Category: Barrett Brown

New Charges Filed Against Former ‘Anonymous’ Spokesman Barrett Brown

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Barrett Brown, whose online meltdown led to his September arrest for threatening an FBI agent, has been indicted for last year’s Stratfor hacking.

UPDATE: Brown acted as an unofficial spokesman for the Anonymous hacking conspiracy for more than a year and was raided (but not arrested) in March at the time the feds busted the “Lulzsec” splinter cell of Anonymous. Because Brown was not arrested, there was widespread suspicion from March onward that he was cooperating with authorities as an informant, in a deal similar to the one whereby “Lulzsec” leader Sabu ratted out his comrades.

Six months after the March raid, Brown posted a series of bizarre YouTube video rants in which he threatened by name an FBI special agent, and was charged with three federal counts related to that incident. Brown’s belated indictment for the December 2011 hacking of Stratfor (and distribution of illegally obtained credit card information) may help explain the strange paranoia that led to Brown’s September meltdown.

UPDATE II: Associated Press via Washington Post:

Barrett Brown, 31, was indicted in Dallas this week on a dozen charges that include aggravated identity theft and device fraud. He is accused of making public an Internet link providing access to credit card information stolen from Stratfor, which had emails taken during that same hack released by WikiLeaks. . . .
Brown was a de facto spokesman for Anonymous, willing to speak for a movement that prides itself on anonymity. The Stratfor breach claimed by Anonymous ravaged the company’s servers, leading to the disclosure of thousands of credit card numbers and other information.

You can click here to see the 12-count federal indictment.

UPDATE III: Brown’s egomaniacal arrogance caused him to be regarded as a selfish “famewhore” by some Anonymous members. When he emerged as the media-grabbing face of the hacker movement in 2011, I predicted that Brown would become a focus of law-enforcement scrutiny. Logically, Brown could not speak for the Anonymous hackers without communicating with them, and thus surveillance of Brown could lead the feds to other members of the group. Whether or not that’s what led to the subsequent arrests of Anonymous hackers, it’s now becoming evident that the feds have been watching Brown closely for months:

The new charges stem from a Christmas Day attack against Stratfor, a U.S.-based intelligence gathering firm, in which Anonymous hackers stole some 5.5 million emails, some of which were later published on WikiLeaks. Brown allegedly facilitated the hack by posting a hyperlink in an Internet Relay Chat channel he controlled, thereby providing others access to the credit card information and identities of 5,000 individuals in the Stratfor database.
That’s count one: knowingly trafficking in stolen authentication features. Count two alleges that Brown kept at least some of this credit card information for several months in an attempt to defraud the card holders. He is also charged with 10 counts of aggravated identity theft. All told, Brown could face up to 45 years in prison and a $3 million fine on the new counts alone.
Another Anonymous hacker, Jeremy Hammond, has been accused of orchestrating the Stratfor attack and could face life in prison.

So one of his erstwhile comrades is facing life, and Brown himself could spend 45 years in the pen. Guess that book deal won’t work out, huh?

UPDATE IV: I first became aware of Barrett Brown in October 2009, when he evidently got the idea that it would be cool to dogpile on Charles Johnson’s attacks against me. Rather than argue with him about that — or even mention his name — instead I put up a post mocking his former role as spokesman for an atheist group.

For a while thereafter, Brown would occasionally pop up online harassing me about one thing or another, and every so often I’d heap more scorn and mockery on him. In December 2010, I mocked Brown’s weirdly grandiose scheme for “Project PM”:

Has Barrett Brown slipped a cog? Is he zany, daft, wacko, loony, bonkers, Froot Loops, and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?

Brown reacted by threatening to sue me for libel, which I laughed off as ridiculous, the evidence of Brown’s derangement being quite obvious. It was about two months later (February 2011) that somebody sent me an e-mail informing me that this narcissistic nutcase had made himself the public spokesman for Anonymous. Now here we are 22 months later, with Barrett Brown under arrest and threatened with the possibility of decades in federal prison. Perhaps his atheist pals will recommend that Barrett take comfort in praying to infinite eternal nothingness.

