Three days in Beijing with Ai Weiwei, Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras, the global dissident elite
by Kashmir Hill, Fusion, April 27, 2015
Appelbaum became involved in environment and animal activist groups as a teenager, and began learning about privacy-enhancing technologies after he discovered the extent to which activists can become targets for monitoring. While working in IT in his twenties for Greenpeace and the BDSM porn site Kink.com, he started volunteering for Tor. In 2006, he met Julian Assange at the Computer Chaos Club, a Berlin-based hacker association, and by 2008, Appelbaum had fully embraced the anarcho-hacker life.