Category: Barrett Brown

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.

2012: Barrett Brown calmly explains why he’s going to ‘destroy’ an FBI agent

Longtime readers will remember Barrett Brown, the former “Anonymous” spokesman who went to federal prison after a September 2012 incident in which he threatened an FBI agent’s family in a bizarre 13-minute video rant on YouTube. That episode went down while I was trying to cover the 2012 presidential election, but Barrett had been threatening me (and also Patterico) in connection with some of the weirdness swirling around Neal Rauhauser, which is a very long story.

My habit, from decades in the news business, is to operate in “file it and forget it” mode. Once I’m through covering a story, I forget about it and move on, and this would certainly apply to Barrett Brown, if he could just go somewhere and stop bothering people. Prison would be best, but the feds had to turn him loose (“Notoriously Crazy Felon Barrett Brown Has Been Released From Federal Prison,” Nov. 29, 2016) and a couple years ago, he showed up in the comments here with a bunch of paranoid accusations (“Is Barrett Brown Back on the Junk?” July 1, 2019). Did I mention he’s a heroin addict? Because whether or not he is back to his old junkie habits, the symptoms of organic brain damage caused by Barrett’s years of substance abuse are readily apparent.

Can you say “impaired judgment,” boys and girls?

The American journalist Barrett Brown has been arrested and detained in the UK for allegedly overstaying his visa and for alleged public order and incitement offences relating to his role in holding a protest banner which said: “Kill Cops.”
Police arrested Brown on Monday at a canal boat moored in east London, where he had been living for several months with a British woman. He was interviewed and released on bail the following day, but immediately detained by immigration authorities.
Brown told the Guardian he intended to claim asylum in the UK. . . .
Brown said he had been in Britain since November. His profile in London grew last month when he was photographed without a mask at a protest against a new crime bill. . . .

Hey, if you’re a convicted felon in a foreign country on an expired visa, maybe holding up a “KILL COPS” banner is not such a good idea.

Oh, but Barrett is an “investigative journalist,” see?

Speaking to the Guardian [May 21] from Brook House immigration removal centre near Gatwick airport, 28 miles south of London, Brown said two of the alleged offenses for which he was arrested concerned the banner.
He said that . . . police turned up at Bow Locks, on the River Lea in a rundown eastern district of the city, after his fiancée left for a coronavirus vaccine appointment.
Brown said he intended to claim asylum in the UK on the basis that he had been persecuted in the US for his journalism.
“The asylum case is something I’ve been thinking of doing for a couple of months,” he said, “because I’m just not confident in the US’s ability to properly handle me, any more than they did last time.”

What “journalism” has Barrett done lately that anyone would bother to “persecute” him for? Heroin addicts are not noted for their productivity, and if Barrett’s byline has appeared anywhere the past two years, I must have missed it, but it’s not like he’s been exposing some dark government secrets that would result in him being “persecuted.”

As recently as a year ago, he spent a month in rehab and — here’s that impaired judgment symptom of his brain damage again — then apparently decided to travel via Antigua to London in order to crash on a houseboat in a river on the bad side of town with a “fiancee” (likely some credulous bimbo impressed by the famous America “investigative journalist”) then overstayed his visa, a crime he might have gotten away with, had it not been for his genius idea to show up at a public protest holding a “KILL COPS” sign. Now he wants to play persecuted martyr by forcing the British government to grant him asylum, and I can only hope he succeeds. Farewell and adieu, Barrett! Go somewhere — anywhere will do — load up on narcotics and nod off like the hopeless junkie you are, and stop bothering the rest of us with your self-aggrandizing drama.

Someday he’ll die of an OD, and nobody will bother to notice.

September 2012: Barrett Brown threatens to ‘destroy’ an FBI agent

It’s been a few months since I’ve mentioned this pathetic soul (“Is Barrett Brown Back on the Junk?” July 1), and so I must remind you that Barrett is the journalistic fame-whore who, circa 2010-2011, attempted to cash in on the notoriety of the “Anonymous” hackers. He appointed himself the de facto “spokesman” of that digital anarchist mob and managed to wangle a book deal out of it, but before he could complete the manuscript, Barrett’s craziness did him in. He got raided by the FBI and, when federal prosecutors began pressuring him to cooperate, Barrett flipped out and recorded a series of bizarre YouTube rants in which, among other things, he threatened to “destroy” one of the FBI agents involved in his raid. Well, this was foolish, and in January 2015, Barrett was sentenced to federal prison. He was released in November 2016, and has recently returned to his habit of ranting about conspiracy theories.

