Snowden urges 1.73M followers to watch video
Their response? Meh.
At 8:41 p.m. Moscow time on December 30, 2015, fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden tweeted from his Russian hideout. “If you watch only one thing today,” he urged his 1.73 million Twitter followers, “make it George Torwell [sic].” Snowden linked to “A message from George Orwell to everyone on the Internet,” a short video posted at YouTube four days earlier by The Juice Media of Melbourne, Australia, whose motto is: “News with true views to restore your faith in the fourth estate.”
Snowden’s tweet included two hashtags, the first imploring #SupportTor — Tor being the anonymizing network and free software developed and deployed by Massachusetts-based nonprofit The Tor Project, and also the explanation of Snowden’s play on words “George Torwell.” The second hashtag, #32c3, signified a 4-day hacker conference held in Hamburg, Germany by Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) that concluded on the evening of Snowden’s tweet.
A day before, the Tor Project’s annual presentation at CCC had featured Juice Media’s video, a slickly made 225-second commercial not just for Tor but also for Signal, a free open-source encrypted mobile messaging app that Snowden plugged in November 2015, tweeting: “I use Signal every day.”
Snowden’s championing of Tor went back even farther. In November 2012, six months before what Wired would call “his blockbuster leaks,” Snowden emailed Runa Sandvik, described by Wired as “a rising star in privacy circles, who was then a key developer on the anonymous web surfing software Tor.” Snowden told Sandvik he ran a major Tor exit and was trying to persuade coworkers to set up additional servers. He asked her to send him a stack of official Tor stickers.
As it happened, Sandvik would be vacationing in Hawaii in December, and offered to present Tor to a local audience. Delighted, Snowden organized a “CryptoParty” at a small Honolulu art space attended by 20 hackers. A year later, one of those coveted Tor stickers would memorably decorate Ed’s laptop lid in the Moscow hotel room where he was interviewed and photographed by Barton Gellman for The Washington Post.
The day after Christmas 2015, and one day before 32C3 convened, Juice Media announced via Twitter that their video was available on YouTube, where they expressed “Special thanks to peeps at the Tor Project for instigating and supporting the production of this video.”
Juice Media also acknowledged “savvy script consultant” Jacob Appelbaum, the Tor Project’s advocate, security researcher, and developer. In May 2013, Appelbaum was asked by filmmaker Laura Poitras to vet an anonymous professed source at the National Security Agency who’d agreed to be interviewed by her. “One of the goals was to determine whether we were really dealing with an NSA whistleblower,” Appelbaum told Der Spiegel in July 2013, a month after Snowden’s leaks first appeared. “I had deep concerns of COINTELPRO-style entrapment. We sent our securely encrypted questions to our source.” Snowden passed the test.
And now Ed was shilling for the Tor Project during its first-ever crowdfunding campaign, which The Verge reported was meant to “expand its donor base beyond the US government … which typically accounts for 80 to 90 percent of annual funding.”
As might be expected in response to being hyped by such a high-profile figure, views of Juice Media’s YouTube video spiked following Snowden’s tweet. Yet what’s unexpected is how relatively shallow that spike was. Juice Media’s own initial Twitter announcement on December 26 generated 11,000 views, presumably from the preexisting fanbase of Juice Media, which since joining YouTube in May 2008 has attracted well over 100K subscribers. Within two days views tapered off, holding steady at 3,000 daily. On the day of Ed’s tweet, views shot back up to 10K, but over the next 72 hours declined to previous levels. Disinterested observers may be forgiven for wondering why the importuning of a celebrity with 1.73 million followers yielded a mere 10K views — an anemic response rate of one-half of one percent.
What’s equally remarkable is that this brief Snowden surge seems not to have translated into donations for the video’s “instigators.” By Christmas Eve, the Tor Project’s month-old crowdfunding campaign had stuffed its stocking with $114K. Extrapolating that daily average through December 29, Tor would’ve raised a total of $132,387 before Snowden promoted Juice Media’s video. On December 31, Tor confirmed, “We have surpassed our goal of $130K (!) — can you help us get to $150K?” However, this scarcely merited a parenthetical exclamation point, since it meant that in the six days culminating in Ed’s tweet, Tor had merely maintained its preceding daily average.
On January 15, 2016, having extended its campaign into the new year, Tor trumpeted, “We are thrilled to announce the total of Tor’s first crowdfunding campaign. This community is amazing. #ThankYou.” Over the course of 53 days, Tor had bagged $205,874 from 5,265 donors, averaging $39.10 apiece. In all honesty, though, given the precipitous plunge in views of Juice Media’s video over the same span, we cannot attribute much of Tor’s good fortune to the single bounce of Snowden’s tweet.
Could it be that Snowden’s influence is waning? One shudders at the thought.