Category: Barrett Brown

Barrett Brown and ‘Team Themis’

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Barrett Brown explains his
‘informational schematic,’ December, 2010

Excuse me for dwelling on Barrett Brown today, but amid a coordinated media push to beatify Saint Barrett of the Blessed Suboxone, it’s important to keep pushing back, even if some readers are getting bored by this celebrity criminal douchebag. Here’s a key section from Alexander Zaitchik’s Rolling Stone profile of Barrett:

The biggest fish flopping in Brown’s net was the story of a cluster of contractors known as Team Themis. The origins of Team Themis dated to Bank of America’s alarm over Julian Assange’s 2010 claim to possess documents that “could take down a bank or two.” The Department of Justice recommended Bank of America retain the services of the white-shoe D.C. law firm Hunton & Williams and the high-­powered intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. On behalf of Bank of America, Hunton & Williams turned to the large and growing world of InfoSec subcontractors to come up with a plan, settling on HBGary and two data­intelligence shops, Berico Technologies and Palantir Technologies.
The Themis three were also preparing a proposal for Hunton & Williams on behalf of another client, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The leaked HBGary documents revealed that Themis was exploring ways of discrediting and disrupting the activities of organized labor and its allies for the Chamber. The potential money at stake in these contracts was considerable. According to Wired, the trio proposed that the Chamber create a $2-million-­a-month sort of cyber special-forces team “of the kind developed and utilized by the Joint Special Operations Command.” They also suggested targeting a range of left-of-center organizations, including the SEIU, watchdog groups like U.S. Chamber Watch, and the Center for American Progress. (The Chamber of Commerce and Bank of America have denied ever hiring Team Themis or having any knowledge of the proposals.)
In pursuit of the Chamber and Bank of America contracts, the Themis three devised multipronged campaigns amounting to a private-sector information-age COINTELPRO, the FBI’s program to infiltrate and undermine “subversive” groups between 1956 and 1971. Among the Themis ideas presented to Hunton & Williams: “Feed the fuel between the feuding groups. Disinformation. Create messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization. Submit fake documents and then call out the error.”

This is something I’ve repeated over and over, but let me repeat it once again: NONE OF THIS EVER ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

That is to say, what was revealed by the HBGary hack was a series of e-mails in which Aaron Barr (as part of Team Themis) proposed to engage in various outlandish schemes against the enemies of the Chamber of Commerce, however:

  1. These were merely proposals made in e-mails in an effort by HBGary (in cooperation with Berrico and Palantir) to win a contact through a law firm working for the Chamber of Commerce;
  2. Neither the law firm nor the Chamber of Commerce ever approved a contract with “Team Themis” for this work; and therefore
  3. None of the shenanigans proposed in the e-mails were ever more than “stuff somebody wrote in e-mails.”

Barrett Brown’s obsession with Team Themis was fundamentally misguided. Aaron Barr’s wacky “Super Spy” ideas were never carried out by HBGary, by any of HBGary’s Team Themis partners, or by anyone acting on behest of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Furthermore, the idea that this Team Themis stuff was the subject of important “investigative journalism” by Barrett Brown and his grandiose Project PM group is ridiculous. Go read Nate Anderson’s excellent February 2011 Wired article, “Spy Games: Inside the Convoluted Plot to Bring Down WikiLeaks.”

That’s 4,400 words and Anderson was able to publish that rather exhaustive account within a few days of the HBGary hack. Barrett Brown then spent the next 18 months digging through the HBGary e-mails with his Project PM friends . . . for what?

Where was the big payoff? What did Brown uncover from those e-mails that meaningfully advanced the story beyond what Nate Anderson did in February 2011? To borrow Dorothy Parker’s famous putdown of Oakland, there was no “there” there.

Yet if you examine the transcripts of Barrett Brown’s September 2012 video meltdown — Transcript 1, Transcript 2, Transcript 3 — you find that, in his paranoid state, Brown acted as if Aaron Barr had committed horrible crimes and as if the very existence of Team Themis (an ad hoc collaboration that, in fact, ended in February 2011) justified Brown’s insane plans for revenge:

Then later, you know, more things happened. Among them, on February fifth, an article appeared in the fucking Financial Times, saying that, uh, this Aaron Barr fellow had found the identities of all these Anons, and knew their leader and their co-founder . . .
So we wrote a little funny press release, me and Topiary and a few other people, uh a couple in there I forgot we all kind of collaborated on it; put it out on my DailyKos account and on the AnonOps deals and blah-blah. And then the next day they hacked HBGary . . .
Anyway, so Aaron Barr resigned a month later after what was found, including the Team Themis stuff. Now, HBGary, that term, that got out a lot. What, what didn’t quite  make as much press, but made a few, was that all of these, this conspiracy directed against us, that involved me for some reason even though I was doing nothing even remotely wrong. . . .

Wait just a doggone minute there, Barrett. You can’t just make an off-hand reference to “me and Topiary and a few other people” and not explain that “Topiary” (a/k/a Jake Davis) is a criminal hacker indicted on federal conspiracy charges. You say that you collabored with this criminal hacker in authoring the Feb. 5, 2011, press release published under your name at Daily Kos, mocking Aaron Barr and “then the next day they hacked HBGary.” Gosh, what a coincidence.

Just hanging out in the IRC chats with your buddies, “doing nothing even remotely wrong,” writing press releases about Aaron Barr the day before he got hacked. And then the next day, within an hour of the hacking, you report the news at Daily Kos, subsequently updating with yet another “Anonymous” press release.

Because you were “doing nothing even remotely wrong,” obviously, despite this highly suggestive evidence that you had advance knowledge of their plans and your own admission that you were in communication with the criminal “Topiary” (a/k/a Jake Davis) “and a few other people.” Please, Mr. Brown, tell us more:

HBGary, uh, they got upset, and they went to the FBI . . . now they’re talkin’ to the FBI — we don’t know exactly what was said, and in fact I knew very little about their response and what they were doing until about two months ago, when another hack occurred. . . . It was a hack of a woman named Jennifer Emick. Jennifer Emick is a FBI informant. . . .
I can tell you that at the same time that she was an FBI informant, and in fact paid for supplies, given assignments, actively worked with by an agent named Daniel Borsuk, who’s gonna wish he never — anyway, uh, during that same time, she was being paid, or rather was supposed to be paid, by HBGary for her services. I don’t know if the FBI knew that, but they know it now, because I know it, and they monitor me.

Let us stipulate that Barrett Brown is crazy, and we can’t believe a word he says. With that in mind, what he is saying is that Jennifer Emick was both paid by HBGary and was an informant working with FBI Agent Daniel Borsuk. True or not, the point is that somehow, in Barrett Brown’s mind, the role of Jennifer Emick explains why the FBI served a search warrant on him in March 2012.

Does that make sense, or does it violate Occam’s Razor? Because see, as I’m looking at it, the FBI’s interest in Barrett Brown probably had something to do with his demonstrably close relationship with the criminal “Topiary” (a/k/a Jake Davis) “and a few other people.” But please, do continue with your explanation, Barrett Brown:

[T]here was very little for me to use to show what’s been happening to me, uh, vis-a-vis the Justice Department, um, since early 2011, when I was involved in exposing something that they put together, Team Themis, uh, in which they had some companies go after WikiLeaks and also Glenn Greenwald, the US citizen who’s a journalist who, uh, is the enemy of the state now apparently, um, plus other activist groups on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce and all that, but Holder’s Justice Department did not investigate that, there were no raids. . . .
Every little news circus I create from here on out directs the media and the public to the criminal conspiracy that was never investigated last year involving Team Themis and the Justice Department, Eric Holder’s little fuckin’ Justice Department, already fuckin’ under a cloud, you know, not relative to the Bush administration but still almost as bad, ah, you know, and uh that helps, so I have no choice left but to defend my family, myself, my girlfriend, uh, my reputation, my work, my activism, my ideas, and the revelations that my friends are going to prison so that we can have a chance to get out for other people, so that they would matter. And frankly, you know, it was pretty obvious I was gonna be dead before I was forty or so, so I wouldn’t mind going out with two FBI sidearms and a fuckin’ Egyptian pharoah. Adios.

