NEW YORK CITY–A Wikileaks editor, deciding not to risk a confrontation with federal agents, skipped a high-profile speaking engagement at a hacker conference here on Saturday.
Instead, Jacob Appelbaum, a Seattle-based programmer for the Tor Project, who’s involved in the Wikileaks Web site, took over the 1 p.m. ET keynote slot on behalf of co-founder Julian Assange.
Appelbaum used the opportunity to exhort a largely sympathetic audience to support Wikileaks by volunteering or by donating money, to address recent criticisms of the document-publishing Web site, and to boast that Wikileaks remains uncensorable. “You can try to take us down… but you can’t stop us,” he said.
“The whole idea of hunting” for Assange is misguided, Appelbaum said. “You can cut off the head, but there will be more.”
CNET previously reported that organizers of The Next HOPE conference said that six Homeland Security agents showed up on Friday morning looking for Assange, who’s at the center of a storm of publicity involving a video that a U.S. serviceman may have provided to document-sharing site Wikileaks.
Appelbaum wasn’t taking any chances: after his speech ended, he indicated he’d be back after the leaked video finished playing. But he ducked behind a curtain and left the conference hotel through a rear door, while a doppelganger wearing the same style of black hoodie (with his head covered) made a very public exit through the front……Appelbaum is a hacker and security researcher who co-founded the Noisebridge hacker space in San Francisco’s Mission district. He’s also worked to bypass the security of “smart” parking meters, unearth flaws in Web security certificates, and discover a novel way to bypass hard drive encryption.
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