UPDATE V: Robert McMillan at Wired points out something I’d forgotten about Barrett’s September video rant:

The self-proclaimed Anonymous spokesman said he was expecting to face fraud charges after his apartment was raided back in March. He mentioned them in a long, rambling video posted to YouTube the day on the same day he was arrested in September. “I bring in no money. I have $25,000 I brought in the last year from this f–king book deal. that’s it.” he said. “A f–king fraud charge for a f–king writer activist who has no fucking money.”
Later in the video, Brown railed against FBI Agent Robert Smith, saying that he was going to “ruin” Smith’s life “and look into his f–king kids.” The Anonymous activist said he was angry that feds were contemplating obstruction of justice charges against his mother.

Brown knew he was being investigated in connection with the Stratfor hacking, which explains a lot about his agitated state in that video. It doesn’t explain, however, why he was ranting about Jennifer Emick, HB Gary and other stuff he had been discussing with “Carlito2000.”

 

UPDATE: Walker v. Kimberlin, Et Al. (Also: Why ‘Doxing’ Is Always Illegal)

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John Hoge’s latest news in the Virginia case of Aaron Walker v. Brett Kimberlin, et al., is that Walker’s attorney Dan Backer has filed motions for default judgments against Kimberlin’s co-defendants Ron Bryanert and Neal Rauhauser. Backer is requesting that the court in Prince William County schedule the hearing on this motion for Dec. 4, the same date as a hearing on Backer’s motion for procedural sanctions against Kimberlin.

Furthermore, Backer has filed notice that Brett Kimberlin has breached the court’s order on the sealed discovery for the fifth time.

It is perhaps about time to point out the hazards of amateurism illustrated here. As every student of Kimberlin’s criminal career knows, the Speedway Bomber became somewhat renowned as a “jailhouse lawyer” during his 17 years in federal prison, filing more than 100 actions on his own behalf. But what was his success rate? I’m not sure anyone has ever bothered to check.

So here we see Kimberlin as the defendant in a civil suit, representing himself pro se, in a case where the plaintiff Aaron Walker, although a trained and experienced attorney, has enlisted the services of the esteemed Dan Backer, Esq., to represent him.

Kimberlin evidently has taken this case lightly and/or has overestimated his ability to lie his way out of a jam, and as a result has committed numerous errors that may put him at an extreme disadantage as the case advances. In fact, it is entirely possible that on Dec. 4, the judge will find Kimberlin in contempt of court and have him spend a few days in the Prince William County Jail.

Meanwhile, the esteemed Dan Backer, Esq., methodically sticks to the law and the facts, with the effect of presenting the judge with a stark contrast between the two sides of the dispute: Humble law-abiding plaintiff Walker vs. arrogant scofflaw defendant Brett Kimberlin.

Now, ask yourself why neither Brynaert nor Rauhauser has bothered to respond to the Walker lawsuit, and the answer seems obvious: Kimberlin encouraged them to believe that he, Wizard of Jailhouse Lawyering, would succeed in getting the case dismissed before it ever got to the point of their being required to deal with it. If that was their belief, then it appears their faith in Kimberlin may be misplaced.

Judging from the filing for default against Rauhauser, it would appear that Neal is behaving like a fugitive from justice at this point, which may or may not relate to the federal case against Barrett Brown that I wrote about last night. Among other things, Brown is accused of conspiring to “dox” an FBI agent and, while his co-conspirator in that (alleged) crime is not named in the indictment, Brown’s acquaintance with Rauhauser certainly would make Neal a possible candidate as “another person known to the grand jury.”