Right. There was a “criminal conspiracy . . . involving Team Themis and the Justice Department,” rather than, say, a criminal conspiracy involving actual criminals, among them the hacker “Topiary” (a/k/a Jake Davis) “and a few other people.”

What Barrett Brown has done, you see, is to turn reality upside down, so that the HBGary e-mails sent by Aaron Barr were a “criminal conspiracy.” The failure of the Justice Department to prosecute Barr and his Team Themis cohorts for the federal crime of sending e-mails is, according to Barrett Brown, proof that the Justice Department itself was part of this “criminal conspiracy.”

The fact that Team Themis was assembled to attempt to get contracts to protect clients against Anonymous hackers — well, that’s just evil, to Barrett Brown, whose mind can’t seem to grasp the concept that hacking into other people’s computers is actually a crime.

Speaking of crime, perhaps readers didn’t notice when Alexander Zaitchik described how Team Themis “suggested targeting a range of left-of-center organizations, including . . . watchdog groups like U.S. Chamber Watch” — does that name ring a bell?

The reference is to U.S. Chamber Watch, a wholly owned project of Brett Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution! Of course, at that point, I’d never heard of Brett Kimberlin or Velvet Revolution, but it’s kind of weird how, over the course of several months in 2011 and 2012, these divergent threads came together. In September 2011, Neal Rauhauser e-mailed Barrett Brown’s colleague Gregg Housh to coordinate “Occupy” activism on behalf of Velvet Revolution. And in September 2012, Rauhauser as “Carlito2000” got Barrett Brown agitated about Jennifer Emick.

So while Barrett Brown is being celebrated as a journalistic hero by the New York Times and Rolling Stone, I’m being sued by the convicted bomber Brett Kimberlin for “DEFAMATION, MALICIOUS PROSECUTION, HARASSMENT, STALKING, CONSPIRACY, INVASION OF PRIVACY AND INTENTIONAL INFLICTION OF EMOTIONAL DISTRESS” and yet — checking my e-mail inbox again — no, neither David Carr of the New York Times nor Alexander Zaitchik of Rolling Stone seems to find that story interesting.

Just a coincidence, I’m sure . . .

 

 

 

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Barrett Brown, Special Snowflake

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Barrett Brown promotes atheism on Fox News, January 2009

“Karen Lancaster always believed her only son was special” — that line in Alexander Zaitchik’s Rolling Stone profile of Barrett Brown stands out as explaining how this high-school dropout who started “dabbling” with heroin at age 19 was able to imagine himself as the hero of a psycho-drama in which he would “destroy” an FBI agent to vindicate himself against the conspiracy of which he accused his enemies.

Oh, the Special Snowflake! Couldn’t be bothered to obey the law, because the law isn’t meant to apply to Special Snowflakes:

Brown grew up in the affluent North Dallas neighborhood of Preston Hollow, where, following his parents’ divorce, he lived with his New Age mother. Karen Lancaster always believed her only son was special — he once wrote that she called him “an indigo child with an alien soul.” Among her house rules was that mother and son meditate together daily. She instructed him in the predictions of Nostradamus and made sure he kept a dream journal for the purpose, as Brown described it, “of helping him divine the future by way of my external connection to the collective unconscious.” (For her part, Brown’s mother says she was progressive, but not “New Age”, and that her son’s comments were made in jest.)
A precocious pre-adolescent reader and writer, Brown produced a newspaper on his family’s desktop computer while in elementary school. When he started writing for the student paper at his private high school in the mid-Nineties, he quickly clashed with the paper’s censors over his right to criticize the administration. “Barrett always challenged authority, even as a kid, and anytime you go up against authority, you’re going to get in trouble,” says Brown’s father, Robert. “You could sort of always see this coming.”
By the time he reached high school, Brown had discovered Ayn Rand and declared himself an atheist. He founded an Objectivist Society at school and distinguished himself from other Randians by placing second out of 5,000 entrants in a national Ayn Rand essay contest. (Brown now expresses regret over this.) By all accounts, Brown hated everything about organized education, preferring to follow his own curricula and chat up girls on the bulletin-board systems of a still-embryonic Internet.
After his sophomore year, Brown told his parents he wasn’t going back. He signed up for online courses and spent his junior year in Tanzania with his father, a Maserati-driving conservative, safari hunter and serial entrepreneur who was trying to launch a hardwood-harvesting business. “Barrett loved living in Africa,” says his father. “He preferred adventure to being in school with his peers. We weren’t far from the embassy that was bombed that year.”
Brown returned to the U.S. and in 2000 joined some of his childhood friends in Austin, where he spent two semesters taking writing classes at the University of Texas. After dropping out, he spent a summer doing what one friend calls a “heroic” amount of Ecstasy and acid before settling into the charmed life of a pre-crisis Austin slacker — working part-time, smoking pot and paying cheap rent in a series of group houses with enormous porches. Brown’s roommates remember his rooms as being strewn with leaning towers of books and magazines — he especially liked Gore Vidal, P.J. O’Rourke and Hunter S. Thompson — but say he was not especially political. “After 9/11 and Iraq, there were a lot of protests in Austin,” says Ian Holmes, a childhood friend of Brown’s. “I don’t remember him participating in it or being extra vocal, but he was against it all like everyone else.”
As Brown built up his clip book and matured as a writer, his ambitions began to outgrow Austin. In 2007, Brown moved to Brooklyn with a group of old friends that called itself “the Texadus.” Their Bushwick apartment emerged as a hub for Lone Star State refugees who liked to get high, crush beers and play video games. “People were always hanging out and coming and going,” says Caleb Pritchard, a childhood friend of Brown’s who lived with him in Austin and Brooklyn. Among the apartment’s large cast of characters were a crew of weed-delivery guys from Puerto Rico and Honduras who used the apartment as a daytime base of business operations. “They brought over an Xbox, bought us beer and food and played strategy games with us,” Pritchard says. “It was a good cultural exchange for a bunch of skinny white kids from Dallas.”
As virtual-world games grew increasingly sophisticated, Brown spent more time in front of his computer. But he didn’t play the games like most people. In Second Life, he linked up with a group of people known as “griefers,” the term for hackers who in the mid-00s became known for generating chaos inside video-game worlds. Socializing on the bulletin board 4chan.org, they formed the first cells of what would later become Anonymous. In the documentary We Are Legion, about the hacktivist group, Brown waxes nostalgic over his griefer period, when he’d spend entire nights “on Second Life riding around in a virtual spaceship with the words ‘faggery daggery doo’ written on it, wearing Afros, dropping virtual bombs on little villages while waving giant penises around. That was the most fun time I ever had in my life.”
When everyone else went out to the bars, Brown stayed in. Aside from video games and the odd afternoon of pick-up basketball, he also pounded out columns, diaries and blog posts for Vanity Fair, Daily Kos and McSweeney’s, as well as restaurant reviews and essays for weeklies like New York Press and The Onion’s A.V. Club. Though he had some paying gigs, he published most heavily in unpaid, self-edited community forums like Daily Kos and The Huffington Post. “Barrett wasn’t really working in New York so much as getting by with the help of friends and family,” says Pritchard. Among his unpaid gigs was his work as the spokesman for the Godless Americans PAC, which led to Brown’s first TV appearance, on the Fox News morning show Fox & Friends.
In Brooklyn, Brown resumed shooting heroin, which he’d dabbled in off and on since he was 19. Over the years, doctors have diagnosed him with ADHD and depression. Accurate or not, the diagnoses suggest Brown was drawn to opiates for more than just the high. “When I joined him in Brooklyn in ’08, Barrett was already basically a functional junkie,” says Pritchard.

You can read the whole thing, which is part of the dishonest media campaign to portray Barrett Brown as a helpless victim, but insofar as Alexander Zaitchick tells us who Barrett Brown really is — a child of privilege, a mama’s boy, a Special Snowflake to whom the ordinary rules did not apply — it is certainly helpful in understanding why Barrett Brown is in federal custody, where he belongs.

