here in Berlin, the conversation doesn’t start with convincing someone to care; the conversation usually starts with
collaborating on actions. That’s a huge difference. It is without a doubt unique in the world in my experience, and
also in the experience of most other people that I have worked with.
Is the whistleblower a new figure that has arisen due to our contemporary society?
Throughout history we see one very important detail, which is often left out in revolutionary writings. Everyone
used to romanticize the Che Guevaras and the Fidel Castros – great military heros. But it’s actually people who
worked for an oppressor, defecting to humanity, that have often tilted the battle in favor of the rest of the people.
It’s the people who decide to switch sides that make the difference. What they are doing is saying, “Fuck this, I
have had enough, I am with the rest of humanity.” And that is something that the whistleblower embodies right
now.
It’s a very complex figure. The conservative critique would say that he is a coward.
That‘s hilarious. These are the Mitläufers [followers] of our generation. Fuck them. They are pigs.
If anyone is the coward it is them.
Your third work in this show, the necklaces with the title Schuld, Scham & Angst, reminded me of something to put drugs in. I was wondering if you could also get addicted to leaking.
No, I don‘t think so. The whole point of that necklace is about the fact that we are intimidated, despite everything
that has occurred. They also contain shredded documents, but these documents actually no one is ever supposed
to see. It’s about fear, guilt and shame, it represents both the triumph and the failure. It is about the shame that
whistleblowers feel when we become collaborators because we destroy documents, for source protection or not
to be arrested. So the panda represents a way of moving, sharing, smuggling information,samizdata. The necklaces are the opposite. It’s information that should be published, but probably never will be. It’s information that
wasn’t from public documents; it’s from the trash bags of my journalistic notes that no one will ever see. And the
main reason is fear, self-preservation and pressure. The fear is overpowering, even amongst some of the people
pictured here.
Have you ever not leaked something because of fear?
Of course, every time we published something, the first question is: if we publish this, is it what will make them
come for us?
You once said that you admire surrealistic art, which has a lot of complexity and weirdness in it. And as
a hacker and political journalist you come from a world of disruption. But your art seems a bit pleasing
– beautiful pictures, without a disruption.
OCTOBER 13, 2015
For the photos it’s true, they are very classical portraits of individuals. And it would also be the case if you didn’t
know about how they were made, about the color infrared-technique, and that the whole process is an analogue
process in a digital world. But it disrupts the anonymity of people. The pictures were meant as a gift.
Most of the people you portray are people that one connects to technology. So what’s with all the trees
and nature in the pictures?
The trees in the background express a commonality between all of the pictures. That is, trees as a reference to
network. There is a complexity that goes outside the boundaries of the frame that you can’t really understand or
make sense out of. These people exist in an ecosystem, and you see them in this system. People imagine Julian
Assange as just being in an embassy, or worse, they imagine him as just being in the Internet. And yet here he is
as a human being standing tall in front of a tree. That is, in a sense, completely bizarre.
DOKUHOUS
SEPTEMBER 10, 2015
NEWS.DOKUHOUSE.DE
DOKUHOUSE
A U S S T E L L U N G S P R E V I E W:
10.09.2015
In der NOME-Galerie in Friedrichshain eröffnet heute die Ausstellung SAMIZDATA: Evidence of Conspiracy von
Jacob Appelbaum. Sie beschäftigt sich künstlerisch mit ureigensten Netzpolitik-Themen wie Überwachung, Transparenz und der Geheimhaltungskultur.
Die ausgestellte Kunst- zwei Skulpturen sowie 6 Infrarotfilm-Porträt-Fotografien von bekannten Akteuren aus Überwachungstheorie – und Praxis wie Sarah Harrison, William Binney oder Laura Poitras sowie die sie umgebende
Architektur entwickeln bereits für sich betrachtet einen spannenden Kontrast:
Ähnlich wie das Neubaugebäude das die Galerie beherbergt, mit einer forschen Welle aus Beton die Kreuzung
an der Dolziger Straße eher erkämpft als für sich gewonnen hat, ist Berlin in den vergangenen Jahren zu einem
der Schaltkreuze für die „digitalen Dissidenten“ avanciert, die oft kritisch beäugt – und noch öfter durchleuchtet
– werden. Der Zuzug der internationalen Netzaktivisten wie Appelbaum, aber auch Sarah Harrisson und vielen
anderen, hat wahrnehmbar dazu beigetragen, dass Politik sich zurück in den digitalen aber auch analogen Raum
(z.B. durch Demonstrationen) spielt-während zeitgleich „merkeln“, das heisst: aussitzen, zum Jugendwort des
Jahres gewählt wird. Vieles ist in der Stadt wie in der Ausstellung ambivalent. Und zutiefst konzeptuell:
Es verwundert nicht, dass die Nome-Galerie sich in dieser Gemengelage dem Spannungsfeld aus Kunst, Technologie und Politik verschrieben hat. In der Vorgänger-Ausstellung wurden Werke von James Bridle gezeigt der
ebenfalls den Ansatz von „Art as Evidence“ verfolgt. Es geht darum, durch Visualisierung bzw. Sichtbarmachung
komplexe Themen so aufzubereiten, dass sie in Aktivierungsenergie und politische Prozesse umgesetzt werden
können.
Titel bezieht sich auf den russischen Begriff „Samizdat“, der Ende der 1950er Jahre in der Sowjetunion und dem
ehemaligen Ostblock die Verbreitung und Vervielfältigung zensierter Literatur auf nichtoffiziellen Kanälen bezeichnete. Schriften von indizierten System-Kritikern wurden in Geheim-Druckereien oder handschriftlich vervielfältigt und weiterverteilt. Übertragen auf das 21. Jahrhundert passt das Konzept zu Aspekten der Snowden-Affäre
und WikiLeaks.
Netzwerke sind nicht zwingend digital. Nicht nur die NSA ist der Meinung, dass die Analyse einer Zielperson
innerhalb ihrer sozialen Kontakte sehr viel aussagekräftiger ist, als diese isoliert zu betrachten.
Obwohl insbesondere die Fotografien auch unter reiner Bewertung nach ästhetischen Gesichtspunkten sehenswert sind (sowohl der verwendete Film als auch das Trägermedium werden nicht mehr produziert), sind die
spannenderen Ansatzpunkte für die dahinter verborgenen Geschichten in der verwendeten Technik als auch in
Bilddetails, der Hängung und dem Gesamtarrangement zu suchen.
Die Motive in den Fotografien sind teils als Metaphern zu lesen. So beispielsweise die Einbeziehung der Natur:
Zwar resoniert der verwendete Infrarotfilm (ursprünglich benutzt für Luft-Überwachung in der Landwirtschaft oder
DOKUHOUS
SEPTEMBER 10, 2015
NEWS.DOKUHOUSE.DE
Personenprofile in bewaldeten Gebieten) besonders mit dem Chlorophyll der Blättern, die sich in allen Fotografien wiederfinden. Die Wurzeln der Bäume deuten aber auch auf die porträtierten Personen hin: Netzaktivismus
ist eine Grassroots-Bewegung aus der Zivilgesellschaft. Zwar gibt es herausstechende Charaktere, wie z.B. Julian
Assange, der hier noch vor seinem Exil in einer Londoner Botschaft als aufrechter, jüngerer Mann im Freien eingefangen wird.
Gemeinsam ist den Porträts, dass sie in einem künstlerischen Akt Diejenigen in den Konsekrationsraum der Kunst
erheben, die sich nicht aus herausragenden gesellschaftlichen Positionen gegen unerwünschte politische Entwicklungen wenden, sondern als wachsame Privatpersonen. Zusammengebracht durch die Snowden-Enthüllungen
verbinden sich hier einzelne Akteure zu einem Netzwerk aus Kollaborateuren. An Details wie Schärfe und Unschärfe, Haltungen, abgebildeten Accessoires, Glitches und Posen liessen sich zahlreiche weitere Geschichten
exemplifizieren, die nicht nur als par-pro-Toto in der Ausstellung, sondern in einem Übertragungsbogen auch für
die politische Arbeit der Dargestellten gelten können.
Nur ein Porträt verwundert ein wenig in dieser Reihe: Das von Ai WeiWei. Die Verbindung erfolgt über ein zweites Ausstellungsstück:
P2P(Panda to Panda),das in diesem Jahr auf der re:publica vorgestellt wurde ist eine Kooperation zwischen Jacob
Appelbaum und Ai WeiWei , die von Rhizome und dem New Museum in New York in Auftrag gegeben worden
war. Für diese Arbeit schredderten die beiden Künstler NSA-Dokumente, die einst Laura Poitras und Glenn Greenwald zugespielt worden waren, und befüllten damit in Ai Weiweis Heimatstadt Beijing Pandabär-Plüschtiere. In
jedem Pandabären befindet sich eine Micro SD-Speicherkarte, auf der Weiwei und Appelbaum jeweils eine
Überraschung abgespeichert haben. Die Pandabären wurden aus Beijing herausgeschmuggelt und reisten um die
Welt, wobei sie buchstäblich ein menschliches Netzwerk des Daten-Transfers bildeten: wieder „Samizdat/a“.
„Panda to Panda“ nimmt Bezug sowohl auf einen umgangssprachlichen Ausdruck für die chinesische Geheimpolizei, als auch auf die sogenannte Peer to Peer-Kommunikation (P2P), eine dezentralisierte Anwendungsstruktur,
die Aufgaben oder Arbeitspensum auf verschiedene Teilnehmer, „Peers“, verteilt.
Die dritte Arbeit der Ausstellung, Schuld, Scham und Angst, besteht aus filigranen Kettenanhängern, gefüllt mit
verschiedenen Materialien: geschredderte Notizen von Journalisten, historische sowie nicht redigierte geheime
Dokumente aus dem Sommer der Snowden-Enthüllungen und den darauffolgenden Jahren. Der Titel bezieht sich
auf die Emotionen von Journalisten, die mit diesen Materialien arbeiten: „Angst“, das Gefühl aus welchem heraus die Dokumente geschreddert werden; „Schuld“ und „Scham“ in dem Bewusstsein der Tatsache, dass auch
Journalisten zu Kollaborateuren in einer Kultur der Geheimhaltung geworden sind.
