English Audio Request

Even in the world of hackers and web revolutionaries, Appelbaum's dedication to the internet is startling (it is "the only reason I'm alive today", he once told Rolling Stone magazine). He found in computers an escape from a chaotic upbringing and credits his skill in technology for moving him out of America's underclass and into the middle class. As well as working at the university he is also a spokesman for Tor, a free internet-anonymising software that helps people defend themselves against surveillance, and he is spent five years teaching activists how to install and use the service to avoid being monitored by repressive governments. Now he himself is frequently targeted by the US government as a result of his relationship with WikiLeaks, which used Tor software.
Sometimes, though, hackers don't realise they are no longer outsiders but have their hands on the levers of power. Tech writer Danny O'Brien points to Bill Gates, who continued to believe right up until the anti-trust lawsuits of the 1990s that Microsoft would be destroyed by big powerful companies such as IBM – despite the fact that he was, by then, one of the world's richest men and Microsoft the world's biggest IT company. Furthermore, it can prove difficult to reconcile the subversive hacker mindset with the demands of running a multinational firm. A robust disregard for intellectual property in youth, for example, is often replaced with a cadre of lawyers enforcing draconian copyright law once the requisite information has been hacked, the product built and the company made profitable.
O'Brien is himself an embodiment of the transformation. This once-shabby Londoner, who wrote a tech newsletter called Need To Know, meets me in a swish cocktail bar in Palo Alto, California. "When we wrote [NTK] originally, geeks were under-represented; an unconnected group of outsiders who were excited about technology. But now the story is how much ridiculous power we have and how we're misusing that power or unaware of it."