You should read “The Kook Who Knew Too Much.” Hey, maybe I could have been a Special Snowflake, but I had to get a job.

For some reason, Evil Blogger Lady thinks this scene is relevant:

 

The Barrett Brown Whitewash Continues

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Sept. 12, 2012: Barrett Brown rants about his plan to ‘destroy’ an FBI agent

“In late 2010, thousands of hacktivists joined a mass digital assault on the websites of VISA, MasterCard, and PayPal to protest their treatment of WikiLeaks. Other targets were wide ranging — the websites of corporations from Sony Entertainment and Fox to the Vatican and the Church of Scientology were hacked, defaced, and embarrassed — and the message was that no one was safe.”
— Parmy Olson, We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency

“I know what’s legal, because I know what’s been done to me and if it’s legal when it’s done to me it’s going to be legal when it’s done to f–king FBI Agent Robert Smith, who is a criminal, who is involved in a criminal conspiracy. . . . Uh, anyway, so that’s why Robert Smith’s life is over. And when I say his life is over I don’t say I’m gonna go kill him, but I am gonna ruin his life and look into his fuckin’ kids, because Aaron Barr did the same thing, and he didn’t get raided for it. How do ya like them apples?”
— Barrett Brown, Sept. 12, 2012

David Carr of the New York Times lends himself to the dishonest campaign to portray Barrett Brown as a helpless victim:

In December 2011, approximately five million e-mails from Stratfor Global Intelligence, an intelligence contractor, were hacked by Anonymous and posted on WikiLeaks. The files contained revelations about close and perhaps inappropriate ties between government security agencies and private contractors. In a chat room for Project PM, Mr. Brown posted a link to it.
Among the millions of Stratfor files were data containing credit cards and security codes, part of the vast trove of internal company documents. The credit card data was of no interest or use to Mr. Brown, but it was of great interest to the government. In December 2012 he was charged with 12 counts related to identity theft. Over all he faces 17 charges — including three related to the purported threat of the F.B.I. officer and two obstruction of justice counts — that carry a possible sentence of 105 years, and he awaits trial in a jail in Mansfield, Tex.
According to one of the indictments, by linking to the files, Mr. Brown “provided access to data stolen from company Stratfor Global Intelligence to include in excess of 5,000 credit card account numbers, the card holders’ identification information, and the authentication features for the credit cards.” . . .
Journalists from other news organizations link to stolen information frequently. Just last week, The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica collaborated on a significant article about the National Security Agency’s effort to defeat encryption technologies. The article was based on, and linked to, documents that were stolen by Edward J. Snowden, a private contractor working for the government who this summer leaked millions of pages of documents to the reporter Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian along with Barton Gellman of The Washington Post.
By trying to criminalize linking, the federal authorities in the Northern District of Texas — Mr. Brown lives in Dallas — are suggesting that to share information online is the same as possessing it or even stealing it. . . .

You can read the whole thing, which includes more context than have some of the pro-Barrett Brown stories circulating on the Left, much of which doesn’t even mentions his threats against FBI Special Agent Robert Smith. So at least David Carr didn’t completely whitewash the case, but he is still presenting a defense brief that, by focusing on the Stratfor-related indictment — which is only one of three sets of indictments in the case — attempts to portray Barrett Brown as just another journalist doing what other journalists do, so as to elicit sympathy for Brown among journalists who (we must certainly hope) do not do anything remotely like what Barrett Brown actually did.

Let’s start with this: What does FBI stand for? Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI investigates crimes and, if federal crimes have been committed, citizens are obligated to assist the FBI in its investigations. Barrett Brown was first raided by the FBI in March 2012 as part of their investigation into the so-called “LulzSec” hacking cell, a splinter of Anonymous. From Wikipedia:

A federal indictment against members contends that, prior to forming the hacking collective known as LulzSec, the six members were all part of another collective called Internet Feds, a group in rivalry with Anonymous. Under this name, the group attacked websites belonging to Fine Gael, HBGary, and Fox Broadcasting Company. This includes the alleged incident in which e-mail messages were stolen from HBGary accounts. In May 2011, following the publicity surrounding the HBGary hacks, six members of Internet Feds founded the group LulzSec.

You can go read the entire article and my point is this: LulzSec was a criminal conspiracy, and at least six of its members have been prosecuted for their illegal activities. Barrett Brown deliberately associated himself with this conspiracy and, as part of their investigation of LulzSec, the FBI obtained a search warrant to seize Barrett Brown’s computer equipment, although he was neither arrested nor charged with any crime at the time of the March 2012 raid.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation was . . . investigating.

That’s their job. That’s what they do.

Rather than to cooperate with this investigation, however, Barrett Brown attempted to obstruct it, to hide the computers for which the FBI had obtained warrants. Barrett’s mother has, in fact, already pleaded guilty to having helped him in that effort.

Has the FBI told us everything they found on Barrett Brown’s computers? I don’t know, nor are they obligated to do so. Perhaps those computers yielded information relevant to ongoing investigations. Whether or not Brown illegally “provided access” to stolen data from Stratfor, and whether he should be sent to prison for doing so, is for a federal jury to decide — but Barrett Brown and his lawyers evidently don’t want to take their case to a jury.

His lawyers have twice postponed Brown’s trial, while self-evidently attempting to use media accounts to pressure prosecutors either to drop the charges or to offer a more lenient plea bargain. And the journalists who are assisting them in this propaganda campaign are, from my perspective, unindicted co-conspirators in Barrett Brown’s scheme to elude justice for his criminal activities.

Glory days: Barrett Brown interviewed by Michael Isikoff, 2011

“A self-described anarchist, [Barrett] Brown claims he’s policing wrongdoing, at least as Anonymous describes it. . . .
“[Brown said:] ‘When we break laws, we do so in service of civil disobedience.'”
— NBC Nightly News, March 8, 2011

Once again, I ask any sane law-abiding person to examine the three YouTube video rants that led to Barrett Brown’s September 2012 arrest:

  1. Meltdown Video 1 — 15:03 (transcript)
  2. Meltdown Video 2 — 15:03 (transcript)
  3. Meltdown Video 3 — 13:30 (transcript)

If you examine that and dismiss it as the demented ravings of a lunatic, OK, but a judge ruled that Barrett Brown is at least sane enough to stand trial, and Brown’s lawyers have not yet suggested they are contemplating an insanity defense. But the fact that Barrett Brown was ranting like a madman does not mean that we cannot discern a worldview in his incoherent obscene gibberish:

The other part of what’s absurd about this is it’s fucking insane, and because of it, and because of what I found out about how this came about, how this came to be that my fucking mom is now being threatened by a fucking US D.A. and a fucking chickenshit little faggot cocksucker, ah, little FBI agent, little Robert Smith that we’re investigating now. Uh, I’ve, you know, got to find out, thanks to a hack — thanks to another fuckin’ stroke of luck, thank god — that HBGary since mid-Febuary had hired an FBI informant who was already an FBI informant, already had been bitching to the FBI about this other nonsense about Gregg Housh for fuckin’ years. A paid IB, uh, FBI informant, who the FBI pur–purchased supplies for or paid, you know, gave some money to buy supplies cause she was so helpful to them in making shit up and thinking up reasons to raid Barrett Brown and get his information that they wanted for other reasons. Uh, that she was in the employ of fucking HBGary, and working straight with Greg Hoglund, the fucking CEO who’s already been caught, already been caught last year, by my fucking friends, some of whom are, you know, friends and, and acquaintances. [laughs] Really… Well-wishers, they sort of, contemporary, by my contemporaries who I don’t really like that much. Uh, when they hacked into their server, already fucking caught the fucking guys in another fucking conspiracy, including one that involves setting up on fraud charges fucking activists, who had done nothing to anyone except criticize the Chamber of Commerce.

It was a “conspiracy,” you see. In this conspiracy, according to Barrett Brown, the FBI was in league with HBGary and an FBI informant was “making up shit” to justify the FBI’s raid of Barrett Brown.