Im besten Sinne wird in der Ausstellung mit Kunst als Überbrückungstechnologie das geleistet, was in Texten oder
Datensätzen nur vereinzelt gelingt. Komplexe moralische Fragen werden durch das persönliche in den Bildern,
fernab der offiziellen Funktionen der Porträtierten erörtert. Die Tragweite des Kulturwandels hin zu einer Überwachungsgesellschaft wird deutlich- der Katalog versammelt weitere interessante Denkanstöße.
M O T H E R B OA R D G E R M A N Y
SEPTEMBER 11, 2015
W W W. M O T H E R B O A R D .V I C E . C O M
EINE AUSSTELLUNG IN BERLIN FEIERT
DIE AKTIVISTEN, DIE SNOWDEN
U N T E R S TÜT Z E N
1 1 . 0 9 . 2 0 1 5 , V O N T H E R E S A LO C K E R
In der Berlin-Friedrichshainer Galerie Nome stellt der Netzaktivist und Tor-Entwickler Jacob Appelbaum seit dem
10.9. Portraitfotos von den Menschen aus, die seit Jahren gegen die Massenüberwachung kämpfen.
Alle Bilder sind mit einer analogen Mittelformatkamera geschossen: „Das gibt mir die Hoheit über die Bilder
zurück—zu wissen, dass niemand elektronisch drankommt“, erklärte Appelbaum, der spätestens seit seinem
Einblick in Snowden- und Wikileaks-Dokumente genau weiß, wie weit Überwachung gehen kann, gegenüber
Motherboard.
Für seine Show hat Appelbaum sechs seiner Weggefährten aufgenommen; darunter die Wikileaks-Mitarbeiterin
Sarah Harrison, den Künstler Ai Weiwei in einem chinesischen Garten, Julian Assange aus bewährt messiasähnlicher Perspektive, eine entspannt lümmelnde Laura Poitras, NSA-Whistleblower William Binney und den
SEPTEMBER 11, 2015
Guardian-Journalisten Glenn Greenwald mit seinem Freund David Miranda vor deren Haus im brasilianischen
Dschungel. Insbesondere deren Portrait sieht so entspannt und unbeschwert aus wie ein Urlaubsfoto.
„Erstens sind die beiden das heißeste Gay-Paar, das ich kenne“, findet Appelbaum, „und ich glaube, die beiden
haben gar kein gutes Foto von sich—deswegen habe ich es ihnen auch geschenkt. Ich bin stolz, dass sie mich
in ihr Leben gelassen haben. Ich finde es unglaublich, wie die beiden diesen immensen Druck durchgestanden
haben. Es geht mir bei allen Portraits um ein Netzwerk des Widerstandes, das ich hier abbilden möchte“.
Für seine Show hat Appelbaum sechs seiner Weggefährten aufgenommen; darunter die Wikileaks-Mitarbeiterin
Sarah Harrison, den Künstler Ai Weiwei in einem chinesischen Garten, Julian Assange aus bewährt messiasähnlicher Perspektive, eine entspannt lümmelnde Laura Poitras, NSA-Whistleblower William Binney und den
Guardian-Journalisten Glenn Greenwald mit seinem Freund David Miranda vor deren Haus im brasilianischen
Dschungel. Insbesondere deren Portrait sieht so entspannt und unbeschwert aus wie ein Urlaubsfoto.
„Erstens sind die beiden das heißeste Gay-Paar, das ich kenne“, findet Appelbaum, „und ich glaube, die beiden
haben gar kein gutes Foto von sich—deswegen habe ich es ihnen auch geschenkt. Ich bin stolz, dass sie mich
in ihr Leben gelassen haben. Ich finde es unglaublich, wie die beiden diesen immensen Druck durchgestanden
haben. Es geht mir bei allen Portraits um ein Netzwerk des Widerstandes, das ich hier abbilden möchte“.
Sämtliche Fotos stammen aus Appelbaums Privatarchiv und wurden mit Infrarotfilm geschossen, der lichtempfindlicher ist als normaler Film und durch die spezielle chemische Behandlung Bilddetails sichtbar macht, die
herkömmliches Trägermaterial nicht erfasst. Zudem ist in jedem Bild ein Baum zu sehen; „eine Metapher für das
Netzwerk des Widerstandes, das sich weit über den Bildausschnitt hinausbewegt—und außerdem mag ich tatsächlich Natur“, so Appelbaum.
Zuletzt zeigt der Künstler auf einen Stoffbeutel mit einer chinesischen Aufschrift neben einem der mit Dokumenten gefüllten flauschigen Pandas, die er gemeinsam mit Ai Weiwei im Rahmen des Projekts Panda2Panda (P2P) in
Peking erstellte.
„Auf der Tasche steht ‘Fick deine Mutter’“, freut sich Appelbaum. Ein bisschen jugendlicher Anarcho-Witz ist ihm
bei aller Ernsthaftigkeit der Thematik zum Glück immer noch geblieben.
M O T H E R B OA R D U S
SEPTEMBER 10, 2015
INFRARED PORTRAITS CAPTURE
COUNTER-SURVEILLANCE DISSIDENTS
1 0 . 0 9 . 2 0 1 5 , B Y D J PA N G B U R N
American hacker and privacy advocate Jacob Appelbaum is primarily known as a former WikiLeaks spokesperson and persistent thorn in the side of governments worldwide. But he also has an artistic streak.
In 2014, he and artist Trevor Paglen created the Autonomy Cube, a sculpture designed for museums, galleries
and civic spaces, equipped with an open wifi connection that routes all traffic onto the Tor network. The title of
his first solo show, SAMIZDATA: Evidence of Conspiracy, which opens at Berlin’s NOME Gallery this week, riffs on
the samizdat underground publishing network that spread dissident writing in the shadows of the Soviet Union by
hand. The emphasis isn‘t on gadgets but on the human element in modern dissident networks, featuring portraits
of individuals engaged in a modern day “network of resistance.”
His art itself began in private, with portrait photography of his friends. “The purpose of my art is as a gift to the
subject,” says Appelbaum. “And that’s a matter of trust—single edition portraits, in particular.” For the show,
Appelbaum has assembled six of those portraits, all of friends and colleagues: Snowden reporters Laura Poitras
and Glenn Greenwald and Greenwald’s partner David Miranda; WikiLeaks editor Sarah Harrison, and its founder
Julian Assange; NSA whistleblower William Binney; and Ai Weiwei, the Beijing-based artist and political activist
who, like Appelbaum, has become a nuisance to his government.
Each portrait is shot in infrared, and rendered in vibrant cibachrome prints, allowing him to reveal more information than standard film. Appelbaum used the now discontinued Polaroid stock Kodak Color Infrared (EIR) as a nod
to its original use: in the detection of camouflaged targets, agricultural surveillance and forensics investigations.
In Appelbaum’s photograph of Weiwei, the artist stands in a field of flowers and trees, looking up into the sky.
The infrared colors pop in surreal fashion, almost like Federico Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits. In the William Binney
SEPTEMBER 10, 2015
portrait, the old NSA whistleblower, who lost both of his legs to diabetes, stands in front of a tree while his wheelchair sits several feet behind him out of focus.
The piece is a sly critique of secret police, and the idea that truth must sometimes travel through side channels,
through sneakernets
Also notable: the character in Appelbaum‘s ongoing saga of surveillance who is not present. “These are
pre-Snowden, and he’s not even featured—it’s about networks of resistance that go beyond a set of documents
or affair,” said Appelbaum, who emphasized the totality of his subject‘s lives and careers, rather than focusing
on more recent events. “Laura‘s work on the film The Oath is just as important as her work on Citizenfour. Julian
Assange and Sarah Harrison at Wikileaks play a role in the ‘Snowden Affair’, if you want to call it that, but that‘s
not why they‘re at the show.”
“It‘s also true for people like Bill Binney and Ai Weiwei,” he added. “If it weren‘t for Binney, there wouldn‘t be
a Snowden. When put together, they‘re more than the sum of their parts.”
With his focus trained on the individuals who are resisting global networks of surveillance in SAMIZDATA, Appelbaum draws a line between the ramshackle, secretive network of publishers and readers that defined the Soviet
underground and the modern-day dissidents who use Tor and other peer-to-peer networks.
He acknowledged it‘s a loose parallel. Communication over the internet is so much easier, allowing transmission
and reproduction on a previously unthinkable scale. And the „underground“ web enabled by software like Tor
includes a fraught mix of hidden data, from credit card numbers to pirated movies to the vital communications
of dissidents in authoritarian countries. That in turn has encouraged new legal regimes and techniques that lump
together piracy and activism as forms of cybercrime. “We‘re seeing people getting in trouble not just for sharing
movies,“ said Appelbaum, „but for hosting mirrors for the distribution of Wikileaks data.“
Another piece in the show, P2P (Panda 2 Panda), is a collaboration with Ai that grew out of a series of conversations with Poitras. “I came up with the idea of shredding NSA documents and stuffing them in [toy] pandas, and
then we would think about how we should distribute them around the world.”
Appelbaum first met and collaborated with Ai for three days in Beijing in April. Ai, he explains, „shaped P2P in a
very smart way as far as art direction, [telling] me about the fact that China’s secret police are called pandas, and
if people do share things [online] it‘s pop culture, so this warped the whole concept.”
Initially, “I was going to bring original documents that I had basically made from a historic, if you will, journalistic
work project I had to destroy, like notes and classified documents, that couldn’t be released.” But Chinese acquaintances kept telling Appelbaum, “No, you can’t do that — [the government] will reconstruct them.”
Though Appelbaum tried to assure them that this would be impossible, he said their paranoia was powerful. Appelbaum and Weiwei ended up using documents that weren’t one of a kind—“public documents,“ he said—
and then shredded them. Appelbaum and Ai bought 20 panda bears, removed their stuffing, and restuffed them
with the shredded documents as well as a micro SD card containing unknown data. (Poitras made a short film
about the collaboration, “Surveillance Machine.”)
Appelbaum said that he and Ai were worried that the Chinese government might try to intercept the pandas as
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they were distributed, by hand and person-to-person, around the world. Then again, they were also worried
the US government might do the same given the people involved in the project. In that sense, the piece is a sly
critique of secret police, and the idea that truth must sometimes travel through side channels, through sneakernets
or peer-to-peer networks, be they in Beijing, Berlin, or New York.