Last week, Barrett published a column at CounterPunch in which he mostly quoted his own press clippings, complaining about how he was portrayed by, for example, Adrien Chen in a 2013 Gawker profile. He meanders on for several paragraphs before descending into his favorite swamp, a conspiracy theory involving HBGary that Brown has been hyping since 2011-2012, and which he has never been able to explain with enough clarity to make anyone do whatever it is he imagines should be done to those he has “exposed” as nefarious schemers.

Barrett wants to be relevant — a newsworthy public figure — but his output as an “investigative journalist,” which consists mainly of recycling that 2012 stuff about HBGary, doesn’t justify such notoriety. And so he continues sparring with the shadow of his own diminished reputation.

Did I mention he got permanently banned from Twitter? Last week, Barrett also found time to send a lengthy email to Twitter, which he published under the headline, “An Open Letter To Twitter Regarding The Safe Space It’s Created for Nazis.” His chief grievance seems to be that some of those who complained about his Twitter account are “alt-right” types, and he concludes with this remarkable paragraph:

I’m asking that my account, @BarrettBrown_, be restored immediately — today, the 25th of October, as you’ve had over a month to deal with this since [DailyDot writer David] Gilmour first wrote to you asking for comment- and that I be given the verified status that others in the press have called for me to receive. I’m also asking that @PursuanceProj, which has been suspended twice without explanation, also receive this status, given how vulnerable it’s proven to people who have correctly decided there are no repercussions for making false reports about non-profits and then bragging about what they’ve done in full view of journalists (see below). Finally, I’m asking that a representative from Twitter be made available on an ongoing basis for press to contact directly about the violent threats, doxing, and other ongoing criminal activities. And just as a favor, I’d like to ask that Twitter refrain from lying to the public about having supposedly reached out to me after a previous ban was reversed, as one of your representatives claimed to the press on a recent occasion.

Well, good luck I guess. It’s been more than three years since my @rsmccain account was banned from Twitter without any real explanation, and if Barrett should somehow overturn his permanent suspension there might be hope not only for me but others on the right (“alt-” and otherwise) to also get our accounts reinstated. But I’m not holding my breath, and if Barrett got un-suspended, I’d be surprised.

Barrett Brown’s biggest failure is that he is not consistently productive. You cannot build a career in journalism if you’re not publishing regularly and, given that Barrett can’t seem to quit reliving his past “glories” (such as they were), what does he expect? Also, it should be noted, Barrett has a habit of jumping onto whatever conspiracy-theory bandwagon happens to be rolling through the “progressive” Left, trying to claim credit for other journalists’ work in “exposing” some malfeasance.

Take, for example, the tech firm Palantir. Back in the day, Palantir was part of a proposed alliance known as “Team Themis,” which HBGary’s Aaron Barr wanted to put together to deal with the problem of “Anonymous” hackers. It’s important to emphasize that “Team Themis” never actually existed; it was simply something that Barr had proposed, and because “Anonymous” was able to hack Barr’s email, this became part of a conspiratorial myth that Barrett Brown refuses to turn loose.

Well, the New York Times and others have recently reported about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) using data-collection software from Palantir to locate illegal aliens, and this has become a cause célèbre among open-borders activists. Brown has tried to claim credit for “exposing” the Palantir/ICE connection, but he had nothing to do with this, and is merely trying to attach himself to the story like a parasite. For that matter, Barrett didn’t expose “Team Themis” either; he just became obsessed with it to such an extent that some accounts now incorrectly credit him for a story that was widely reported by other journalists covering tech and security issues at the time.

A lot of people who are by no means “alt-right” have long since seen through Barrett Brown’s “investigative journalist” pretensions, and his critics include other journalists who are weary of Barrett’s self-dramatizing legend of himself as a lonely courageous truth-seeker. Barrett is lazy and undisciplined, and maybe for all we know he’s returned to his heroin addiction. Also, he seems to have blown past another book deadline, demonstrating his characteristic irresponsibility. How long before he turns up on YouTube babbling like a lunatic about the vast conspiracy against him? I only pay attention to his plight because sometimes the demented fame-whore sometimes includes me as one of the conspirators in this imaginary anti-Barrrett Brown plot.

Judging from his disheveled appearance and incoherent manner in a recent YouTube video, I think it’s entirely possible that Barrett Brown has returned to his heroin habit. He’s definitely returned to his idée fixe — the “Team Themis” conspiracy theory he spent so much time babbling about before his epic September 2012 YouTube meltdown, when he threatened an FBI agent and eventually ended up in federal prison.

