Jamie Kastner's new documentary Nobody Wants to Talk About Jacob Appelbaum allows the Wikileaks star to talk about himself.Courtesy Cave 7 productions/Supplied
Jacob Appelbaum could be called a digital dissident, a dark web technologist, a journalist in exile, a WikiLeaks rock star and a persona non grata. Rolling Stone magazine, in a 2010 profile, called him “the most dangerous man in cyberspace” and “a bizarro version of Mark Zuckerberg.” Applebaum himself just prefers you call him using an encrypted telephone.
He is the peculiar protagonist of Jamie Kastner’s fascinating new documentary Nobody Wants to Talk About Jacob Appelbaum.
“No matter what happens, even if there’s a videotape, it was murder,” Appelbaum says in the documentary’s opening scene. Looking straight into the camera, impishly at first and then dead-seriously, he’s telling Kastner and anyone watching that if he is ever found dead it won’t be by suicide, even if it looks that way.
Paranoid? It’s been said that paranoia is just having the right information. As a journalist, Appelbaum had access to top secret documents leaked by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in 2013. He’s also an associate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
So, yeah, Appelbaum has information.
Although the title of the film is Nobody Wants to Talk About Jacob Appelbaum, Kastner did interview hacker Mitch Altman, civil rights attorney Margaret Ratner Kunstler and others. The doc opens this weekend in Vancouver’s VIFF Centre and at Toronto’s TIFF Lightbox on June 23 and 25 before premiering on CBC Gem, June 26. It is part Kafkaesque comedy and part le Carré-like thriller. The Canadian director Kastner employed all his documentarian powers of persuasion – “encrypted arm-twisting,” as he puts it – to establish a level of trust with the elusive Berlin-based Appelbaum.
“It was nearly two years of cat and mouse and cloak and dagger just to get a foot into the door and start having conversations,” Kastner says. “He is living in another dimension that the rest of us are unaware of. Every aspect of his life is convoluted.”
Once the rising star of the privacy rights movement that works to expose government surveillance programs, Appelbaum resigned from his position with the non-profit Tor Project (a free software network designed to provide online anonymity) after allegations of sexual assault and harassment were levelled against him in 2016.
Convinced he will be arrested if he enters the United States, Appelbaum self-exiled to Berlin, where Kastner first interviewed him on camera. They met in the Canadian embassy during the Berlin Film Festival.
“He is highly aware of potential surveillance,” Kastner says. “As someone who is not used to thinking about that or living in that world, it seems completely surreal.”
Kastner, a veteran filmmaker whose credits include Free Trade Is Killing My Mother and Kike Like Me, has dealt with complicated characters before. His 2016 documentary The Skyjacker’s Tale centres on Ishmael Muslim Ali (formerly Ishmael LaBeet), a convicted murderer who escaped custody by hijacking a plane to Cuba in 1984. On camera, Ali presented as charming and contradictory, as does Appelbaum.
For a man devoted to the cause of online privacy, Appelbaum is secretive yet thirsty for attention – flying under the radar, yet ready for his close-up.
A strange scene takes place in Tel Aviv, where Appelbaum is meeting family members (some from Toronto). While he speaks with Kastner, Appelbaum spots a man he believes is spying on them. It turns out he is a random dude who just happens to be a security expert.
The scene feels staged – not by Kastner, but by Appelbaum. The director takes it in, smiling and semi-puzzled at the weirdness of it all.
“When you’re not an expert in surveillance or security, you don’t know what’s real and what’s not,” Kastner says. “It seems crazy, but it also sounds plausible.”
Appelbaum is described in the film as poised, charismatic and elegant, but he can come off as calculating.
“I’m intrigued by him as a character, but I don’t have any problem with anybody’s take-away about him one way or another,” Kastner says. “The film is not intended to be hagiography. His story is a fascinating story that along the way tells the rise and fall of a movement.”