On April 22, 2015, art activist Ai Weiei met with computer security researcher and hacker Jacob Applebaum in Beijing, China to collaborate on an art project. The two worked together to create “Panda to Panda,” a project in which they effectively distributed a backup of shredded, published documents to the United States, China, Germany, Britain, Russia, and Canada.
Jacob Applebaum collaborated with Weiwei on the piece. Applebaum, best known for his hacking activities, is not able to return to the United States and continues to fight for transparency in government.
These two men have become targets of their countries—Ai a target of China and Jacob a target of the United States. Both have been detained and interrogated at separate points. Ai was beaten by the Chinese government so severely that he now has a traumatic brain injury. He was held by his government for 81 days. He is now unable to leave China. In order to protect his son, he moved him to Berlin and is unable to see him.
Jacob is unable to return to the United States. He now lives in Berlin and his lawyers have advised him not to return to the US because of an ongoing investigation on Wikileaks.
Together, in their “Panda to Panda” project, the men shredded published government documents. They then proceeded to remove the stuffing from panda bears and fill those pandas with the shredded documents. Inside each of the pandas they placed a memory card that had backups of these documents. Applebaum says, “We’re going to distribute [the pandas] to as many different places as we can, so it’s like a distributed backup—if you send one to different places it makes it impossible to destroy the information without destroying all 20 of them.”