“It’s a critique against everyone, and it‘s about stripping away national issues,” Appelbaum said. “It wasn‘t possible for Weiwei to pass a bear along to Snowden, and I don‘t have a Russian visa, and I can‘t get it to Assange
either, so we had to rely on intermediaries to help; like samizdat really, and that was the idea.“
“We smuggled them all around the planet through a network of people, so they’re in Russia, and they’re in China, Canada, the US, Germany, and UK,” Appelbaum explained. For the show, Appelbaum hoped to display only
a single panda. „I‘m a big fan of the lone panda, which by itself suggests that one person helped it get there.”
During Appelbaum‘s trip to China—his first—he told Fusion‘s Kashmir Hill that criticism of China and its own
surveillance tends to be overblown: “The perceptions of China don’t meet the reality… It doesn’t feel like an oppressive surveillance state. China has been demonized by the West.”
Appelbaum wasn’t sympathizing with Beijing, he said. He was commenting on the fact that it wasn’t nearly as
creepy in person as it was portrayed in the media.
“My point was that people demonize China without looking at the facts. They talk about the Chinese being super
hackers, when it takes Snowden to reveal the real hackers.”
“There are a lot of things to take issue with the Chinese government,“ he added. „It doesn‘t have the hallmarks
of a democracy, but it‘s also bad when western governments mirror them.“
Everywhere, he said, „surveillance is meant to make you feel nothing, so you won‘t feel the oppression.” Appelbaum himself has felt it acutely: he has been stopped and searched multiple times by the US government, and
now lives in exile in Berlin. „In the West, people think that if you don‘t know that it‘s happening, then it‘s not a
problem. But that idea is ridiculous.“
Having spent much of his career steeped in the technical details of surveillance and transparency, Appelbaum is
now more eager to present ideas in a way that’s easy for anyone to understand and discuss—or even wear. He
is also exhibiting Guilt, Shame and Fear, a set of necklaces that look like test tubes, each stuffed with shredded
secret documents that were never released to the public.
“I have a garbage bag full of these documents, but I couldn’t bring them to China with me or release them,” said
Appelbaum. “So I wanted these necklaces to be shared amongst people.“ An edition of 100 necklaces will be
sold at the gallery, with the proceeds donated to Edward Snowden‘s defense fund.
“It‘s very important to have a lot of these discussions in public, and use it to discuss issues of basic liberties,” he
said. “The art world is a great way to reach a lot of people who otherwise wouldn‘t be reached.”
WE MAKE MONEY NOT ART
SEPTEMBER 3, 2015
W W W.W E - M A K E - M O N E Y - N O T - A R T. C O M
S A M I Z DATA : E V I D E N C E O F C O N S P I R AC Y .
TA L K I N G S E C R E T S A N D PA N D A S W I T H
JACOB APPELBAUM
3.09.2015, BY REGINE
Next week, NOME, one of those too rare galleries exploring art, politics, and technology, is going to open Jacob
Appelbaum’s first solo show in Germany. Titled SAMIZDATA: Evidence of Conspiracy, the show was curated by
Tatiana Bazzichelli and accompanies the symposium SAMIZDATA: Tactics and Strategies for Resistance which will
explore alternatives into the development of shared forms of post-digital resistance.
Jacob Appelbaum is an independent journalist, a hacker and a Wikileaks collaborator who helped develop the
anonymous web browser Tor. He is also a U.S. citizen who has been living in exile in Berlin, due to an ongoing
investigation into his involvement with Wikileaks and to repeated harassment at immigration. His situation offers
a striking contrast with Ai Weiwei’s, a Chinese artist who has long been prevented from leaving his own country
(although a few weeks ago, he was finally given his passport back and moved to Germany as well.)
Earlier this year, Weiwei and Appelbaum were invited to work together as part of Seven On Seven, Rhizome’s
series of artists-meets-technologists events. The two of them met at Ai Weiwei’s house in Beijing and their collaboration was filmed by Laura Poitras, the director of the award winning documentary Citizenfour and another artist
who has been living under the gaze of State surveillance.
The video that documents their collaboration shows the artists working inside Ai’s studio, emptying the stuffing
from toy pandas and replacing it with shredded N.S.A. documents released in 2013 by whistle-blower Edward
Snowden. The work is called Panda to Panda, a reference to peer-to-peer communication but also an allusion to
the Chinese secret police whose unofficial symbol is the panda. Sewn inside the stuffed toys are also micro SD
memory cards that contain a digital archive of the intelligence documents.
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The pandas were then sent to free-speech activists around the world and to museums, as a kind of distributed
backup.
Appelbaum will also be premiering at NOME a series of six colored infrared photos shown as cibachrome prints.
Each of them celebrates a political dissident whose brave work has made them the targets of oppressive governments.
The portraits show William Binney, a former high official with the NSA who resigned in 2001 and has since
spoken out against the NSA’s data collection policies. Glenn Greenwald, a journalist, constitutional lawyer, and
author whose recent book, No Place to Hide, is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on
the Snowden documents. Sarah Harrison, a British journalist, legal researcher, and WikiLeaks editor. She accompanied Edward Snowden on his flight from Hong Kong to Moscow while he was sought by the U.S. government.
The other portraits show Laura Poitras, Ai Weiwei and Julian Assange.
The fantastic people at NOME (thanks Tabea!) put me in touch with Jacob Appelbaum and we discussed over the
phone about the exhibition, his experience of surveillance and the world of secrecy. Unsurprisingly, the conversation took place under the shelter of an encrypted calling app:
Hi Jacob! You are a U.S. citizens in exile and you are now living in Berlin. Do you find that an individual’s right to
privacy is less under attack in Germany than it is in your own country? And do you think that this situation is likely
to change and that Europe shows signs of becoming more and more open to surveillance and control of citizens?
Surveillance is a French word so it’s not as if surveillance came from the United States to Europe. Surveillance has
been here for a long time. The first big data project of Europe was the holocaust, as documented in the book IBM
and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. I think that it looks like at the moment there is a scary and worrying trend in
Europe of moving towards the right wing with Le Pen and other groups across Europe and with that often comes
a consolidation of State power and surveillance. It is very scary because if groups like the Golden Dawn, Le Pen,
people who are in charge in Hungary at the moment and extreme right groups here in Germany, have control
over these surveillance apparatuses, it will be very bad. I think it’s very bad already but it will just get worse. In
particular with the Golden Dawn.
The political and cultural situation in Europe is not like the weather. It’s not just something that you observe. It’s
not just something that happens. Rather it is something that we let happen and that we create by taking an active
role in. I think that we are in fact changing this dialogue a great deal. It’s not just me and Laura and Glenn. It’s
hundreds of thousands of people across Europe who really care about improving the LIBE committee in the European Parliament, the European Court of Human Rights, the Court of Luxembourg, etc. You can see that there are
a lot of people who remember how surveillance has been used for in the 20th century and who understand that
surveillance is not always used to prevent crime but in some cases is used to commit crimes. This is something
that people in Europe understand and i think that the situation is changing precisely because this understanding
is working its way into the common understanding and into the cultural discussion. But it’s not like the weather,
it’s not changing on its own.
I’d be interested to know about your choice of making portraits in cibachrome prints. Why did you use
this photographic process?
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I’ve been living under surveillance in some way or another for about 13 years. Maybe more. And in different
capacities. In the last 5 years it has become very intense. The reason i mention this is because when you shoot
with a digital camera and you plug in to a computer that’s on the internet, when you share photos on the internet,
that’s it! They are no longer your photos. I’m sure that all the photos that i ever posted on the internet, on flickr
for example, are sitting in an FBI database and i’m sure that they’ve been used to harm people and to harass my
friends and people i work with. So i don’t really post photos on the internet anymore and as a result i started to
work with slide film very heavily. I also started to keep my files offline and if i scan them, i keep them scanned on
machines that are not connected to the internet and only for archival purposes. I felt that it made a lot of sense not
to go to a professional printing studio and print digital photos of these slides but to actually do the entire process
offline as much as possible. Cibachrome is the most analog process and it allows me to go low tech and that was
very important for me. Cibachrome felt like the natural thing because it fits with the whole reason i was shooting
slide films in the first place which was to regain my autonomy from surveillance.
The people your work portrays are involved in uncovering surveillance. I read some of the names in the
list of captions for the photos of the show: Sarah Harrison, Laura Poitras, and William Binney. Who are the
others and can you briefly tell you why you chose them?
The other people are Ai Weiwei who needs no introduction. David Miranda is in the photograph with Glenn
Greenwald. He is the partner of Glenn Greenwald but also works with him around the Snowden affair. There’s
Sarah Harrison, the woman who helped Snowden to seek and receive asylum, basically to escape from Hong
Kong. Then there is Julian Assange, William Binney and then Laura Poitras.
Apologies for the silly question but why did you decide to shred the information rather than stuff the
pandas of the work Panda 2 Panda with whole pages randomly distributed?
Two reasons. The main reason is that i felt that it represented the way that people actually see the information
anyway. Ideological information, economic information or the information that spies craft doesn’t make sense to
a lot of people. It’s a specialized language. These shredded documents are the support structure of the actual
body itself. But we also added a very small micro SD card inside the pandas. It actually contains the documents
and then some. Which means that every single panda is the medium and the message in itself and it can be transported. We smuggled 20 of these pandas out of China and took them all over the world. That means that even if
you took the whole internet down, even if you got rid of every website and of every member of the press, you’d
have to actually also go and track down these 20 pandas. In addition to a lot of other things. The goal was then
to have a piece of art in a museum that is full of this kind data and to make it so that the secret services wanting to
erase it would have to go into the museum and destroy the pandas. Which places them very firmly in the aesthetic
camp of being on the wrong side of history. In a sense, it’s like asking them “Come on! Get us! We dare you!”
How will Panda 2 Panda be exhibited exactly at NOME? With some of the pandas, the Poitras video and
some information? What will the installation of the piece look like?
There won’t be any video. But instead we will have these 6 very large prints, nicely framed, mounted on aluminum and shadow boxes. We will also have the panda and the bag that it came in which is a beautiful Ai
Weiwei bag which says ”Cǎonímǎ” which is this Grass Mud Horse (the word for internet censorship in China.)
Weiwei and i signed this bag and it’s the transport for the panda. The panda is filled with documents that have
been made public in the press.
SEPTEMBER 3, 2015
But I decided that it wasn’t good enough. I wanted to create a final piece for the show that takes this project
beyond what is public. For many years i’ve worked as a journalist shredding documents, either because we take
journalistic notes about a source or we print out a document that we believe we wouldn’t legally be able to
release without the risk of being arrested or something like this because it contains agent names, for example.