It is interesting to note, in this connection, another lesson about the hazards of amateurism. While researching the Brown case yesterday, I came across a site called “Occupy Peace,” run by a liberal lawyer named Sue Basko. Her purpose is to help keep protesters and “activist” types out of jail, and in writing about the indictment of Barrett Brown, she says this:

IS COUNT TWO ABOUT “DOXING”?
YES. Count Two alleges that Barrett Brown asked someone to find info on the internet about the FBI Agent, and someone searched on the internet for such information.  The indictment does not state that the information was ever found or ever posted; it does not need to be.  The Conspiracy allegedly exists because the two people, Barrett and someone else known to the grand jury, allegedly agreed to commit this crime.  If two people agree to commit a crime and some step is taken in furtherance of the crime, conspiracy exists.

Maybe Barrett Brown should have consulted Sue Basko before he began making threats to against an FBI agent and the agent’s family, and conspiring with “another person known to the grand jury” to publish “restricted information” about them. It’s against the law to “dox” a federal employee, that is, to publish their private information — home address, etc. — in order to expose the employee to harassment or intimidation. Furthermore — and some of the script-kiddies are going to be shocked by this — “doxing” is illegal no matter who the target is, as Sue Basko elsewhere explains:

Doxing is always illegal, whether it is done against a federal employee, a state employee, or a regular person.  There are federal and state laws that specifically address doxing government employees.  With regular citizens, doxing falls under various state criminal laws, such as stalking, cyberstalking, harassment, threats, and other such laws, depending on the state.  Since these doxing threats and activities are made on the internet, the law of any state may be invoked, though most often an investigator  will look to the state in which the person making the threat is located, if this is known, or the state in which the victim is situated.  A state prosecutor can only prosecute violations of the laws of his or her own state, and of acts that extend into their state.  When acts are on the internet, they extend into all the states.
Misinformation was spread that doxing is legal.  I am not sure how or why anyone fell for that misinformation.  Surely, people must understand instinctively, even if they were misled about the law, that if they are threatening someone or putting them at risk, or tormenting or harassing the other on the internet, that this must be illegal.  Common sense would tell you that bullying or jeopardizing another would be illegal in some way.  So yes, doxing is illegal, no matter who the target.

What has Neal Rauhauser been doing for the past year and a half? What has Rauhauser done to Patrick Frey, Aaron Walker, James O’Keefe, Mike Stack, Lee Stranahan, Jennifer Emick, Ali Akbar and so many other of his targeted enemies? Has Rauhauser been “threatening someone or putting them at risk, or tormenting or harassing” these people?

Whether or not Neal Rauhauser has committed any felony, misdemeanor or tort against these people, we must leave to the judgment of qualified authorities. But to say that what Neal Rauhauser has done is wrong — well, that’s just a Neutral Objective Fact.

UPDATE: By the way, we should be extraordinarily grateful to Sue Basko for her common-sense explanation of why “doxing” is always illegal. This prompts the question, as she says, of why anyone ever fell for the “disinformation” that it was legal.

I’ve got a hunch that this mistaken belief originated in the anonymous/pseudonymous world of hackers and trolls, where nobody’s “real life” identity is known and where, behind the presumed protection of anonymity, people do all kinds of things they would never do publicly under their own names. We see this, for example, in the case of notorious Reddit troll Michael “Violentacrez” Brutsch.

No one would have openly done, under their own name, what Brutsch did at Reddit: Create and monitor a “jailbait” forum featuring photos of underage girls. Yet Brutcsh believed, and his Reddit hosts and fanboys shared his belief, in an absolutist view of “free expression” that included the right to anonymity as a principle.

To quote another Texan: “Oops.”

Within troll world, the people who engaged in “doxing” did so in the belief that their identities would never become known, and so this clearly illegal form of harassment — publishing people’s addresses, workplace phone numbers, etc., in order to intimidate them and expose them to harm — became an accustomed behavior that seemed to them entirely right and legal.

So when Barrett Brown became angry at an FBI agent, he did so inside a troll mindset where “doxing” is a routine method of retaliation.

“Oops.”

‘Another Person Known to the Grand Jury’ in the Barrett Brown Indictment?

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

On Sept. 12, former Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown was arrested in Texas after he posted a bizarre YouTube video rant in which he threatened to “destroy” an FBI Special Agent.

In March, Brown had been raided, but not arrested, by the FBI at the time that the feds busted the “LulzSec” hackers, a splinter of Anonymous.