Having gone months without giving any thought whatsoever to Barrett Brown, I was startled when my brother called me late Monday to inform me that the former spokesman for Anonymous had shown up in the comments of my post about Portland’s Antifa terrorists:

Hey there, Stacy!
Did you happen to know that the Neal Rauhauser fellow you and Pat Frey decided to tie me to despite my efforts to assist Frey was working for both Infragard and the FBI? In fact, for the same FBI handler that ran Jennifer Emick, Daniel Borsuk?
Did you happen to know of this, Stacy? Because it kind of seems like you were cooperating pretty hard with the FBI and Emick to smooth the way into prison for me, and no bond, etc. And that does sound like the sort of cowardly thing that a neo-confederate man-child mediocrity would pull against someone whom he was never comfortable actually linking to when trying to refute him. Sounds like a Sons of Confederate Veterans move.
Want to see those documents, and the call I had with the agent this morning?
Go back and read the articles you had Emick write here, and the ones you wrote about me before I got back out and you shut right the fuck back up again. Then look at Neal here checking in with Emick’s scummy FBI handler. You’re not even a snitch; you’re a greasy little police informant disinformation artist.
That’s how you’ll be remembered, Stacy.

What, exactly, is he ranting about? It was not a secret that Neal Rauhauser frequently communicated with the FBI — Neal boasted about it, and many people believed he was being “protected” by the FBI because of his value as an informant. Was Neal “working for . . . the FBI”? Was he on their payroll? Considering the vast sums Neal owed in unpaid child-support, I would consider it highly unlikely the feds would hire him, even if they could possibly get him a security clearance, which of course they couldn’t. And screen-shot copies of emails as “evidence” of such a relationship? As if this kind of “evidence” couldn’t be forged?

This last time I paid any attention to Barrett was in November 2016 (“Notoriously Crazy Felon Barrett Brown Has Been Released From Federal Prison”) at which time I wrote this:

This “investigative journalist” bullshit is the hero-martyr narrative Barrett’s paranoid anarchist fanboys want to believe, in the same way some people want to believe Jim Garrison’s crackpot conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination, but it simply is not true.
Brown was an opportunistic famewhore who got in over his head trying to cash in on the “Anonymous” criminal hacking spree of 2010-2011. He appointed himself the unofficial spokesman for Anonymous, fooled quite a few clueless mainstream journalists into taking him seriously, hustled a book deal for himself and a co-author and then . . .
Oh, it’s a long, sad story.

You can read the rest of that. As to why Barrett decided to drop in on the comments here, my guess is he’s lonely and wants attention. But who knows what goes on in the mind of a madman?

Damn his atheist soul, but Barrett Brown is an excellent writer. His mistake was to think this qualified him to be an “investigative journalist,” a task for which his heroin addiction probably disqualified him, as if his habit of associating with criminal terrorists were not bad enough. Fortunately for Barrett, he flipped out in September 2012 and threatened an FBI agent in a manic YouTube meltdown. This has provided him the opportunity to write literary criticism, and this week Barrett Brown takes on novelist Jonathan Frantzen:

In Purity, marriages fail one after another in excruciating 50-page flashbacks. No one is particularly likable or even unlikable, though a few do manage to be insufferable. Toward the end we’re treated to one great character, the cynical plutocrat dad of one of the dastardly feminists, but then he disappears from view and promptly dies. The megalomaniacal information activist is admirably complex, but as a megalomaniacal information activist myself, I found him unconvincing. The one murder that serves to kick off the plot is perpetuated against an otherwise minor off-screen character rather than one of the several main characters whom the reader might have much preferred to see murdered. Franzen is also rather hard on the ladies, whereas everyone would have been better served had he instead been harder on himself and maybe put out a better book.
It’s worth reiterating, though, that this sort of subject matter is not my cup of tea to begin with, and I certainly don’t want anyone to refrain from reading a novel that might interest them simply because I said mean things about it. If you’re up for a “moving meditation on marriage and friendship,” then you should probably read Freedom over and over again until your eyes bleed. If divorce and infidelity and guilt and trial separation is your thing, then you’d better get your ass over to the nearest book store and pick up a copy of Purity. You need not worry about what I think. But if you’re curious anyway, what I think is that I hate you.

You can and should read the whole thing, and laugh as you envision Barrett doing hard time in a federal penitentiary, where he is paying his debt to society and writing witty essays.

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.

Dangerous criminal Barrett Brown issues insane statement after getting five-year federal sentence. DON'T #FreeBB pic.twitter.com/2vAS0jCgkS

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) January 23, 2015