Hackers are good people, says Barrett Brown.

FBI informants are bad people, says Barrett Brown.

So when hackers illegally obtain information by hacking HBGary’s accounts, and an FBI informant assists federal agents investigating that crime, such assistance is wrong, says Barrett Brown.

Barrett Brown’s anti-social attitude — the typical outlaw mentality of the criminal who rationalizes his wrongdoing by asserting that the laws are unjust and that therefore law enforcement is engaged in victimizing the innocent — is not in itself a crime. But it may be a motive for crime, and once you understand Barrett Brown’s criminal worldview, you understand why he was ranting as if he were a victim:

I know what’s legal, because I know what’s been done to me and if it’s legal when it’s done to me it’s going to be legal when it’s done to fuckin’ FBI Agent Robert Smith, who is a criminal, who is involved in a criminal conspiracy that has thank god been revealed, part of which was evident, uh, months and months ago because I told the fucking FBI Agent Daniel Borsuk, who gave me a fake name when his fucking little Jennifer Emick fuckin’ informant, HBGary employees, was bragging about this shit and gave me the number, I guess he wanted to talk to me and see what I’d say.

Get it? The crime against HBGary was not a crime, in Barrett Brown’s mind. Therefore the investigation of that crime was an injustice, anyone who assisted either HBGary or the FBI in that investigation was “a criminal . . . involved in a criminal conspiracy” and, in his depraved mind, Barrett Brown had appointed himself the judge, jury and executioner who was going to bring these criminals to justice.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

This sociopathic inversion of reality, where criminals are heroes and agents of law enforcement are villains, is the outlaw mob mentality by which Anonymous hackers justified their illegal activities.

The fact that several of those hackers are now in federal prison apparently has not sufficed to convince some people that this criminal worldview is dangerous. David Carr of the New York Times should be ashamed of himself for endorsing it.

UPDATE: “Barrett Brown, Special Snowflake.”

 

 

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Barrett Brown Inspires a Bizarre Campaign for Douchebag Rights

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Sept. 12: Barrett Brown rants on YouTube about his plan to ‘destroy’ an FBI agent

“I know what’s legal, because I know what’s been done to me and if it’s legal when it’s done to me it’s going to be legal when it’s done to f–king FBI Agent Robert Smith, who is a criminal, who is involved in a criminal conspiracy. . . . Uh, anyway, so that’s why Robert Smith’s life is over. And when I say his life is over I don’t say I’m gonna go kill him, but I am gonna ruin his life and look into his fuckin’ kids, because Aaron Barr did the same thing, and he didn’t get raided for it. How do ya like them apples?”
— Barrett Brown, Sept. 12, 2012

Did you ever find yourself in an Internet flame-war with some bozo and kinda wish bad things would happen to him? Honestly, I try to avoid thinking like that. But in your wildest revenge fantasy, you could never imagine this: They hook up with an international criminal conspiracy, get raided by the FBI and then, with federal prosecutors breathing down their neck, they flip out on YouTube and — in a raving fit of paranoid insanity — threaten to “destroy” an FBI agent, and get themselves locked up facing the possibility of 105 years in federal prison.

All of which is to say, I never could have wished this on Barrett Brown, because I simply never could have imagined it.

Nor could I have imagined that a coalition of his deluded admirers would turn Barrett Brown into a First Amendment martyr, but tonight they’re having a joint benefit for Barrett and his “Anonymous” comrade Jeremy Hammond as “political prisoners of the information age.”

And if you believe that, you’re a gullible chump, the kind of sucker who doesn’t deserve an even break.

“Anyway, while I was in the backyard, and I remember I heard the Mexican FBI agent bringing the other one back in he said, oh yeah, the bad guy’s back here. It was then that I realized that I’m a bad guy. You know, I had no idea beforehand. You know, and even now I still have trouble really sort of internalizing that. But if the FBI says it, it must be true, and from now on I am the bad guy. And I’m gonna prove that in the coming months, using the court system, using the media, using my group Project PM, which has always been, uh, secretly to some extent created for the purpose of wiping out this f–king government and certain media institutions and through other means at my disposal, some of which are known, some of which are known to a few and some of which are still secret. But I don’t like keeping secrets. I was a journalist for a long time, it’s not my nature.”
— Barrett Brown, Sept. 12, 2012

The “Anonymous” hackers spent more than two years engaged in terroristic intimidation — “Do what we say, or we’ll hack you! We’ll dox you! We’ll do a DDOS against you! We’ll SWAT you! Because lulz!” — and thought they could never get caught. Barrett Brown got the idea he could ride that wave to fame and glory, and when it didn’t turn out the way he planned, he decided that this was unfair, an injustice.

That’s the bottom line: Barrett Brown failed and, unable to accept responsibility for his failure, he blamed his failure on his enemies. Look at his final video meltdown if you dare:

  1. Meltdown Video 1 — 15:03 (transcript)
  2. Meltdown Video 2 — 15:03 (transcript)
  3. Meltdown Video 3 — 13:30 (transcript)

Go watch all of it, read all of it, and good luck making sense of any of it, because it’s nothing but pure paranoid gibberish. He recorded 45 minutes of video to explain this vast conspiracy against him — the “criminal conspiracy” with which he says this FBI agent was involved — and I’d like to see someone attempt to describe it in a linear or logical fashion, because it is evident that Barrett Brown was so deeply confused he couldn’t even make sense of his own theory.

Yet this scrambled mishmash of a conspiracy theory — allegedly involving Aaron Barr, Jennifer Emick, Alan Everett and Tom Ryan, among others — is the justification for Barrett Brown threatening to destroy an FBI agent, ending with this violent sign-off:

Every little news circus I create from here on out directs the media and the public to the criminal conspiracy that was never investigated last year involving Team Themis and the Justice Department, Eric Holder’s little f–king Justice Department, already f–king under a cloud, you know, not relative to the Bush administration but still almost as bad, ah, you know, and uh that helps, so I have no choice left but to defend my family, myself, my girlfriend, uh, my reputation, my work, my activism, my ideas, and the revelations that my friends are going to prison so that we can have a chance to get out for other people, so that they would matter. And frankly, you know, it was pretty obvious I was gonna be dead before I was forty or so, so I wouldn’t mind going out with two FBI sidearms and a f–king Egyptian pharoah. Adios.

This guy is a victim of injustice? This guy is a First Amendment hero? No, this guy is ridiculous douchebag, and if I never could have imagined him doing something quite this ridiculous, I think a nice long stay in federal custody for Barrett Brown might be a helpful warning to any other fame-whoring douchebag who thinks he can roll like that and never encounter any serious consequences.

Did you know, by the way, that in 2009 Barrett Brown was working on a book called Hot, Fat, and Clouded: The Amazing and Amusing Failures Of America’s Chattering Class, about such eminent figures as Thomas Friedman, William Bennett and Charles Krauthammer, and then — after my 2009 flame-war with Charles Johnson — Barrett decided to add a 45-page chapter on me. His editors took a look at the manuscript and said, “Robert Stacy Who?” So that got axed, and the book flopped anyway, and I think Barrett somehow blamed me for that.

All of which is necessary to explain why I’m featured rather prominently in the first part of the “Ballad of Barrett Brown”:

You have the right to be a douchebag, but being a douchebag does not confer upon you any special privileges.

Some douchebags just have to learn that lesson the hard way, I guess.

 

Barrett Brown’s Overblown Ego

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Sept. 12: Barrett Brown rants on YouTube about his plan to ‘destroy’ an FBI agent

“Uh, I’ve been on Suboxone since then, um, partly because, in fact in large part, um, in preparation for this particular day, or two days as it’s turned out, um, which I’ve also been, uh, preparing for by virtue of the last six leaks, uh, Project PM put out in the last, uh, month or so — the New York Times leaks, there’s two parts of that on Cryptome, and the LA county prosecutor leaks, there’s three parts of that on Cryptome and with more coming on both, uh, by and by.”
— Barrett Brown, Sept. 12, 2012

The Left’s ongoing attempt to turn Barrett Brown into a heroic martyr for First Amendment freedom — the latest issue of Rolling Stone calls him “America’s Least Likely Political Prisoner” — requires his admirers to overlook a lot of things, especially the vast distance between his grandiose claims and his paltry accomplishments.