And i have garbage bags full of these shredded documents. I just can’t throw them out. So i decided that that was
going to be like the paint of a new picture. I collaborated with 3 other artists to make a hundred little necklaces.
These necklaces are vials, like little test tubes, and inside of it are shredded unreleased documents. So a hundred
people will be able to carry around the equivalent of the panda, except that it’s documents that have never been
released. It reaches a totally different audience of people and in some ways it feels more risky but also less risky
because it’s shredded documents. The piece is called Schuld, Scham und Angst which means Guilt, Shame and
Fear in english. The reason behind that name is that i and all of the journalists who shredded documents and didn’t
release every single one of them, we became in a sense collaborators with the secret state. And i’m distressed
with myself for having to do that. The only time that it is ever appropriate to do that is for source protection reason.
Do you find that you and Ai Weiwei have a different approach to issues such as surveillance, secrecy and
censorship? And how you express your opposition to them?
Yes, i do think that we are very different. We have complementary approaches. One is a coping mechanism. The
other is a resistance strategy.
Weiwei is trying to document his whole life, to make himself as public as possible which in a sense raises his
profile. Everyone talking about surveillance either vanishes or adopts this approach. Both Weiwei and i are both
taking this approach to a degree.
I am also trying to raise the consciousness about this issue, to make sure that no one is victimized like this ever
again. It’s not just about me. I think Weiwei also wants that to happen but it not clear to me –even with a work
like Panda 2 Panda– that we change the fundamental structure of that kind of oppressive surveillance. But Weiwei is under much more oppressive surveillance than i am these days.
The work that i’ve done under the last 10 years is to make it hard for the people to monitor anyone who would be
targeted for surveillance, whether they are legitimate so-called ‘targets’ or otherwise. But i also want to raise the
consciousness about it and to raise the culture of discussion so that people start to ask ‘wait a minute! what does
it mean to be a legitimate target?” I want to actually try and empower every person, not just special people, to
free them from that kind of oppressive dynamic which in itself is a punishment and is often done in total secrecy.
It happens in such a way that it corrodes life itself for people. So i want to fuck that up as much as possible.
Do you think we should all assume that we are under surveillance?
No, i think we should all live with the assumption that we have the right to resist. It is our duty, in fact. We don’t
have to live with the assumption that we are under surveillance. And in fact, when we do it then that tells us that
we should take action.
Thanks Jacob!
W I D E WA L L S
SEPTEMBER, 2015
W W W.W I D E WA L L S . C H
W I D E WA L L S
J A C O B A P P E L B A U M E X H I B I T I O N E X P LO R E S
T H E E V I D E N C E O F C O N S P I R AC Y AT N O M E
SEPTEMBER 2015, BY RICARDO MARTINEZ
Do you feel safe? Do you think that you are enjoying liberties that are proclaimed in your Constitution? Are your
emails intact and read only by the people you have sent them to? Is your everyday communication not being
eavesdropped, analyzed and stored somewhere? If all your aswers are “yes”, well, you are probably living in
a different place and different time than today’s Earth. Or, perhaps, you are not using any other mean of communication except for face-to-face talking. Because, if you are online – and you obviously are, since you are
reading this – all the chances are that you and your communication with the world around you are being under
some form of surveillance. You see, this is the kind of world we are living in, and the artist, independent computer
security researcher, journalist and photographer Jacob Appelbaum is among those people that are fighting for a
different and better world. And visitors of NOME gallery will be able to see that at Jacob Appelbaum’s exhibition
that was named SAMIZDATA: Evidence of Conspiracy.
Admiration for Human Rights Defenders
This will be Jacob Appelbaum’s first solo show (it will be curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli), after his previous collaboration in art projects with Ai Weiwei, Trevor Paglen, Laura Poitras, and others. What is SAMIZDATA: Evidence
of Conspiracy exhibition at NOME gallery in Berlin all about? It will feature six colored infrared photos shown
as cibachrome prints, and the persons that are on the photographs are some of the world best-known human
rights defenders, whistleblowers, and removers of secrets: they are reveiling information that governments want
to keep away from public’s view. At first, these infrared photographs were created as a sign of admiration for
people on them, and for their work. And portraited persons are, amongst others, Ai Weiwei, Sarah Harrison and
W I D E WA L L S
SEPTEMBER, 2015
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William Binney. Apart from portraits, the exhibition will also feature an artwork called P2P (Panda to Panda), that
Appelbaum had created with Ai Weiwei. In panda bears, artists have put shredded documents that once, not that
long ago, Edward Snowden, a whistleblower of the highest rank, had given to The Guardian’s journalist Glenn
Greenwald and Laura Poitras, an awarded film director. Beside these shredded papers, inside each panda is a
micro SD memory card – what’s on the card, we’ll find out when the exhibition opens.
People on the Photographs
So, whom did Jacob Appelbaum photograph? Well, you know about Ai Weiwei and all of his struggles and
battles with the oppressing China’s administration (and then with the administration of the United Kingdom). William Binney is an ex-NSA official (National Security Agency of USA), who quit his job after the administration of
George Bush Jr. had started extensive spying of the U.S. citizens after September 11, 2001. Binney called this
expanded surveillance “better than anything that the KGB, the Stasi, or the Gestapo and SS ever had”, claiming
that the 9/11 plot could have been revealed, if the collected information was properly analyzed. In 2012, Binney
estimated that the NSA had intercepted 20 trillion communications of the USA citizens – phone calls, emails,
and other forms of data.
On the other hand, Sarah Harrison was a young unpaid intern researcher at the Centre for Investigative Journalism at City University in London, and, as such, she was assigned to Julian Assange, before he started publishing
leaked documents on the Afghan War. She became Assange’s closest adviser, and in 2013 she had accompanied Edward Snowden from Hong Kong to Moscow, where Snowden has found political asylum from the USA
extradiction.
Jacob Appelbaum Exhibition SAMIZDATA: Evidence of Conspiracy – Where and When
SAMIZDATA: Evidence of Conspiracy is presented in collaboration with SAMIZDATA: Tactics and Strategies for
Resistance at Kunstquartier Bethanien by Disruption Network Lab. This conference that will be held on September
11th and 12th will gather artists, hackers and critical thinkers with a joint concept of resistance and social justice,
in light of Edward Snowden’s revelations on how the NSA and the American government are routinely violating
the human rights and the Constitution of the USA. Apart from Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras, Jaromil, Jørgen
Johansen, Theresa Züger and Sophie Toupin will be the participants of this conference, and Jacob Appelbaum’s
solo exhibition SAMIZDATA: Evidence of Conspiracy will be opened on September 10th at 6 PM at NOME Gallery in Berlin. The exhibition will remain open until October 31st.
DIGICULT
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DIGICULT
J AC O B A P P E L B A U M . S A M I Z DATA :
EVIDENCE OF CONSPIRACY
SEPTEMBER 2015
La NOME Gallery di Berlino presenta SAMIZDATA: Evidence of Conspiracy, la prima personale di Jacop Appelbaum in Germania, a cura di Tatiana Bazzichelli. Dopo aver collaborato con artisti come Ai Weiwei, Trevor
Paglen e Laura Poitras, il giornalista indipendente Jacob Appelbaum presenta questa volta i suoi lavori da artista.
Il titolo della mostra si riferisce alla parola russa “samizdat”, un’importante forma di attività dissidente nata
durante il blocco sovietico, nel quale la letteratura censurata era riprodotta e distribuita. Trasportata nel 21esimo
secolo, quest’attività si collega a certi aspetti del Caso Snowden e di Wikileaks in riferimento alla distribuzione
di informazioni in grado di mettere in pericolo le vite di delle persone coinvolte.
Con SAMIZDATA Jacop Appelbaum presenta una serie di opere come critica alla progressiva perdita di libertà,
partendo da un contesto di giornalismo investigativo fino ad arrivare a documenti segreti con l’obiettivo dichiarato della trasparenza. Per la prima volta l’artista mostra una serie di sei fotografie a infrarossi stampate con la
tecnica ilfochrome, ritratti della sua rete di colleghi e amici: Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald e David Miranda,
Julian Assange, Sarah Harrison, William Binney e Ai Weiwei. I lavori sono stati ideati in segno d’ammirazione e
rispetto per le persone ritratte e per il loro lavoro che ha portato alla scoperta del “Caso Snowden” e non solo.
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Altro lavoro in mostra è P2P (Panda to Panda), collaborazione con Ai Weiwei, commissionato da Rhizome e
dal New Museum di New York nel 2015. I due artisti hanno fatto a pezzi dei documenti dell’NSA una volta in
possesso di Laura Poitras e Gleen Greenwald e li hanno stipati dentro dei panda nella città natale di Ai WeiWei,
Pechino. All’interno di ogni panda, Ai e Appelbaum hanno inseirto una scheda di memoria micro SD contenente
una sorpresa. I panda sono stati fatti portati fuori da Pechino e hanno viaggiato in giro per il mondo, in modo da
costruire un network umano composto da informazioni rubate: Samizdat/a. “Panda to Panda” fa riferimento sia
a un termine colloquiale usato dai servizi segreti cinesi sia alla comunicazione peer-to-peer (P2P), un’architettura
di comunicazioni distribuite che suddivide i compiti o carichi di lavoro tra nodi equivalenti.
Il terzo lavoro, Schuld, Scham und Angst, consiste in parti di gioielli riempiti da vari media, stralci di note giornalistiche e documenti classificati e mai pubblicati dall’Estate di Snowden e dagli anni successivi. Il titolo fa
riferimento alle emozioni provate dai giornalisti mentre lavoravano su questi materiali: “paura”, il sentimento
che porta alla distruzione dei documenti; “colpa” e “vergogna”, nella consapevolezza che anche i giornalisti
erano diventati parte di una cultura del segreto. Questo lavoro è stato creato con la collaborazione di Manuela
Benetton, Bert Gilma e Luzi Tornado.
Jacop Appelbaum è ricercatore indipendente in sicurezza informatica, giornalista e artista. Vive e lavora a Berlino ed è uno dei membri fondatori del Tor project, un free software network progettato per garantire l’anonimato
online. SAMIZDATA: Evidence of Conspiracy, è presentato in collaborazione con la conferenza del Disruption
Network Lab SAMIZDATA: Tactics and Strategies for Resistance a cura di Tatiana Bazzichelli presso il Kunstquartier Bethanien. La conferenza durerà due giorni (11-12 settembre 2015) e riunirà hacker, artisti e pensatori critici
che, alla luce delle rivelazione di Snowden, applicano il concetto di resistenza e giustizia sociale sotto numerosi
punti di vista diversi.