About a week before Brown’s meltdown, on Sept. 3, he had accosted me on Twitter, threatening to sue me for having reported the widespread suspicion that he was cooperating with the federal investigation of Anonymous. I laughed off Brown’s absurd threat, telling him he needed a psychiatrist more than he needed a lawyer. His subsequent video freakout and arrest tended to confirm my judgment. On Oct. 3, Brown was indicted on three federal felony charges:

A federal grand jury in Dallas returned a three-count indictment . . . charging Barrett Lancaster Brown in Count One with making an Internet threat; in Count Two with conspiring to make restricted personal information of an employee of the United States publically available, and in Count Three with retaliation against a federal law enforcement officer.  Brown, 31, a resident of Dallas, was taken into federal custody last month for the conduct described in the indictment.

Click here to see a PDF of the federal indictment against Brown. While it is customary to make the disclaimer that Brown is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, I think anyone reading the indictment will conclude that the feds have got an open-and-shut case.

What I found intriguing, however, was Page Eight of the indictment, which describes Count Two against Brown for conspiring to publish “restricted information” about the FBI Special Agent and the agent’s family, “with the intent to threaaten and intimidate the Special Agent and to incite the commoission of a crime of violence against the Special Agent.” The indictment alleges that in September 2012, Brown “requested another person known to the grand jury to assist him find on the Internet restricted information” about the agent and the agent’s family “and that the other person agreed to do so, and furthermore, the other person did conduct a search on the Internet for the restricted information.”

Hmmm. Who is “another person known to the grand jury”? If Barrett Brown is facing federal prison time for conspiring to do this, why haven’t charges been filed against “another person known to the grand jury,” with whom Brown (allegedly) conspired?

This intrigues me because I know that Barrett Brown was in communication with Neal Rauhauser prior to Brown’s arrest. And we know that Rauhauser is rather notorious for his online research. If Barrett Brown wanted to “dox” an FBI agent, wouldn’t Neal Rauhauser be the sort of person whose assistance he might solicit?

Well, this is mere speculation, but whether or not Rauhauser was “another person known to the grand jury,” the question remains: Why hasn’t Barrett Brown’s unnamed co-conspirator been charged?

Neal Rauhauser as Carlito2000:
How Barrett Brown Went Down

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My planned campaign road trip has unfortunately been delayed, which gives me a chance to follow up on some recent activity by Neal Rauhauser, who became rather enraged when I pointed out that it was Neal who “drove Barrett Brown off the deep end.”

Rauhauser knows that this is true — the Sept. 12 video meltdown by Brown, the former “Anonymous” spokesman, was a direct consequence of Neal’s manipulations — and he is attempting to evade responsibility for Brown’s arrest.

Brown’s meltdown occurred in the immediate aftermath of his attacks on Patrick “Patterico” Frey. The fact that Brown went after Frey, then flipped out and started raving about Jennifer Emick, Aaron Barr and HB Gary — who loom large in Rauhauser’s favorite conspiracy theories — was all the circumstantial evidence needed to know that Neal was behind it. The day before Brown’s arrest, he posted to Pastebin a transcript of an online chat he had with Frey, which included this question from Brown:

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?

Woo hoo! Now, in point of fact, I never had any communication with Emick until Oct. 19, when she contacted me to talk about her recent conflicts with Neal Rauhauser. And I’ve never talked to anyone at HBGary, period. But this was what Rauhauser wanted Brown to believe, that somehow I was part of a conspiracy involving Emick and HBGary. In the Pastebin, Brown posts this excerpt of an online chat log:

13:47] <Carlito2000> Jen Emick & William Welna getting cornholed by #treehouse on 2600.net
[13:47] <Carlito2000> logs posted by Bitchiest aka Kelly Hallisey
[13:47] <Carlito2000> ringleaders there are Bratty (Kelly), Render64 (her man), Pythorian, girlfriday, DingoLingo & humu
[13:47] <Carlito2000> Emick has been circulating among right wingers for a while now
[13:47] <Carlito2000> Approached by @ZAPEM, tentatively Michele Lessick a while ago. Very likely was working with
[13:47] <Carlito2000> @Liberty_Chick (Mandy Nagy) and @dmatthewstewart (Douglas Matthew Stewart) in pursuit of Anonymous
[13:47] <Carlito2000> they hassle @AnonyOps, @AnonyNewsNet, claiming they are Neal Rauhauser, and otherwise act stupid
[13:47] <Carlito2000> Emick has appeared just once as “Cream” on @BrooksBayne site thetrenches.us, as secret source on Rauhauser
[13:47] <Carlito2000> there is a huge split there – Darby/Stranahan get crosswise with Bayne, nasty civil war stared a month ago
[13:48] <Carlito2000> nachash (@doxbin) release big torrent on @Sanguinarious (Welna) and there was a Jen Emick funpack
[13:48] <Carlito2000> funpack contains a doc about pursuit of Brett Kimberlin, straight out of HBGary playbook, and it was NOT in the initial dump UGnazi took from Emick
[13:49] <BarrettBrown> oic
[13:49] <BarrettBrown> where can I get that?
[13:49] <Carlito2000> source is believed to be Tom Ryan, canna go into details on how we sorted that out
[13:49] <BarrettBrown> okay
[13:49] <BarrettBrown> I know he and Emick are in some petty war
[13:49] <Carlito2000> So, its in Emicks’s directory but the writing ain’t her or ZAPEM, seems very much to be @Liberty_Chick style
[13:49] <BarrettBrown> and vaguely aware of Bitchiest etc conflicts, all that, but haven’t followed as much as I should
13:49] <Carlito2000> So, its in Emicks’s directory but the writing ain’t her or ZAPEM, seems very much to be @Liberty_Chick style
[13:49] <BarrettBrown> and vaguely aware of Bitchiest etc conflicts, all that, but haven’t followed as much as I should
[13:50] <Carlito2000> sadly, I am a subject matter expert on this anondrmama
[13:50] <Carlito2000> So Darby is under suspicion as being the SWAT caller that triggered #Swatgate

What you see here is that “Carlito2000” is offering Brown a file (“funpack”) supposedly containing information about Emick’s “pursuit of Brett Kimberlin,” which Emick says is a complete fabrication by Rauhauser. And you see that “Carlito2000” is also interested in many other of Rauhauser’s obsessions — Mandy Nagy, Doug Stewart, “ZAPEM” and Brandon Darby. Frey tried to get Brown to see this:

Frey: “Carlito2000” sounds an awwwwwful lot like Neal. . . .
I think your source Carlito2000 is Neal. He’s spreading disinformation the way he tends to, by sending it to people other than the target, to make it seem more credible. I know all his tricks by now and he and his people are all boring me.
Brown: I actually know for a fact that he’s not Neal, just like I knew for a fact that @Anony_Ops wasn’t Neal. And if I thought it was Neal I wouldn’t take it all too seriously.

With this in mind go watch the 13-minute video rant that got Barrett Brown arrested last month:

“I got to find out, thanks to a hack — thanks to another f–king stroke of luck, thank God — that HB Gary, since mid-February, had hired an FBI informant . . . making up reasons to raid Barrett Brown and get his information. . . .
“It turns out — from the e-mails that were stolen two months ago and that, thank God, I have — that that guy was an old military buddy of HB Gary executive Jim Butterworth. . . . I know what’s been done to me by these f–king contractors . . .
“FBI agent Robert Smith is a criminal who’s involved in a criminal conspiracy that has, thank God, been revealed, part of which was evident months ago, because I told the f–king FBI agent Daniel Forseck . . . when his f–king little Jennifer Emick — f–king informant, HB Gary employee — bragging about the sh-t, she gave me the number. I guess she wanted to talk to me and see what I’d say.”

So, who fed Brown this conspiracy theory about Emick and HB Gary? “Carlito2000,” a/k/a Neal Rauhauser.