Also, he was crazy.

Barrett was obsessed with the idea of “leaks,” and seemed to have the idea that he would out-leak Julian Assange, thus making himself a worldwide hero of the online anarchist community who worship at the anti-American altar of Assange, Bradley Manning, et al.

Barrett’s problem was his overblown ego, his habitual bragging, his relentless inflation of the significance of whatever occupied his unbalanced mind at any given moment. Wildly undisciplined and emotionally unstable, his “work” production was never impressive, as he wasted time on subjects that were of no real interest or importance.

Sane people could see Barrett Brown was losing his grip even before he became involved with “Anonymous.” In December 2010, when he outlined his “informational schematic” in Video 153? Go watch that rambling 13-minute video. The phrase you’re looking for is red flag. Here was a young heroin addict describing his plan to create “what should be the best means of obtaining information in existence.”

Riiiiight.

Typical of Barrett Brown’s grandiosity was what he called, in his epic Sept. 12 meltdown rant, “the LA county prosecutor leaks.” This involved Los Angeles County Assistant District Attorney Patrick Frey, who is the conservative blogger known as Patterico.

For years, his various enemies have been trying to get Frey fired from his day job, on the basis of his off-hours political blogging, as though it were somehow unethical — a conflict of interest — which it is not, because there is no relationship between (a) what Frey does on his day job and (b) what he does on his blog. Frey’s day job is as a prosecutor in the anti-gang unit: The Bloods, the Crips, the Latin Kings, and so forth — he puts those guys in prison for their crimes. Maybe you could speculate some kind of psycho-babble theory between that work and what Patterico writes about politics, but he never writes about any of the crimes or criminals he prosecutes. Ergo, no conflict of interest. Q.E.D.

Frey’s enemies either don’t understand this or don’t care about the truth, and so he has repeatedly been the target of various schemes hatched by Neal Rauhauser. Why? Because in 2011 (a) Patterico’s blogging about the WeinerGate scandal made him a central figure in Rauhauser’s theory of a Breitbart-led right-wing conspiracy against Anthony Weiner, and (b) Frey’s employment in a public-sector job seemed to Rauhauser to make Frey a vulnerable target.

This background is necessary to understanding why, in August 2011, Neal Rauhauser used the pseudonym “Carlito2000” in an IRC channel to sic Barrett Brown on Patrick “Patterico” Frey:

[13:50] [Carlito2000] So [Brandon] Darby is under suspicion as being the SWAT caller that triggered #Swatgate
[13:50] [BarrettBrown] And what’s Darby’s deal in particular?
[13:50] [Carlito2000] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe4NCaz4NgM
[13:51] [BarrettBrown] he’s under suspicion of doing swat call on Patterico?
[13:51] [Carlito2000] calls on Mike Stack aka @CryingWolfeBlog
6/23/2011 @Patterico 6/30/2011 @EWErickson on 5/26/2012(?)
[13:52] [Carlito2000] and alleged event for @AaronWorthing [a.k.a., Aaron Walker] on 5/29/2012, but no audio has been released
[13:52] [Carlito2000] SWAT of Stack was done to cover their tracks – they took out Weiner because he triggered the extortion investigation into former FBI agent turned Congressman Mike Grimm
[13:52] [Carlito2000] Ofir Biton, Mike Grimm fundraiser, arrested.
[13:53] [Carlito2000] 2012 calls are due to some stuff with James O’Keefe – Rauhauser appear at some hearing in NJ about him
[13:53] [Carlito2000] @Patterico dox @NadiaNaffe, Rauhauser hooked her up with @LeidermanDevine, epic lawsuit ensued
[13:57] [Carlito2000] So New Hampshire state grand jury on O’Keefe, NY
federal grand jury on Grimm, D.C. federal grand jury on O’Keefe, and Chicago cybercrime task force wants swatters, they get info on Darby
[14:09] [BarrettBrown] okay, so I’ll take a look at these links here

You don’t have to understand Rauhauser’s bizarre conspiracy theories (variously involving Brandon Darby, Mike Stack, New York Rep. Michael Grimm, James O’Keefe III and the FBI’s “cybercrime task force”) to understand what Rauhauser/”Carlito” was trying to do, namely to get Barrett Brown to write something — anything — that Rauhauser could then use as “evidence” against his enemies.

The immediate result of that provocation was a series of online chats between Barrett Brown and Frey, who was profoundly suspicious of Brown’s motives, correctly suspecting that Brown had contacted him in pursuit of a Rauhauser-inspired scheme. And my name kept coming up in these Brown-Frey chats, e.g.:

Only reason I ask [if Frey knows anything about Jennifer Emick] is that she left a comment on Robert Stacy McCain’s blog last year when he did a post about me, during such time as she was both serving as an FBI “informant” and working secretly for HBGary pursuant to their covert campaign to get me “picked up” and discredited despite the fact that I committed no crimes against them, etc.
Right now, I think the only real question I have for you is, do you know if Robert Stacy McCain might have had any discussions at all with either Emick or anyone at HBGary at any time, and do you have any correspondence in which he discusses me?

Now, if you’ll go read the transcript of Barrett’s Sept. 12 meltdown video, you’ll see how this theme of Emick as being an FBI “informant” while also working for HBGary is central to Barrett’s paranoid belief that he was the target of some kind of conspiratorial set-up:

I know what’s legal, because I know what’s been done to me and if it’s legal when it’s done to me it’s going to be legal when it’s done to fuckin’ FBI Agent Robert Smith, who is a criminal, who is involved in a criminal conspiracy that has thank god been revealed, part of which was evident, uh, months and months ago because I told the fucking FBI Agent Daniel Borsuk, who gave me a fake name when his fucking little Jennifer Emick fuckin’ informant, HBGary employees, was bragging about this shit and gave me the number, I guess he wanted to talk to me and see what I’d say. Well, his real name’s Daniel Borsuk, I know that now because of more hacked e-mails that she got that she has not refuted although she is, [laughs] the informant is now claiming she doesn’t work for HBGary even though we, again, we have the invoices, the e-mails, her ex-partner’s been in touch, it was already obvious and we have other proof of it, even besides these things that she doesn’t know about yet. Um, we don’t play all our hands, like they do. Uh, anyway, so that’s why Robert Smith’s life is over.

Four words: Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

What do I know about Jennifer Emick? Almost nothing. Never talked to her until October of last year, after Barrett Brown had been arrested for threatening an FBI agent, and Emick sent me an account of her interactions with Neal Rauhauser. Yet you see that this idea — that I was somehow part of Emick and HBGary’s “covert campaign” against Barrett Brown — was part of the conpiracy theory Brown was trying to get Frey to confirm, and was also part of the madness that led to that Sept. 12 meltdown. (See: “Neal Rauhauser as Carlito2000: How Barrett Brown Went Down,” Oct. 26.)

On Sept. 6, less than a week before his final meltdown, Barrett Brown published his “LA county prosecutor leak” — i.e., the transcript of an online chat Brown had with Frey — at Daily Kos with a prologue that included this disjointed 89-word sentence:

As noted, this leak is being conducted in retaliation for Frey’s failure to readily answer questions about a possible connection between Confederate/white nationalist Washington Times editor Robert StacyMcCain and the HBGary criminal organization as well as Frey’s decision to publicly attack an RNC protester who was arrested in possession of a weapon, with the final straw being R.S. McCain’s latest attack on Brown, whom the author and conservative stalwart denounced in public as deserving of FBI attention in 2011 — before later claiming instead that Brown is in fact an FBI informant based on his own misunderstanding of facts known even to many reporters who have covered Anonymous in the last few years.

Again, four words: Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

Whatever my “misunderstanding of facts,” I always understood that Barrett Brown was a raging narcissist, and what Brown called “the final straw” — my “latest attack on Brown” — was my Sept. 4 response to Brown’s threat to sue me for libel, which ended thus:

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.