Tra i partecipanti saranno presenti Jacop Appelbaum, Laura Poitras, Jaromil, Jørgen Johansen, Theresa Züger e
Sophie Toupin.
EXBERLINER
SEPTEMBER 8, 2015
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EXBERLINER
U P C LO S E W I T H . . . J A C O B A P P E L B A U M
8.09.2015, BY RENE BLIXER
Jacob Appelbaum’s show Samizdata: Evidence of Conspiracy, curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli, opens at NOME
gallery on September 10. The next day, he and Laura Poitras will discuss document leaking, art and transparency
as part of a Disruption Network Lab panel at Kunstquartier Bethanien.
Who are the people in the six portraits you’re showing at NOME gallery? We recognised a few of your
comrades-in-exile in Berlin...
They are people who have worked to effect massive amounts of change and who, in different ways, have contributed to a very large dialogue that is taking place in society now. There’s Sarah [Harrison]; Glenn [Greenwald]
and David [Miranda]; Laura [Poitras], but also the early ones – Julian [Assange] and Bill [Binney]. Then Ai Weiwei,
who is on the other end of the spectrum with regards to Snowden or WikiLeaks, making cultural objects that link
up to the information that’s been published.
Are these the heroes of our post-Snowden era?
They are famous for their acts of courage. But they are also regular people. None of these people are born
revolutionaries. These are people who in the right circumstances took courageous actions, and they had a good
intellectual basis for understanding why that courage was necessary. This is not about creating a culture of heroism, but rather recognising that any person can take heroic action.
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You shot them with infrared film – like targets of surveillance.
This colour infrared film was agricultural surveillance film... It’s expired, it’s old and you can’t really get it anymore. It’s something quite special. The paper is Cibachrome. So it’s the rarest of films, and the rarest of printing methods. Using it to photograph people who are targets of surveillance is, for me, to recontextualise industrial-scale
surveillance film. The film allows you to see things a little bit differently – grains, structures, things you normally
couldn’t see – because it picks up ultraviolet and near and far infrared.
You’re showing a few of the toy pandas that you and Weiwei stuffed in Beijing back in April. How did
those come about?
The idea behind the Rhizome project was for a technologist and an artist to come together. I arrived in Beijing with
this original art idea: fill a panda with shredded NSA documents and have it be like a peerto- peer networking
thing. Weiwei was immediately open to it. We had a little bit of technical difficulty, though, because Laura didn’t
feel comfortable bringing real Snowden documents to Beijing. She was worried they would be reconstructed,
even though I have a very good shredder. So I came to China empty-handed. We had to buy a shredder, download documents from the internet and shred them.
What did you learn from Weiwei as an artist?
I understand much more about working at scale. A lot of his work, his whole compound, is about scale. It’s really
incredible to experience how he gets things done, even the division of labour in his workshop. Even the way he
moves his hand is a very directed piece of art. Then he has a very firm idea of how to direct and document his
work. Laura was there to document it, he also documented it on his iPhone. The workshop became another part
of the art piece.
What about Weiwei’s selfies? You both took quite a few of them over there.
Weiwei takes more selfies than anyone else does any other task other than breathing. We went to the gym, for
example, and he made a video of me doing pushups when I wasn’t looking! He also seems to have perfected
selfies as a modern form of autograph. When we would go out for a walk in Beijing, people would stop and want
to take a picture with him. In the past, with someone like Andy Warhol, people would ask him to sign something...
Weiwei’s version of the autograph in the 21st century is the selfie.
You’re known as a security analyst and developer, hacker, activist and campaigner, journalist, now an
artist... what’s next?
I had an artist residency in Vienna in 2006, so this is not new for me. I am actually starting a PhD in a maths department in post-quantum computer cryptography.
What would you have done if you had lived in the pre-digital age? Do you have any analogue hobbies?
Well, there’s my photography. All of this is 100 percent analogue. The printing is analogue, the film is analogue,
the cameras are analogue. But I also like to go swing dancing!
CBC
SEPTEMBER 10, 2015
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CBC
H AC K E R J AC O B A P P E L B A U M ’ S N E W TO O L
I N T H E F I G H T F O R D I G I TA L F R E E D O M ?
P H OTO G R A P H Y
1 0 . 0 9 . 2 0 1 5 , B Y D E B B I E PA C H E C O
Jacob Appelbaum is an American hacker, a privacy activist and an artist with a new show, his first solo photography exhibition in his chosen city of Berlin. Had things gone differently, he could even have been a Communications Security Establishment (CSE) agent.
According to Appelbaum, he was invited to talk to students about privacy online a few years ago in, if he remembers correctly, Ottawa. It‘s something he often does as a member of the Tor project, a free software network
providing online anonymity.
He later found out it was a military college, and that the audience at the bar where the talk took place wasn‘t just
students but also various government agents.
„There was a guy in the audience who came up to me afterwards and said, Why don‘t you come work for us?“
Appelbaum says people would be surprised by how many offers he‘s received from various federal agencies.
Instead, the 32-year-old built an international reputation as a privacy advocate and security expert, a winner of
the respected Henri Nannen prize for journalism for helping reveal surveillance by the U.S.‘ National Security
Agency (NSA) in Germany, and an ally of both Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
„I kind of regret it. You know? If I can go back in time I think it would have been a really good thing to do that,
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SEPTEMBER 10, 2015
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if only because then we would have had another Edward Snowden, this time from Canada. Hindsight is always
20/20,“ he says from the Nome Gallery in Berlin.
An exhibit of Appelbaum‘s work on the topic of surveillance opens this week (one day shy of September 11) in
the city he now calls home. Appelbaum describes himself as „living in exile in Germany“ because he says he‘s
faced repeated harassment by the U.S. government.
Appelbaum‘s ‚SAMIZDATA: Evidence of Conspiracy‘ is a series of works that includes one of several panda bears
stuffed with Snowden‘s shredded documents, a collaboration with Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei.
But the central item of the exhibit is a collection of portraits Appelbaum took over the years of his colleagues and
friends, like Ai Weiwei, Citizenfour documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
That they were taken using infrared film once used for aerial surveillance seems quite the meta statement, but
Appelbaum says it‘s a happy accident. He was introduced to the film about a decade ago by Toronto photographer Kate Young.
One of the goals of the exhibit is to illustrate what Appelbaum calls „a kind of emergent network“ that has sprung
up, an informal team of anti-surveillance dissidents.
But it‘s also to show how he views these similarly polarizing, controversial figures.
„You‘re not going to see Laura lying on her couch normally,“ he says.
And with the Assange photo, taken in 2012, „I consciously wanted to display a proud person when we were still
on the edge of understanding how far this was going to go.“
For Appelbaum, the idea of anonymity online isn‘t something to fear.
„Anonymity online is to be at liberty,“ he says, adding that the internet is a place where one should be able to
freely associate and form your own thoughts and opinions.
„There will always be bad actors, but sometimes those bad actors wear good cop badges.“
Jacob Appelbaum. SAMIZDATA: Evidence of Conspiracy, presented in collaboration with SAMIZDATA: Tactics
and Strategies for Resistance by Disruption Network Lab, curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli. NOME Gallery, 31 Dolziger St., Berlin. Fri., Sept. 11 to Sat., Oct. 31. Tue-Sat, 3pm-7pm. Free.
NETZPOLITIK
SEPTEMBER 10, 2015
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NETZPOLITIK
A U S S T E L L U N G S P R E V I E W: S A M I Z D A TA :
EVIDENCE OF CONSPIRACY
1 0 . 0 9 . 2 0 1 5 , B Y K AT H A R I N A M E Y E R
In der NOME-Galerie in Berlin-Friedrichshain eröffnet heute die Ausstellung SAMIZDATA: Evidence of Conspiracy
von Jacob Appelbaum. Sie beschäftigt sich künstlerisch mit ureigensten Netzpolitik-Themen wie Überwachung,
Transparenz und der Geheimhaltungskultur.
Die ausgestellte Kunst: Zwei Skulpturen sowie sechs Infrarotfilm-Porträt-Fotografien von bekannten Akteuren aus
Überwachungstheorie und -praxis wie Sarah Harrison, William Binney oder Laura Poitras sowie die sie umgebende Architektur entwickeln bereits für sich betrachtet einen spannenden Kontrast:
Ähnlich wie das Neubaugebäude, das die Galerie beherbergt, mit einer forschen Welle aus Beton die Kreuzung
an der Dolziger Straße eher erkämpft als für sich gewonnen hat, ist Berlin in den vergangenen Jahren zu einem
der Schaltkreuze für die „digitalen Dissidenten“ avanciert, die oft kritisch beäugt – und noch öfter durchleuchtet
– werden. Der Zuzug der internationalen Netzaktivisten wie Appelbaum, aber auch von Sarah Harrisson und
vielen anderen hat wahrnehmbar dazu beigetragen, dass Politik sich zurück in den digitalen, aber auch analogen
Raum (z. B. durch Demonstrationen) spielt – während zeitgleich „merkeln“, das heißt: aussitzen, zum Jugendwort des Jahres gewählt wird. Vieles ist in der Stadt wie in der Ausstellung ambivalent und zutiefst konzeptuell:
Es verwundert nicht, dass die NOME-Galerie sich in dieser Gemengelage dem Spannungsfeld aus Kunst, Technologie und Politik verschrieben hat. In der Vorgänger-Ausstellung wurden Werke von James Bridle gezeigt, der
ebenfalls den Ansatz von „Art as Evidence“ verfolgt. Es geht darum, durch Visualisierung bzw. Sichtbarmachung
komplexe Themen so aufzubereiten, dass sie in Aktivierungsenergie und politische Prozesse umgesetzt werden
können.
Der Titel bezieht sich auf den russischen Begriff „Samizdat“, der Ende der 1950er Jahre in der Sowjetunion und
dem ehemaligen Ostblock die Verbreitung und Vervielfältigung zensierter Literatur auf nichtoffiziellen Kanälen
bezeichnete. Schriften von indizierten System-Kritikern wurden in Geheim-Druckereien oder handschriftlich vervielfältigt und weiterverteilt. Übertragen auf das 21. Jahrhundert passt das Konzept zu Aspekten der Snowden-Affäre und WikiLeaks.
