Barrett Brown, Who Threatened Me, Is Sentenced to Five Years in Federal Prison

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In September 2012, days before his final epic meltdown — ranting on YouTube about his plans to “destroy” an FBI agent — Barrett Brown threatened me, warning of dire consequences if I did not call him immediately. To that I responded with an email:

“Look at yourself, Barrett: Publishing error-strewn ‘documents’ on Pastebin. . . . You’re publicly self-destructing, and it’s not a pretty sight. Seek professional help.”

He didn’t listen. He was sentenced to federal prison Thursday:

A Dallas man who acted as a spokesman for the underground group Anonymous and whose prosecution raised First Amendment concerns among journalists and Internet activists was sentenced Thursday to five years and three months in prison.
Barrett Brown, 33, pleaded guilty in April to threatening an FBI agent, attempting to hide two laptops during the execution of a search warrant and offering to help another hacker. The charges related to a 2011 hack of Austin-based Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor, which disclosed previously unknown information about the world of defense contractors.
“Mr. Brown collaborated with and supported the hackers,” U.S. District Judge Sam A. Lindsay in Dallas said in court on Thursday. “He is more involved than he wants me to believe.”

Given that he has already spent 31 months in federal custody, the sentence means that Brown will be eligible for release sometime in 2017. He was also ordered to pay nearly $900,000 in restitution and fines. The Guardian goes to great lengths in its effort to depict Brown as a martyred hero, but he was a victim of nothing except his own insane arrogance. I tried to warn him in September 2012:

“You don’t need a lawyer, Barrett. You need a psychiatrist, or perhaps a priest to exorcise your demons. You are traveling a road to destruction, as harmful to yourself as to any of your chosen enemies. Get help.”

Barrett Brown was no hero. He was not an “investigative journalist.” Barrett Brown was a grandiose fool, a heroin-addicted famewhore chasing the phantoms of his paranoid imagination.

He was The Kook Who Knew Too Much.

 

15 comments

  1. Good. I suppose it’s too much to hope that he will use this time to work on developing some humility. I can’t wait for his 10,000 word opus on how he was set up by “Team Themis”.

  7. I wish that were true. I’ve had childhood friends who ended up in Federal Prison come out more addicted than when they went in.

    Getting the drugs is easy…it’s the paying for them that is hard…or distasteful anyways;

  8. In the same vein the Doxbin the page that my twitter stalkers used to DOX me and post the lie I steal other people photos, I’m a convicted human trafficker and a criminal and they encouraged people to harass me is GONE the Feds and Europol shut it down

  12. Well. As we can see from the photo, his mouth is big enough. Weird coincidence, that our conversation tended in that direction, and that the image accompanying the story was so well-suited… 😉

  13. He’s lucky to get the nickel stretch.
    There are a lot of places where his mouth would’ve gotten him one to the head. Hard to imagine anyone more deserving. (of the five years of course:- )

  14. Well, I agree in the sense that neither are likely to enjoy it at all. I had never heard of him before, but he seems crazy enough to actually treat it like an assignment. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing — we could use more and better reporting on the conditions in our prison system — but he is unlikely to be kind to his subject, and vice versa.

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