Can I call ’em, or what? Eight days later, Barrett melted down on YouTube and was arrested by the FBI. But before he got himself arrested, Brown published his “leak” of his chat with Patrick Frey, and announced that with a Sept. 4 YouTube video:

To which America responded with a collective yawn. Who cares anything about Frey, one of dozens of lawyers employed by the L.A. County District Attorney’s office? Why would my “possible connection” to “the HBGary criminal organization” be of interest to anyone, even if there were any such connection (which there is not)? Barrett was obsessed with HBGary, as were Neal Rauhauser and various people associated with Anonymous, but in the grand scheme of things — as far as your average consumer of news is concerned — the typical response is, “HB who?”

In light of his well-deserved obscurity, what shall we say of Brown’s success in convincing his fellow anarchists that he was somebody important who was doing “journalism” that was such a threat to the status quo that he is a “political prisoner”? He has merely proven that there is a sucker born every minute, and that a lot of those gullible suckers are nowadays employed as liberal journalists.

Go read “The Kook Who Knew Too Much.” Is Barrett Brown a political prisoner? Only if insanity is a political ideology.

 

Barrett Brown: Madness Foreshadowed

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December, 2010: Barrett Brown explains his
‘informational schematic’ on YouTube.

“I wonder to myself: Where do these trolls come from? Where do they live and breed? . . .
“Many militants are devoid of an essential ingredient of being human: empathy. . . .
“They afford themselves free rein to act out their basest of impulses.”
— “Robin of Berkeley,” Dec. 3, 2010

“You might get the idea that Barrett Brown is kind of a moody loner, isolated and alienated, attempting to invent a social context for himself where none exists. And if that’s your impression of Brown, you might find it highly significant that the primary subject of Barrett Brown’s online videos is . . . Barrett Brown.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, “Narcissism, Isolation and Trolls,” Dec. 3, 2010

Barrett Brown is now in custody at the Federal Correctional Institution in Fort Worth, Texas, scheduled for trial in September on multiple felony counts that could send him to prison for more than 100 years. Why did no one else see this coming?

“So this reader widget, it works off a human filter of these very erudite people, all together, and provides what should be the best means of obtaining information in existence. “

That is a quote from Barrett Brown’s YouTube “Video153,” in which he rambled on rather incoherently about his plans to gather “very erudite people” to participate in what he called a “schematic.” On Dec. 3, 2010 — that is to say, nearly two years before his September 2012 arrest — I compared Barrett’s incipient madness to that of Patrick Bedell, the schizophrenic Pentagon gunman who got himself shot to death in an apparent “suicide by cop” in March 2010. (See, “Whatever Happened to Crazy?” at Hot Air.) And it is remarkable that now, when Barrett Brown is being celebrated by the Left as a martyr, nobody can be bothered to transcribe this 13-minute video:

Because no one has provided a full transcript — and I’m about to leave on a road trip, so I certainly don’t have time now — the best way I can describe Barrett’s discourse is this: Imagine Wile E. Coyote on Oxycontin, outlining his new super-genius plan to catch that elusive Roadrunner, using Acme rocket skates, 400 feet of rope, an elaborate series of pulleys, two cups of bird seed, and a 95-pound anvil.

We know how this cartoon ends, don’t we?

The word you’re looking for is “grandiose.”

Grandiosity is a term psychologists use to discuss the delusions of greatness that are symptomatic of schizophrenia or, to a lesser degree, the manic phase of bipolar disorder:

Bipolar patients experience delusion during the worse part of their illness. Typically, when experiencing or displaying a stage of heightened excitability, joy, rage, senselessness, and correlated phenomena they might convey thoughts or beliefs that are grandiose in nature. Some of these grandiose beliefs frequently involve thoughts that the patient is very rich or famous or has super human abilities, etc.

In less severe manifestations, grandiosity is associated with narcissism, which is in turn a function of feelings of shame and failure. The damaged ego of the narcissist is unable to cope with failure and overcompensates through a series of rationalizations, including exaggerated and unrealistic schemes to achieve the success (and receive the admiration) he craves. The impracticality of these plans, the yawning gap between (a) the grandiose goals of such schemes and (b) the ability of the person to do what he aspires to do, is significant of the psychological need this kind of fantastic plan serves: A desire for recognition as a superior person, thus to vanquish the feelings of shame associated with the sense of failure.

Barrett Brown is an intelligent person. As a child, he earned praise for his intelligence and was thought to have exceptional promise. But he became a college dropout and a heroin addict, scraping along with meager earnings. He co-authored a book in his mid-20s and discovered that being that grand thing, a “published author,” isn’t really all it’s cracked up to be. Whoop-dee-doo, y’know? It ain’t like you’re a zillionaire rock star with limousines, champagne and showgirls.

This video in December 2010 where Barrett tried to describe his “informational schematic” wasn’t so much a career plan as the symptom of an unhealthy mind tending toward thought patterns that were disorganized and grandiose. Being something of an amateur student of abnormal psychology, I recognized it as such and described it accurately, and now fast-forward to September 2012:

Ask yourself, “Why have Barrett Brown’s admirers never fully transcribed that video rant?” Because it’s haphazard paranoid gibberish, and not the discourse of the hero they want him to be.

It does not matter, really, whether there was anything genuinely newsworthy about the subjects — HBGary and “Team Themis,” etc. — that became the focus of Barrett Brown’s obsessive interest. Other people have written about those subjects without going crazy. And anyone who hails this narcissistic wackjob as a heroic martyr is seriously misguided. Barrett Brown was mentally ill and, according to federal grand jury indictments, a criminal menace.

There is news today: Anthony Weiner’s campaign manager resigned, and people are beginning to ask questions about the thousands of dollars that Weiner’s campaign spent to “investigate” claims that his 2011 scandal was the result of hacking.

“Gosh, who do you think is filling Weiner in on this?” said . . . Neal Rauhauser?

A stalker is terrorizing CNN’s Anderson Cooper, and Bill Schmalfeldt is still crazy, but I’m about to hit the road to cover another story. Could be interesting. Your prayers are earnestly requested, and remember the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are still: Hit the freaking tip jar.

 

 


Maniac Rights? ‘Democracy Now’ Whitewashes Barrett Brown’s Crimes

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Sept. 12: Barrett Brown rants on YouTube about his plan to ‘destroy’ an FBI agent

Donald Douglas at American Power called attention to an absurdly dishonest puff piece about Barrett Brown, the erstwhile “Anonymous” spokesman whose online meltdown in September 2012 resulted in his arrest for threatening FBI Special Agent Robert Smith.

You can click here to read the transcript of the broadcast, but the gist of it is this: Northwestern University philosophy professor Peter Ludlow seems to have bought into Barrett Brown’s idea that any random psychopath, simply by claiming to be engaged in journalism, can engage in criminal behavior, and that if the psychopath-“journalist” is then prosecuted for his crimes, well . . . “chilling effect.” Watch:

People might actually believe that dishonest one-sided propaganda if they knew nothing about the nature of Anonymous, or about Barrett Brown’s “journalism” career, or the allegedly sinister conspiracies that Brown claims he was investigating. Here’s just one short excerpt of Brown, after he was raided in March 2012 in connection with the “LulzSec” hacker cell, spinning his self-serving bullshit:

The warrants themselves refer to the information that they’re seeking as regarding Anonymous, of course, a few other things of that nature, and also two companies: HBGary and Endgame Systems. Both of these are intelligence contracting companies that Anonymous had a run-in with in February of 2011, during which a number of emails were taken from HBGary, in particular, which themselves revealed a number of conspiracies being perpetuated by those companies in conjunction with Justice Department and several other institutions, including Bank of America, against WikiLeaks and against several journalists.
The time since, I’ve spent a lot of time going over those emails, researching them, conducting other research, otherwise trying to expose a number of things that have been discovered by virtue of those emails from HBGary having been taken. I sincerely believe that my activities on that front contributed to me being raided the other day and will no doubt contribute to any further action that the FBI decides to take. I would just also note the Justice Department itself is very much intertwined with this issue, and has been for a while, and in no way can conduct a fair investigation against me, based on what I’ve revealed, what I’ve helped to sort of emphasize about them.