Netzwerke sind nicht zwingend digital. Nicht nur die NSA ist der Meinung, dass die Analyse einer Zielperson
innerhalb ihrer sozialen Kontakte sehr viel aussagekräftiger ist, als diese isoliert zu betrachten.
Obwohl insbesondere die Fotografien auch unter reiner Bewertung nach ästhetischen Gesichtspunkten sehenswert sind (sowohl der verwendete Film als auch das Trägermedium werden nicht mehr produziert), sind die
spannenderen Ansatzpunkte für die dahinter verborgenen Geschichten in der verwendeten Technik als auch in
Bilddetails, der Hängung und dem Gesamtarrangement zu suchen.
Die Motive in den Fotografien sind teils als Metaphern zu lesen. So beispielsweise die Einbeziehung der Natur:
Zwar resoniert der verwendete Infrarotfilm (ursprünglich benutzt für Luft-Überwachung in der Landwirtschaft oder
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SEPTEMBER 10, 2015
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Personenprofile in bewaldeten Gebieten) besonders mit dem Chlorophyll der Blättern, die sich in allen Fotografien wiederfinden. Die Wurzeln der Bäume deuten aber auch auf die porträtierten Personen hin: Netzaktivismus ist
eine Grassroots-Bewegung aus der Zivilgesellschaft. Zwar gibt es herausstechende Charaktere, wie z. B. Julian
Assange, der hier noch vor seinem Exil in einer Londoner Botschaft als aufrechter, jüngerer Mann im Freien eingefangen wird.
Gemeinsam ist den Porträts, dass sie in einem künstlerischen Akt diejenigen in den Konsekrationsraum der Kunst
erheben, die sich nicht aus herausragenden gesellschaftlichen Positionen gegen unerwünschte politische Entwicklungen wenden, sondern als wachsame Privatpersonen. Zusammengebracht durch die Snowden-Enthüllungen verbinden sich hier einzelne Akteure zu einem Netzwerk aus Kollaborateuren. An Details wie Schärfe und
Unschärfe, Haltungen, abgebildeten Accessoires, Glitches und Posen ließen sich zahlreiche weitere Geschichten
exemplifizieren, die nicht nur als Pars pro Toto in der Ausstellung, sondern in einem Übertragungsbogen auch für
die politische Arbeit der Dargestellten gelten können.
Nur ein Porträt verwundert ein wenig in dieser Reihe: das von Ai WeiWei. Die Verbindung erfolgt über ein zweites Ausstellungsstück:
P2P (Panda to Panda), das in diesem Jahr auf der re:publica vorgestellt wurde, ist eine Kooperation zwischen Jacob Appelbaum und Ai WeiWei, die von Rhizome und dem New Museum in New York in Auftrag gegeben worden war. Für diese Arbeit schredderten die beiden Künstler NSA-Dokumente, die einst Laura Poitras und Glenn
Greenwald zugespielt worden waren, und befüllten damit in Ai Weiweis Heimatstadt Peking Pandabär-Plüschtiere. In jedem Pandabären befindet sich eine Micro-SD-Speicherkarte, auf der Weiwei und Appelbaum jeweils eine
Überraschung abgespeichert haben. Die Pandabären wurden aus Peking herausgeschmuggelt und reisten um
die Welt, wobei sie buchstäblich ein menschliches Netzwerk des Daten-Transfers bildeten: wieder „Samizdata“.
„Panda to Panda“ nimmt Bezug sowohl auf einen umgangssprachlichen Ausdruck für die chinesische Geheimpolizei als auch auf die sogenannte Peer-to-Peer-Kommunikation (P2P), eine dezentralisierte Anwendungsstruktur,
die Aufgaben oder Arbeitspensum auf verschiedene Teilnehmer, „Peers“, verteilt.
Die dritte Arbeit der Ausstellung, Schuld, Scham und Angst, besteht aus filigranen Kettenanhängern, gefüllt mit
verschiedenen Materialien: geschredderte Notizen von Journalisten, historische sowie nicht redigierte geheime
Dokumente aus dem Sommer der Snowden-Enthüllungen und den darauffolgenden Jahren. Der Titel bezieht sich
auf die Emotionen von Journalisten, die mit diesen Materialien arbeiten: „Angst“, das Gefühl aus welchem heraus die Dokumente geschreddert werden; „Schuld“ und „Scham“ in dem Bewusstsein der Tatsache, dass auch
Journalisten zu Kollaborateuren in einer Kultur der Geheimhaltung geworden sind.
Im besten Sinne wird in der Ausstellung mit Kunst als Überbrückungstechnologie das geleistet, was in Texten oder
Datensätzen nur vereinzelt gelingt. Komplexe moralische Fragen werden durch das Persönliche in den Bildern,
fernab der offiziellen Funktionen der Porträtierten, erörtert. Die Tragweite des Kulturwandels hin zu einer Überwachungsgesellschaft wird deutlich – der Katalog versammelt weitere interessante Denkanstöße.
IRIGHTS INFO
SEPTEMBER 11, 2015
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IRIGHTS INFO
„ S A M I Z DATA “ : A U S S T E L LU N G U N D
KONFERENZ IN BERLIN
1 1 . 0 9 . 2 0 1 5 , V O N VA L I E D J O R D J E V I C
Jacob Appelbaum, Aktivist, Hacker, Journalist, stellt in seiner ersten Solo-Ausstellung in Deutschland Fotos aus –
analoge Fotos. Er benutzt Infrarot-Filmmaterial, das die natürlichen Farben verfremdet. Die Personen auf seinen
Fotos wirken, als ob sie sich in einer anderen Welt befinden.
Er wolle seine Subjekte nicht nur als Aktivisten darstellen, sondern als vielschichtige Menschen, die neben ihrem
politischen Engagement auch noch andere Seiten haben, meint Appelbaum. Den Journalisten Glenn Greenwald
hat er deshalb mit seinem Lebensgefährten David Miranda fotografiert. Zu ihren Füßen steht ein kleiner Hund –
die beiden sind große Hundefreunde.
Appelbaum sieht die Arbeit mit analoger Fotografie als Ermächtigung: Als jemand, dessen Leben in den letzten
zehn Jahren komplett überwacht wurde, wie er bei der Presseführung sagt, ist die fotografische Arbeit mit analogem Film eine Befreiung. Ein Bild aus einem analogen Film könne man kaum kopieren, ohne Spuren zu hinterlassen.
Die Fotos zeigen die Datenaktivisten der letzten Jahre, die Wikileaksaktivisten Julian Assange und Sarah Harrison,
den Journalisten Glenn Greenwald, die Filmemacherin Laura Poitras, die mit Glenn Greenwald die Snowden-Dokumente an die Öffentlichkeit gebraucht hat, den US-amerikanischen Whistleblower William Binney, der früher
für die NSA gearbeitet hat, und den chinesischen Künstler Ai Weiwei.
Mit Ai Weiwei ist auch eine Installation in der Berliner NOME Galerie entstanden: „Panda Panda“. Dabei stopften Appelbaum und Ai Weiwei zwanzig Stofftier-Pandas mit geschredderten Snowden-Dokumenten und einer
Mikro-SD-Karte mit dem Snowden-Archiv. Sie verschickten sie an Netz-Bürgerrechtler und Museen in der ganzen
Welt.
Als Begleitprogramm zur Ausstellung findet an diesem Wochenende im Berliner Kunstquartier Bethanien eine
Konferenz statt, ebenfalls unter dem Namen „Samizdata – Taktiken und Strategien des Widerstands“. Am Freitag sprechen Jacob Appelbaum und Laura Poitras über Whistleblowing, Öffentlichkeit und Menschenrechte. Am
Samstag moderiere ich ein Panel über Strategien für den Widerstand im Netz.
SPUTNIK NEWS
SEPTEMBER 15, 2015
W W W. S P U T N I K N E W S . C O M
SPUTNIK NEWS
EVIDENCE OF CONSPIRACY: SECRETS,
D I S S I D E N T S A N D PA N D A S
15.09.2015
An independent journalist, hacker and Wikileaks collaborator, Jacob Appelbaum presents his first solo show in
Germany. One of the key developers of the Tor project, a free software network designed to provide online
anonymity, Appelbaum has been living in exile in Berlin, due to an ongoing investigation into his involvement with
Wikileaks and to repeated harassment at immigration.
The NOME gallery in Berlin showcases a series of six colored infrared photos shot by Appelbaum. Each of the
photographs celebrates a political dissident who has been in some way persecuted his or her government.
PRESSENZA
SEPTEMBER 12, 2015
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PRESSENZA
S A M I Z DATA – B E W E I S D E R
V E R S C H WÖ R U N G
12.09.2015, VON SABINE BOCK
In der Ausstellung SAMIZDATA werden Infrarotbilder u.a. von den Journalisten Glenn Greenwald und David
Miranda aus Sao Paulo gezeigt. Sie publizierten die ersten geheimen Dokumente und Programme der NSA von
Whistleblower Edward Snowden (links). Die WikiLeaks Mitarbeiterin und Journalistin Sarah Harrison begleitete
Edward Snowden im Sommer 2013 von Hongkong nach Moskau. Aus Schutz lebt sie in Berlin, wie einige ihrer
Whistleblower-Kollegen (rechts).
Am Donnerstag, 10. September 2015 wurde bei der NOME Galerie in Berlin-Friedrichshain die Ausstellung
„SAMIZDATA: Beweis der Verschwörung“ eröffnete. Es ist die erste Einzelausstellung von Jacob Appelbaum in
Deutschland vom 11. September bis 31. Oktober 2015 in Deutschland zu präsentieren. Präsentiert und kuratiert
wird die Ausstellung von Tatiana Bazzichelli in Kooperation mit dem Disruption Network Lab.
Der Titel der Ausstellung bezieht sich auf den russischen Begriff „Samizdat“, der Ende der 1950er Jahre in
der Sowjetunion und dem ehemaligen Ostblock die Verbreitung und Vervielfältigung zensierter Literatur auf
nichtoffiziellen Kanälen bezeichnete. Übertragen auf das 21. Jahrhundert passt das Konzept zu Aspekten der
Snowden-Affäre und WikiLeaks, innerhalb der sich involvierte Personen für die Verbreitung von Informationen in
Gefahr bringen.
Mit SAMIZDATA präsentiert Jacob Appelbaum Kunstwerke, die eine Kritik am fortschreitenden Verlust von Freiheit
darstellen; höheres Ziel dabei ist es, vor dem Hintergrund und im Kontext des investigativen Journalismus und des
Leakens von Dokumenten mehr Transparenz zu schaffen.