Douchebag Lawyer Defends Denial of Service (DDOS) Attacks as ‘Free Speech’

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At what point do those in the legal community who defend criminals — guaranteeing them their due-process rights, giving them “their day in court” — cross a line into advocating, endorsing or excusing the crimes committed by their clients?

Not a moot question, given how Jay Leiderman speaks of the actions of the “Anonymous” hackers he represents:

Take PayPal for example, just like Woolworth’s, people went to PayPal and said, I want to give a donation to WikiLeaks. In Woolworth’s they said, all I want to do is buy lunch, pay for my lunch, and then I’ll leave. People said I want to give a donation to WikiLeaks, I’ll take up my bandwidth to do that, then I’ll leave, you’ll make money, I’ll feel fulfilled, everyone’s fulfilled. PayPal will take donations for the Ku Klux Klan, other racists and questionable organizations, but they won’t process donations for WikiLeaks. All the PayPal protesters did was take up some bandwidth. In that sense, DDoS is absolutely speech, it should absolutely be recognized as such, protected as such, and the law should be changed. . . .
The government and people who write about tech tend to call it a “DDoS attack” but in certain circumstances it’s not a DDoS attack, but a DDoS protest. So the law should be narrowly drawn and what needs to be excised from that are the legitimate protests.

Let’s be clear about this: What “Anonymous” was engaged in was extortion and thuggery, not “protest.”

You can’t just say to a business, “Here, I’m holding up this hoop — jump through it, immediately, or I’ll shut down your business.”

Let’s also be clear about something else: It’s the Left who believes these thug tactics are legitimate, just like when they sent mobs to camp out in the front yards of bank executives, or to harass people attending last year’s AFP summit.

You will probably not be surprised to learn that Jay Leiderman has a highly selective sensibility as regards free speech. Leiderman is defending former “Anonymous” spokesman Barrett Brown — asserting, we suppose, Brown’s constitutional right to threaten FBI agents — and also representing Nadia Naffe against Patterico, who evidently doesn’t have a constitutional right to reproduce court documents relating to Naffe’s lawsuit against the Republican Party.

This is a legal manifestation 0f Herbert Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance” — only the Left has any “rights” worth defending.

UPDATE: Guess this is as good a place as any to quote an article Taylor Amerding wrote about Barrett Brown’s arrest:

Very few in the security community would comment on the arrest for the record, most saying they did not want the headache of becoming a target of Anonymous.
One of the few who did was Robert Stacy McCain, who wrote on his website, The Other McCain, that “a lot of the Anonymous people never trusted Barrett Brown, regarding him as an untrustworthy egomaniacal fame-seeker trying to cash in.”
“He did a TV interview with Michael Isikoff of NBC and announced a book deal with Gregg Housh, and did all of this while promoting himself as the official spokesman for Anonymous, whose members are … well, anonymous, and with good reason, because the cops would very much like to put a lot of them in prison,” McCain wrote.
McCain wrote that after the FBI raided Brown in March, but did not arrest him, other members of Anonymous suspected he might be cooperating with the agency. Of the latest video, he wrote: “Being a paranoid conspiracy theorist is not illegal, and Brown’s tinfoil-hat rantings about (various enemies) were just so much noise. But his threats to ‘destroy’ FBI agent Robert Smith? Yeah, the feds don’t take that kind of talk lightly.”

What stuns me is the timidity of “the security community” Amerding alleges here. Are people really afraid to comment on Brown’s arrest for fear of “becoming a target of Anonymous”?

This assumes that the members of Anonymous are so stupid they can’t see Barrett Brown for the reckless fool he is. Brown’s laughable foolishness is sufficiently self-evident that I have a hard time believing anyone could ever take him seriously, and I’ve never had any fear of reprisal for pointing it out.

Meanwhile, by way of playing catch-up with the Barrett Brown saga, his friends have published Brown’s letter from prison in which he vehemently denies having ever been a “spokesman” or “leader” of Anonymous, while continuing to rant about HB Gary, Aaron Barr, Jennifer Emick, and other such persons whom he accuses of involvement in a sinister conspiracy.