First: The hacking of HBGary’s e-mails was a crime, an act of terroristic vandalism and theft. What had happened was the head of the firm’s Internet security subsidiary had publicly boasted that he had information that was going to take down Anonymous. A cell of hackers known as “LulzSec” then broke into the HBGary’s server and also hacked the boastful executive’s e-mail account.

There was no “conspiracy” revealed by those e-mails. Instead, they showed the executive, Aaron Barr, suggesting various schemes he proposed for attacking Anonymous. If you will recall, Anonymous zoomed to prominence by its actions in defense of WikiLeaks. Everybody in business and in government was trying to find ways to defend against these online attacks, which had been aimed at a variety of entities — including Amazon, Bank of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — viewed as “enemies.”

It was digital vigilanteism, a thug mob engaged in terroristic intimidation: “Do what we say, or else we will shut down your servers with a DDOS attack and maybe also hack your files.” You could compare Anonymous to the Mafia, the Hitler’s SA Brownshirts, the KKK or any other group that uses terror tactics to achieve its aims.

Aaron Barr was trying to win contracts for HBGary to provide security against such threats, and while pitching his services to prospective clients, Barr proposed a number of . . . uh, innovative approaches.

We could just say that some of the stuff Barr suggested was as shady as the stuff Anonymous was doing. Or we could quote this exchange from the Democracy Now broadcast:

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Ludlow, talk about what he had released. Talk about what he got from HBGary and how this links to Glenn Greenwald.
PETER LUDLOW: Sure. Well, what they uncovered was—I mean, it’s actually a little bit subtle, right? Because it begins with the Bank of America being concerned that WikiLeaks had information on it. Bank of America goes to the United States Department of Justice. The Department of Justice leads them to Hunton & Williams, the big law fix-it firm in the D.C. area, who in turn hooks them up with a group of private intelligence contractors that went under the umbrella Team Themis. And Team Themis had a number of proposals and projects that were exposed in all of this. They included running kind of a PSYOPs operation against the Chamber Watch, which is a group that sort of monitors the Chamber of Commerce, and it was an attempt to undermine it and Glenn Greenwald and other individuals. And, I mean, there were many, many plans that they had, many, many things, but some of the documents released showed that they were saying they were going to create fake documents, leak them to Greenwald, and then, when Greenwald eventually released them, they would expose it as a fraud and attempt to undermine him in that way. And they had a similar plan for Chamber Watch, as well.

Pay attention: “Team Themis had a number of proposals” — key word, proposals — which was all it was, because the ad-hoc consortium known as “Team Themis” never got a contract to do this stuff.

To characterize some of the things in Aaron Barr’s e-mails as “projects” or even “plans” is horribly misleading. Barr and his friends were brainstorming and Barr, coming from a military background, kept offering wild-ass ideas that sounded like spy-vs.-spy stuff: Devious “dirty tricks” operations and so forth.

Neither Bank of America nor any other client ever signed off on any of these “plans,” which as I say, weren’t really “plans” at all, but rather just stuff that Aaron Barr wrote in his e-mails. The e-mails sound scary when described as if they were something that somebody actually did — “projects” — or something intended to be done — “plans” — but what if everything you had ever merely proposed to do in an e-mail were published and presented to the world as if it were an actual event?

Would that be realistic? Would it be . . . “investigative journalism”?

See, this is where the whole phony career of Barrett Brown comes into focus: Barrett didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. Period.

Barrett Brown was never on the staff of any magazine or newspaper, never worked under the supervision of an experienced editor. That drug-addled son of a bitch never so much as covered a city council meeting or a zoning board hearing and yet — thanks to the Internet — he could sit at his laptop promoting himself as an expert on subjects that he simply was not qualified to discuss. And be taken seriously by other “journalists” who don’t have enough basic common sense to come in out of the rain.

God, I despise gullible fools like Amy Goodman.

Carefully parse this sentence from Barrett Brown’s interview:

[A] number of emails were taken from HBGary, in particular, which themselves revealed a number of conspiracies being perpetuated by those companies in conjunction with Justice Department and several other institutions, including Bank of America, against WikiLeaks and against several journalists.

Or, so says Barrett Brown. The e-mails “revealed a number of conspiracies being perpetuated by those companies,” says Barrett Brown, with the confidence of a natural-born bullshit artist.

There were “a number of conspiracies,” that number being zero.

But never mind that: Barrett Brown says he is a journalist and indeed such a journalist is he that the federal government framed him for a crime just to stop him from continuing his journalism.

How many articles did Barrett Brown publish about the HBGary e-mails, “Team Themis,” etc.? Who published these articles? What were the publication dates and word-counts of those articles?

Good luck with that research, Peter Ludlow and Amy Goodman — or anybody else who wants to try to compile the bibliography of Barrett Brown’s “investigative journalism” about HBGary and whatever “number of conspiracies” he says were being “perpetuated.”

You naive chumps — Barrett Brown scammed you. You suckers got played. Let’s re-read Brown’s description of his “journalism”:

I’ve spent a lot of time going over those emails, researching them, conducting other research, otherwise trying to expose a number of things that have been discovered by virtue of those emails from HBGary having been taken. I sincerely believe that my activities on that front contributed to me being raided the other day.

Barrett “spent a lot of time going over those emails,” you see. The HBGary hack was February 2011, the FBI raided him in March 2012, so for 13 months Barrett was “going over those emails” and producing what?

Please, Amy Goodman and Peter Ludlow, show me what Barrett Brown actually reported — you know, real “journalism,” published somewhere besides Pastebin documents — that made him such an Enemy of the State that the FBI raided him to shut him up?

Three words: Bull. Fucking. Shit.

If all I ever did all day long was “going over e-mails” that wouldn’t make me a journalist. Hell, I wouldn’t even be a blogger.

You could call Barrett Brown a lot of things. Adrian Chen of Gawker called him a “famewhore” after Brown announced in November 2011 that he and Gregg Housh had signed a “six-figure” deal for a book about Anonymous. What happened to that book deal? Somebody should ask Gregg Housh if he and Barrett ever delivered so much as a draft chapter to the publisher. And what about Dan Conaway, the big deal New York literary agent who scored that deal? Has anybody asked Dan Conaway how far along Barrett and Gregg were on their “six-figure” manuscript before his client Barrett Brown went berserk and got busted by the feds?

See, these are common-sense questions that a reporter would ask about a story like this, if he were actually interested in the truth, rather than doing publicity or propaganda, which is what Peter Ludlow and Amy Goodman are providing for Barrett Brown: Accept his story about himself at face-value, without bothering to check his story to see if it matches up to the actual facts.

Having cursorily checked the facts, I find that in 2007, Barrett Brown co-authored an anti-creationism book, Flock of Dodos, with a Texas A&M sociology professor, and the blurb says:

Barrett Brown has written for several national magazines including National Lampoon, Cracked, Jest, Wired, Playboy and for nerve.com.

Perhaps someone could provide a listing of the articles that Barrett contributed to those humor magazines. A search of the archives at Nerve.com yields exactly one result for Barrett Brown, a 2003 column of Internet sex news compiled with Sarah Harrison.

My point is that it might be helpful, in understanding him as a journalist, to study Barrett Brown’s work history prior to his bursting upon the scene as the face of Anonymous in February 2011.

Because from my own knowledge of Brown’s career, whatever his skills as a famewhore/spokesman, I can’t really see anything that would particularly qualify him to do anything else with those HBGary e-mails other than, well, “going over those emails, researching them, conducting other research, otherwise trying to expose a number of things that have been discovered.”

Spinning his wheels, wasting his time, and publishing . . . what?

Between February 2011 and his September 2012 arrest, what did Barrett Brown actually publish? Maybe I missed some journalism important enough to merit his arrest by the FBI because, as everybody knows, this is what the FBI does: They arrest investigative journalists who are Getting Too Close to the Truth.