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SEPTEMBER 12, 2015
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Zum ersten Mal zeigt der Künstler eine Serie von sechs farbigen Infrarot-Fotografien in Form von Cibachrome-Drucken, Porträts seines eigenen Netzwerkes von Freunden und Kollegen: Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald und David Miranda, Julian Assange, Sarah Harrison, William Binney und Ai Weiwei. Die Arbeiten waren ursprünglich
als Zeichen der Bewunderung und des Respekts für die porträtierten Personen und ihre Arbeit entstanden, die
schließlich zur „Snowden-Affäre“ geführt hatte und noch darüber hinaus geht. Jacob Appelbaum nutzt für die
Fotografien farbigen Infrarot-Film, der ursprünglich für das Aufspüren von getarnten Zielen entwickelt und in der
Agrarüberwachung sowie in forensischen Untersuchungen eingesetzt wurde. Mit dem Infrarot-Film entstehen
Bilder, die mehr Informationen als Standardfilm enthalten.
Das 2. Ausstellungsstück ist P2P „Panda to Panda“
Es ist ein in Kooperation mit dem international gefeierten chinesischen Künstler Ai Weiwei entstandenes Projekt, das im Jahr 2015 von Rhizome und dem New Museum in New York in Auftrag gegeben worden war. Für
diese Arbeit schredderten die beiden Künstler NSA-Dokumente, die einst Laura Poitras und Glenn Greenwald
zugespielt worden waren, und befüllten damit in Ai Weiweis Heimatstadt Beijing Pandabär-Plüschtiere. In jedem
Pandabären befindet sich zudem eine Micro SD-Speicherkarte, auf der Weiwei und Appelbaum jeweils eine
Überraschung abgespeichert haben. In einem kurzen Interview am Eröffnungstag der Ausstellung erklärte Jacob
Appelbaum in deutscher Sprache: „Zwanzig Pandabären wurden aus Beijing herausgeschmuggelt und reisten um
die Welt, wobei sie ein menschliches Netzwerk des Daten-Schmuggelns SAMIZDATA bildeten.“ „Panda to Panda“ nimmt Bezug sowohl auf einen umgangssprachlichen Ausdruck für die chinesische Geheimpolizei, als auch
auf die sogenannte Peer to Peer-Kommunikation (P2P), eine dezentralisierte Anwendungsstruktur, die Aufgaben
oder Arbeitspensum auf verschiedene Teilnehmer, „Peers“, verteilt.
D A I LY P H O T O N E W S
SEPTEMBER 14, 2015
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EXHIBITION: JACOB APPELBAUM
14.09.2015, BY MYRIAM BOUDJEMIA
Germany, curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli. In cooperation with Disruption Network Lab.
The title of the show references the Russian word “samizdat”, an important form of dissident activity throughout
the former Soviet bloc in which censored literature was clandestinely reproduced and distributed. Transferred to
the 21st century, the activity also resonates with aspects of the Snowden Affair and WikiLeaks as regards the distribution of information that places involved people at risk. With SAMIZDATA Jacob Appelbaum presents artworks
that are a critique of the progressive loss of liberty, evolving from within a context of investigative journalism and
document-leaking aimed at the higher goal of transparency.
Harrison, William Binney and Ai Weiwei. The works were originally created as a sign of admiration and respect
for the portrayed people and for their work that led to the “Snowden Affair” and beyond. Appelbaum uses color
infrared photographic film that was originally produced to detect camouflaged targets and for use in agricultural
surveillance and forensics investigations, to create pictures that reveal more information than standard film.
SEPTEMBER 14, 2015
W W W. D A I LY P H O T O N E W S . C O M
containing a surprise. The pandas were smuggled out of Beijing and traveled around the world, thus building a
human network of smuggled information: Samizdat/a. „Panda to Panda“ makes reference both to a slang term for
the secret police in China and to peer-to-peer communication (P2P), a distributed communications architecture
that partitions tasks or work loads between peers.
The third work, Schuld, Scham und Angst (Guilt, Shame and Fear) consists of pieces of jewelry filled with mixed
media, shredded journalistic notes and historical, unredacted classified documents from the Summer of Snowden
and the following years. The title relates to the emotions of journalists working with these materials: “fear”, the
feeling that leads to the shredding of documents, “guilt” and “shame” in cognizance of the fact that journalists,
too, have become collaborators in a culture of secrecy. The work was created in collaboration with Manuela
Benetton, Berit Gilma and Lusi Tornado.
Jacob Appelbaum is a post-national independent computer security researcher, journalist and artist.
He lives and works in Berlin.
SAMIZDATA: Evidence of Conspiracy is presented in collaboration with the conference by Disruption Network
Lab, SAMIZDATA: Tactics and Strategies for Resistance, curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli at Kunstquartier Bethanien.
The two-day conference (11-12 September 2015) brings together hackers, artists and critical thinkers who, in light
of the Snowden revelations, apply the concept of resistance and social justice from many different angles. Among
the participants, Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras, Jaromil, Jørgen Johansen, Theresa Züger and Sophie Toupin.
ESPRESSO REPUBBLICA SEPTEMBER 15, 2015
W W W. E S P R E S S O . R E P U B B L I C A . I T
ESPRESSO REPUBBLICA
A L L E N A Z I O N I U N I T E , I L “ T R AT TATO
DI SNOWDEN” PER FERMARE LA
SORVEGLIANZA DI MASSA
15.09.2015
E‘ stato al centro, seppure in modo defilato, di uno dei più grandi scoop della storia del giornalismo. Il mondo
si è accorto di lui solo quando è stato arrestato all‘aeroporto di Heathrow, a Londra, nell‘agosto del 2013, con
l‘accusa di terrorismo. Eppure David Miranda con jihadisti, corrieri di al Qaeda, bombaroli non ha nulla a che
fare: è stato arrestato perché, come partner di Glenn Greenwald – il giornalista americano che, insieme con la
documentarista Laura Poitras, ha ricevuto i file top secret di Edward Snowden – ha aiutato Greenwald e Poitras
nella pubblicazione dei documenti.
Arrestandolo mentre transitava per l‘aeroporto di Londra, servizi segreti e governo inglese, in collaborazione con
gli Stati Uniti, hanno messo le mani sui suoi computer e telefoni nella speranza di fermare l‘uscita dei documenti
e di acquisire prove per l‘inchiesta sulla fuga di file.
Il caso, però, ha scatenato una bufera mondiale e ha dimostrato fino a che punto governi democratici, come
quello inglese, sono disposti ad arrivare per fermare il giornalismo che indaga sui massimi sistemi del Potere e
fino a che punto le leggi contro il terrorismo possono essere abusate in una democrazia.
Oggi David Miranda presenta all‘Assemblea generale delle Nazioni Unite il “ Trattato di Snowden ”: una proposta di accordo internazionale per fermare quella sorveglianza di massa che, dopo le rivelazioni di Snowden,
nessuno può più negare o minimizzare. A supportare l‘iniziativa sono testimonial eccellenti, come Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Noam Chomsky, l‘organizzazione di Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, e registi come Oliver Stone,
che sta lavorando a un film su Edward Snowden. “L‘Espresso” ha chiesto a David Miranda di raccontare i giorni
del caso Snowden che sconvolsero il mondo.
Ricorda quando ha sentito per la prima volta il nome di Snowden?
«Sì, è stato subito dopo che Glenn ha pubblicato gli articoli della prima settimana di rivelazioni, mentre si trovava
a Hong Kong. Prima di quel momento, lo conoscevamo solo come “Citizenfour”. Avevamo parlato di questa
persona, di cosa faceva uscire e delle ragioni per cui lo faceva e questo fatto dava a Glenn così tanta forza di
pubblicare. Ad aprile 2013, quando Laura è venuta da noi a farci vedere un paio di documenti, mostrandoli sui
miei computer, io ero lì e insieme discutevamo del caso. E quando Glenn è volato a New York e a Hong Kong,
eravamo in contatto, ma ho saputo il suo nome solo dopo la pubblicazione degli articoli».
Lei cosa suggerì a Glenn Greenwald? L‘importanza della storia era chiara, ma anche i rischi lo erano...
«Glenn è un giornalista con una grande passione. Può starsene incollato a una sedia per quarantacinque ore a
valutare una storia. Si rendeva conto dei rischi, quello era uno dei più grandi scoop della sua carriera ed era
veramente importante far uscire rivelazioni su questioni su cui lui aveva lavorato per anni. Quindi la mia posizione sulla vicenda era quella di dare il massimo supporto al mio partner, perché io credo in tutto quello che lui
fa. E la mia prima reazione è stata di paura: temevo che potessero farci qualche azione di rappresaglia o che ci
potessero anche uccidere, ma la mia scelta è stata di dargli tutto l‘aiuto di cui aveva bisogno».
Le sono capitate cose preoccupanti nei mesi in cui Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras e altri giornalisti lavoravano sui file di Snowden?
«Ho passato un momento veramente cupo, di grande tensione. E‘ stato il primo sabato successivo alla pubblicazione delle prime storie, quella sulla Verizon e poi quella sul programma Prism. Con Glenn parlavano costantemente al telefono, ma quel giorno non parlammo molto. Io tornai a casa e mi svegliai: mi trovavo nel soggiorno
e il mio computer era sparito. A casa abbiamo molti cani: non avevano abbaiato. Arrivò un tizio del servizio
elettricità e mi disse: abbiamo l‘ordine di tagliarle l‘elettricità. E così fece: tagliò la corrente. Io cercavo di parlare
con Glenn e con Edward Snowden, ma se ne era andato. Non riuscivo a parlare con Glenn, non avevo il numero
di Laura: era una situazione veramente strana. Andai in banca, ma il mio codice di “social security” era bloccato.
Non so per quale ragione. Parlai con un‘impiegata, che mi disse: ‚Sì, il suo codice è bloccato, ma le darò i soldi
comunque, non si preoccupi‘. La signora mi dette i soldi e io andai all‘azienda dell‘elettricità per pagare la bolletta, perché il tipo che mi aveva tagliato la corrente mi aveva rilasciato un documento da cui le bollette risultavano
non pagate. Arrivato lì, l‘impiegata del servizio elettrico mi disse che le nostre bollette erano a posto e che lei
non sapeva perché ci fosse stata tagliata la corrente. A quel punto cominciai a pensare: Edward è andato, hanno
preso Glenn e ora tocca a me. Non volevo andare da nessun amico o dalla mia famiglia, perché non volevo
coinvolgere nessun altro, così tornai a casa, me ne stavo seduto con i miei cani vicini e con gli occhi ben aperti.
