The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

What’s the Over/Under on How Soon Barrett Brown Gets Arrested Again?

Posted on | May 18, 2026 | No Comments

Barrett Brown, interviewed on NBC News, 2011

Given all the trouble in the world right now, my hunch is that Barrett Brown is somewhere near the bottom of the list of federal law enforcement priorities. It’s been nearly five years since I last devoted a post to him here (“Oh, Dear God: Barrett Brown Again!” July 13, 2021), after he’d gotten himself arrested in England. However, last year, I mentioned Barrett in discussing the Nazi-adjacent YouTube “historian” Ian Carroll, in the context of the dangers of amateurism.

Longtime readers know the whole history, dating back to Ye Olde Blogspot Days, of Barrett Brown’s tiresome obsession with me — an intermittent obsession, I hasten to add. He’ll go for months or years without bothering me, then erupt in a frenzy of accusations. That’s what happened last week, and when I investigated, I discovered that Barrett has recently started a Substack. It’s been about a month since I posted anything on my own Substack, so I thought, how convenient:

It’s a gloriously sunny day here in the foothills of Appalachia, so why am I wasting it this way, typing out an update about somebody you probably never heard of? It’s not as if there aren’t enough newsworthy events I could be writing about — a Louisiana senator lost his seat in the Republican primary Saturday, the first time a sitting senator has lost a primary in more than a decade. But there are other journalists getting paid to do reporting and commentary on serious news like that, and rather than jump onto the dogpile, instead I’ll give you the latest on Barrett Brown.
We go back, Barrett and I. One afternoon in October 2009, he emailed me to call my attention to something unflattering he’d written about me. At the time, Brown was the communications director of the Godless Americans Political Action Committee (a/k/a Enlighten the Vote), while I was gearing up for a road trip to cover the Doug Hoffman campaign in upstate New York . . .
Well, the 2010 midterm campaign came and went, and then in February 2011, someone sent me an email informing me that Barrett Brown had “evidently become a public-relations agent for the hacker group ‘Anonymous,’ which launched cyberattacks against critics of WikiLeaks” . . .

You can read the rest of that 3,000-word opus, in which I mention the possibility of contacting my friends at the Department of Justice to inquire whether it’s true (as someone told me a few years ago) that Barrett skipped out to England as a way of evading his court-ordered restitution payments. There is alleged to be a sealed indictment waiting for Barrett if the feds ever get their hands on him again.

Currently, of course, with Keir Starmer’s Labour government in the UK, it’s unlikely that British authorities would cooperate with U.S. officials seeking extradition and, as I say, despite his (alleged) status as an international fugitive, Barrett Brown is probably very low on the priority list at the DOJ. Could that change? Well, our boy craves attention, so maybe he’ll do some crazy stunt that makes Kash Patel take notice.

Also, meanwhile, Barrett Brown keeps poking Neal Rauhauser. If ever two people deserved each other as enemies, it’s Neal and Barrett.



 

Category: Barrett Brown

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