No, I don’t believe that. And you don’t believe it, either.

You’d have to be as thick-headed as a Northwestern University philosophy professor to believe something that preposterous. But right there it is, the headline at Democracy Now:

Jailed Journalist Barrett Brown Faces 105 Years
For Reporting on Hacked Private Intelligence Firms

If you’re the kind of person who believes everything you read on the Internet, that settles it, right? Whatever you do, don’t try “Reporting on Hacked Private Intelligence Firms,” or else the feds will kick down your door and send you to prison, too.

Hell, folks, I’m scared to death even to link that headline.

Journalist Barrett Brown spent his 300th day behind bars this week on a range of charges filed after he used information obtained by the hacker group Anonymous to report on the operations of private intelligence firms. Brown faces 17 charges ranging from threatening an FBI agent to credit card fraud for posting a link online to a document that contained stolen credit card data. But according to his supporters, Brown is being unfairly targeted for daring to investigate the highly secretive world of private intelligence and military contractors.

Oh, damn. Now I’ve quoted the story! Is that a SWAT team outside my door? Do I hear the sound of hob-nailed jackboots of the fascist Surveillance State goose-stepping down my street?

“But according to his supporters . . .”

That’s an interesting sentence, isn’t it? Democracy Now didn’t talk to anyone who isn’t a Barrett Brown supporter, we must suppose, because Democacy Now thinks everyone should be a Barrett Brown supporter, and what they are doing is advocacy, not journalism. Here are a few sentences maybe Amy Goodman should read:

Brown wasn’t arrested for “reporting,” and his saga seems more properly understood as a morality tale about unsupervised amateurs who impudently imagine they can achieve fame and fortune by producing an ersatz imitation of actual journalism. . . .
What one usually finds among practitioners of Cargo Cult Journalism is a grandiose posture of contempt for the unglamorous toil of the workaday reporter. Many people who have never covered a county commission meeting, a high-school basketball tournament or a Fourth of July parade — such local tedium is beneath their notice — seem to harbor Walter Mitty fantasies of gaining worldwide journalistic significance. The Internet is a medium that permits these would-be Seymour Hersh types to catapult past the minor leagues of journalism where real reporters learn their craft. . . . Thinking himself a sort of one-man Woodward and Bernstein who would heroically expose the Hidden Secrets of the Surveillance State, Brown instead exposed himself as a blundering amateur who got himself in so far over his head that he couldn’t handle the catastrophic result.

It’s called “The Kook Who Knew Too Much” and — unlike anything Amy Goodman would ever say about Barrett Brown — it has the merit of being the brutal and ugly truth. Y’know, journalism? But let’s watch that 13-minute Barrett Brown meltdown again, just for laughs:

About a week before his epic meltdown, Barrett sent me an e-mail threatening to sue me for libel. He hasn’t sued me yet, but who knows? Maybe he will still be pissed at me in 105 years.

UPDATE: Perhaps it is not sufficiently clear to Peter Ludlow why criminal hacking is not what journalists do for living.

See what I mean? Anonymous had enemies — Amazon, Bank of America, PayPal, HBGary, etc. — and those enemies got hacked. We might add that Glenn Greenwald had enemies — the United States government — and so Edward Snowden took a thumb drive full of classified documents out of the NSA. Therefore criminals get to decide what we get to know or don’t know by their choice of enemies?

And the only real journalists are those like Barrett Brown and Glenn Greenwald who have criminal accomplices with the cunning to obtain information by breaking the law? Like I said: If these hackers get hold of Obama’s e-mails for Sept. 11, 2012 — well, that would be a crime worthy of a Pulitzer Prize, because the White House Press Office sure isn’t being very helpful with this Benghazi thing.

News flash: America already hates journalists. Do you think America will love us more if we were accomplices of thieves and traitors?

 

Speaking of Kooks …

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Glory days: Barrett Brown interviewed by Michael Isikoff, 2011

“A self-described anarchist, [Barrett] Brown claims he’s policing wrongdoing, at least as Anonymous describes it. . . .
“[Brown said:] ‘When we break laws, we do so in service of civil disobedience.'”
— NBC Nightly News, March 8, 2011

Dan Collins seems envious of my success at becoming the idée fixe of so many deranged lunatics. The relevant question: Is this a natural talent or an acquired skill? Maybe it’s a bit of both, but my extensive experience in the field of kook-baiting has not yet been recognized as the sort of expertise that would merit a “six-figure” book deal like the one Barrett Brown announced in November 2011, about 10 months before the infamous meltdown that led to his arrest by the FBI.

Combining narcissistic grandiosity with the arrogance of an outlaw anarchist is a pretty good recipe for a spectacular flame-out, and there is a lesson to be learned from Barrett Brown’s pathetic fate, but most of the punks who admire Brown share his worldview, so it’s unlikely they’ll derive the correct lesson from his sad saga.

Alas, further obscuring the unfortunate reality of Brown’s descent into criminal madness, the Edward Snowden/NSA story and the sudden death of Michael Hastings have led some on the Left to attempt a rehabilitation of Brown’s (deservedly bad) reputation. In separate but related items, Brown had been the subject of recent articles in The Nation, the U.K. Guardian, and the Huffington Post.

You can read all of those articles without learning the most important thing about Barrett Brown: He was completely bugfucking nuts.

Do you really need to watch this 13-minute video again?

No journalist on the planet chronicled Brown’s march to destruction as regularly as I did, and today I summarized it in 2,000 words:

. . . Brown, who hadn’t contacted me directly in more than a year, suddenly popped up and began harassing me on Twitter in early September 2012. He accused me of libel and menaced me with threats of terrible consequences if I did not immediately respond to his demands that I answer various insulting questions. This bullying motif — “Answer my question, or else!” — is characteristic of a style that I’ve come to think of as Cargo Cult Journalism. Like the rituals of certain South Pacific islanders, the Cargo Cult Journalist hopes that his simulacrum of what he ignorantly imitates will magically bring the same result as the real thing. Cargo Cult Journalism is the kind of stuff we once encountered in smudgy mimeographed newsletters, “underground” newspaper tabloids, cheaply printed pamphlets and self-published books by crackpots who warn about conspiracies involving the Bavarian Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission and/or the Military-Industrial Complex. In the digital age, however, many people have trouble distinguishing between this kook-fringe imitation of “reporting” and genuine journalism, a distinction blurred by the increasingly shabby quality of product issued by respectable organs of the mainstream media. . . .
What one usually finds among practitioners of Cargo Cult Journalism is a grandiose posture of contempt for the unglamorous toil of the workaday reporter. Many people who have never covered a county commission meeting, a high-school basketball tournament or a Fourth of July parade — such local tedium is beneath their notice — seem to harbor Walter Mitty fantasies of gaining worldwide journalistic significance. The Internet is a medium that permits these would-be Seymour Hersh types to catapult past the minor leagues of journalism where real reporters learn their craft. While I enthusiastically encourage the burgeoning phenomenon of online citizen-journalism, it is important at the same time to discourage the type of “famewhore” act that led Barrett Brown to his pathetic fate. Thinking himself a sort of one-man Woodward and Bernstein who would heroically expose the Hidden Secrets of the Surveillance State, Brown instead exposed himself as a blundering amateur who got himself in so far over his head that he couldn’t handle the catastrophic result. . . .

Please read the whole thing at The American Spectator.

 

 

UPDATE: Hat-tip to Dan Collins again — you are following Dan on Twitter, aren’t you? — for this interesting item:

Boredom is behind many incidents of cyberbullying and trolling on social media sites, according to the first major study into the matter.
Linguistics expert Dr Claire Hardaker, of Lancaster University, studied almost 4,000 online cases involving claims of trolling.

No offense to Professor Hardaker, but hers is scarcely “the first major study” of trolling. While I don’t claim that my methods are entirely scientific, I’ve been studying this phenomenon at close range ever since Charles Johnson went crazy. This stipulates the hypothetical that Charles was once sane, of course. As far-fetched as that may seem, it would be unscientific to rule it out categorically as impossible.