La mattina dopo –ricordo benissimo quel momento – sentii i cani che abbaiavano, uscii fuori e vidi Glenn sulla
soglia della porta di casa. Attaccai a piangere come un bambino, perché era sano e salvo».
Nell‘agosto del 2013, lei è stato arrestato a Londra in base alla sezione 7 della legge inglese sulla lotta
al terrorismo, il “Terrorism Act”, mentre viaggiava da Berlino a Rio de Janeiro per supportare il lavoro
giornalistico di Glenn Greenwald e Laura Poitras sui file di Snowden. Per mettere le loro mani sul database dei documenti, i funzionari del governo inglese non hanno avuto alcuno scrupolo a usare le leggi
antiterrorismo contro di lei. Può ricostruire cosa accadde quel giorno in cui fu arrestato?
«Ero andato a Berlino a incontrare Laura. Tornando indietro sono stato fermato e arrestato all‘aeroporto di Heathrow. Mi hanno tenuto in stato di arresto per dodici ore, per nove ore sono stato interrogato e per tre sono
rimasto lì seduto: il mio passaporto era nelle loro mani. Durante l‘interrogatorio ho avuto accesso al mio legale
solo dopo otto ore e quindici minuti. Sono stato interrogato da sette diversi agenti, per otto ore e un quarto di
seguito, in base al “Terrorism Act”. Prima mi avevano spiato. Spiano i giornalisti perché possono: hanno i sistemi
per farlo. E il 16 agosto 2013 [due giorni prima dell‘arresto, ndr] avevano mandato un messaggio alla Casa Bi-
anca per dire che mi avrebbero arrestato, interrogato e avrebbero confiscato i miei materiali. Fare tutto questo
sulla base della legge antiterrorismo è stato un totale abuso di potere».
Lei ha risposto con un‘azione legale contro la decisione del governo inglese di arrestarla in base al Terrorism Act. In tribunale ha perso in primo grado, ma è ricorso in appello. Perché ha fatto questa denuncia e
per quando è prevista la sentenza?
«La sentenza è, in tutta probabilità, prevista per il prossimo anno. In Inghilterra molte autorità hanno detto che è
stato un errore totale, ma io voglio dimostrare quanto siano disgustosi governi come quello inglese, americano,
canadese e australiano: vogliono creare questo mondo, quest‘atmosfera per cui i giornalisti non possono fare il
loro lavoro. Sorvegliano i giornalisti che vogliono esporre gli abusi di potere e poi bollano il loro lavoro come
‚terrorismo‘. E‘ per questo che ho portato avanti la mia azione legale: voglio dimostrare al mondo che possiamo
vincere contro questa gente, possiamo combatterli e costringerli alla trasparenza e alla giustizia».
Gli avvocati di Sarah Harrison, la giornalista di WikiLeaks che ha aiutato Snowden a cercare asilo, le
hanno consigliato di non tornare nel suo paese, l‘Inghilterra, perché tornando avrebbe rischiato di finire
arrestata anche lei per l‘aiuto dato a Snowden. Come giudica quello che WikiLeaks e, in particolare, Sarah Harrison hanno fatto per Edward Snowden?
«Ho un grande rispetto per WikiLeaks: in questi anni hanno fatto un lavoro incredibile: stanno anche lavorando
sul “Trattato di Snowden”».
Parlando del Trattato, quali sono gli aspetti più importanti?
«Il Trattato presenta due aspetti importanti: prima di tutto, dobbiamo fermare la sorveglianza di massa, non possiamo permettere ai governi di raccogliere i nostri dati e di usarli per qualsiasi scopo. Raccogliere i dati di intere
popolazioni è estremamente pericoloso e profondamente sbagliato. Poi ci sono le regole sulla protezione dei
whistleblower. Il whistleblower che è cittadino di un paese che aderisce al Trattato di Snowden dovrà essere
necessariamente protetto».
Considerando quello che è successo a Snowden, a cui l‘intera Europa ha negato l‘asilo, lei crede che ci
sia alcuna seria possibilità che paesi come gli Stati Uniti o gli stati europei adottino il Trattato di Snowden?
«C‘è un grandissimo dibattito attualmente in corso nella sfera delle aziende tecnologiche: è possibile vedere
come stanno cambiando dopo le rivelazioni di Snowden. Senza di esse, questo cambiamento avrebbe richiesto
10-15 anni. Ci sono interi team di quelle aziende negli Stati Uniti, in Europa, in Sud America, che stanno lavorando sulla crittografia, perché sanno che ora i cittadini si preoccupano della privacy. La questione vera non è
quello che i governi vogliono, la questione vera è quello che i cittadini vogliono. Se davvero vogliamo un trattato
come questo, allora dobbiamo lavorare insieme, costruirlo e costringere i governi a firmarlo. Non è qualcosa che
faccio per me o per te, è qualcosa che riguarda l‘intera umanità».
© Riproduzione riservata 15 settembre 2015
BLN FM SEPTEMBER 9, 2015
W W W. B L N . F M
BLN FM
JACOB APPELBAUM UND AI WEIWEI
S C H L I T Z E N PA N D A S A U F
9 . 0 9 . 2 0 1 5 , V O N M A R I A G ÖT Z E L
Internetaktivismus hat spätestens seit der Edward Snowden-Affäre ein Gesicht bekommen. Der ehemalige Mitarbeiter des amerikanischen Geheimdienstes veröffentlichte 2013 über die Plattform Wikileaks geheime Dokumente, welche offiziell machten, was alle schon irgendwie ahnten: USA-Geheimdienste hören die ganze Welt
ab – mit Hilfe “befreundeter” Regierungen. Doch auch eine vermeintlich liberale US-Regierung unter Barack
Obama findet “Geheimnisverrat” nicht witzig: also lebt Snowden jetzt im politischem Asyl in Russland.
Edward Snowden gehört zu sechs “Internetaktivisten”, die Jacob Appelbaum, selbst Fürsprecher für digitale Bürgerrechte und Journalist, in seiner ersten Solo-Ausstellung “Samizdata” mit Portraits Respekt zollt. Damit will er, so
sagte er dem Art-Magazine, „seine persönliche Bewunderung für ihre Arbeit ausdrücken und etwas an sie zurück
geben“. Alle politische Dissidenten setzen sich mit der Überwachung des Internet auseinander.
Mit allen Aktivisten arbeitete Jacob Appelbaum zusammen – auch mit dem chinesischen Künstler Ai Weiwei. Mit
dem Kunststar gestaltete er den zweiten Teil der Ausstellung gemeinsam. Der Titel der Installation „P2P“. Diese
Abkürzung steht für das “peer to peer“-Prinzip: damit ist ein Netzwerk gemeint, in dem Informationen nicht zentral lagern, sondern wie bei bittorrent über viele Computer verteilt sind, die sowohl Daten empfangen als auch
anbieten. Dabei ist das P2P-Prinzip das einzige, welches garantiert, dass Information zirkulieren und Informanten
sicher sind. Denn wir kennen es aus Agententhrillern: Wenn Übeltäter den letzten Zeuge eines Verbrechens mit
dem Beweisfoto ausschalten, erfährt niemand die Wahrheit. Einzige Möglichkeit: die Beweise müssen kopiert und
verstreut werden.
Ironischerweise steht “P2P” aber auch für etwas anderes: mit “Panda to Panda” bezeichnen die Chinesen die
Geheimpolizei, die das Netz überwacht und filtert. Diese Doppeldeutigkeit liefert die Idee für die Installation von
Ai Weiwei und Jacob Appelbaum: erst entnahmen sie zwanzig Plüschpandas die weiße kuschelige Füllung. Dann
stopften sie stattdessen geschredderte NSA-Dokumente hinein, die Edward Snowden 2013 an Journalisten übergab. Jeder Panda trägt gleichzeitig eine Chipkarte in sich, auf der die Dokumente nochmals digital gespeichert
sind. Mittlerweile sind die Plüschtiere mit den brisanten Informationen weltweit auf verschiedene Museen verteilt,
wie Laura Poitras Videodokumentation “The Art Of Dissident” festhält.
Ihr Kunstwerk ist also eine Möglichkeit Informationen verfügbar zu halten – und vor den Zugriff von Zensoren zu
schützen. Eine Modernisierung von des Samisdat-Prinzips, mit dem die politische Opposition in der Sowjetunion
Literatur persönlich von Hand zu Hand verbreitete. Deshalb findet zur Eröffnung der Ausstellung auch mit einer
zweitägige Konferenz “Samizdata: Tactics and Strategies” statt, die Hacker, Künstler und Politaktivisten wie Jacob
Appelbaum, Laura Poitras, Jaromil, Jørgen Johansen, Theresa Züger und Sophie Toupin zusammenbringt.
MITVERGNUEGEN SEPTEMBER, 2015
W W W. M I T V E R G N U E G E N . C O M
MIT VERGNÜGEN
UNSERE 11 KUNSTTIPPS
FÜ R D E N O K TO B E R
SEPTEMBER.2015, VON SASKIA & VERENA
1. Samizdata: Evidence of Conspiracy – NOME
Julian Assange wurde zum Pionier der Whistleblower. Er ist einer jener Menschen, Aktivisten und Hacker, die
schmutzige politische Taktiken furchtlos ans Licht bringen. Zu Edward Snowdon und seinen „Kollegen“ lieferte
Laura Pointas den dokumentarischen Film Citizen Four, in dem auch Jacob Applebaum, der Journalist, Künstler
und Hacker, eine Rolle spielt: Er entschied, welche der von Snowden enthüllten Akten der Öffentlichkeit gezeigt
werden, er repräsentiert Wikileaks mit Assange. Mit Ai Wei Wei erdachte sich Applebaum eine Schmuggeltaktik
für geschredderte NSA-Dokumente per Kuscheltier. Diese Soloshow widmet Applebaum den Heldentaten und
der Riege besagter mutiger Gentlemen und -women.
Bis 31. Oktober 2015
NOME, Dolziger Straße 30
Dienstag – Samstag: 15.00–19.00 Uhr

press review - Nomeproject

Transcription

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