 

‘Someone Trying to Breathe Life into a Three-Year Old Dead Horse’

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Thus does John Fund dismiss an attempt by Nadia Naffe to create controversy around James O’Keefe III over a planned “sting” video that never happened, as embarrassing as the details may be.

O’Keefe, as you certainly know, is the young activist who became famous for his collaboration with Hannah Giles in the 2009 undercover videos that destroyed ACORN, and which sparked the successful launch of Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website. Naffe is a former Republican operative who worked with O’Keefe until, in March of this year, she accused O’Keefe of sexual harassment and worse.

Naffe had been “terminated” by the Florida GOP in 2004, which led to a lawsuit that, if O’Keefe knew about it before he hired her, should have given him pause. Who would knowingly hire anyone whose former employment resulted in litigation? And this is especially true of someone whose work would require a high degree of confidentiality.

So now Naffe has made herself a weapon with which O’Keefe’s enemies seek to destroy him. She has made league with Neal Rauhauser — assisting Rauhauser in an attempt, on behalf of Brett Kimberlin, to get access to e-mails that Naffe wrongfully obtained from O’Keefe — and is now apparently ready to file a lawsuit against Patrick “Patterico” Frey:

Rauhauser has been obsessed with Patterico for more than a year, going back to the 2011 WeinerGate scandal, when Rauhauser (under his “Stranded Wind” alias) published a series of posts at Daily Kos accusing Patterico of all manner of wrongdoing:

It was in the aftermath of the WeinerGate scandal that Rauhauser evidently joined forces with Brett Kimberlin and Kimberlin’s tax-exempt 501(c)4 group Velvet Revolution. Kimberlin had his own grievance against Patterico dating back to October 2010, when Kimberlin threatened a lawsuit against Patterico.

Similarly, both Rauhauser and Kimberlin had been striving for some time to destroy Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe, which is how Nadia Naffe’s complaints against O’Keefe brought this together with their grievances against Patterico. When Naffe made her accusations against O’Keefe in March, Patterico raised questions about Naffe’s story and subsequently discovered the public-record documents relating to her 2004 lawsuit against the Republican Party.

Patterico’s criticism of Naffe and his publication of those documents is, so far as I can tell, the only grounds for complaint Naffe has against him and I can’t imagine any court finding Patterico guilty of anything, but this lawsuit is just another typical product of the Kimberlin-Rauhauser “accuse the accusers” strategy. Once they target someone, the accusations proliferate endlessly as part of an orchestrated effort to discredit anyone who might accuse them of wrongdoing. (See my June 17 article, “‘Scrubbed’ Writings Show Kimberlin Associate Neal Rauhauser’s Obsessions,” for some relevant examples.)

Remember that Rauhauser solicited the same California attorney, Jay Leiderman, in an attempt to get SWATting target Mike Stack to file a nuisance suit against Patterico.

It is most unfortunate that Rosie Gray of Buzzfeed has assisted O’Keefe’s enemies in what is, in fact, nothing more than the latest manifestation of a bizarre personal vendetta. “Dead horse” though the story may be, innocent people still suffer real harm from these deliberate attacks. Assisting sadists in the satisfaction of their depraved appetites is not properly the business of a journalist.

UPDATE: Linked by Jackie Wellfonder and Bill Hoge — thanks! — and thanks likewise to the commenter who points out that Jay Leiderman is also the attorney who represents imprisoned former “Anonymous” spokesman Barrett Brown.

Brown’s involvement with Rauhauser became public last month when Barrett threatened me, then published a series of private online chats he had with Patterico, evidently in an effort to defame Patterico as being party to a (wholly imaginary) conspiracy.

Brown’s motives in that incident are impossible to determine, nor do we know what (if anything) connects that failed smear with Barrett’s subsequent public meltdown that led to his arrest. Absent such knowledge we can only observe that, in general, bad things happen to people who actively ally themselves with evil.

 

‘Anonymous’ Spokesman Barrett Brown Arrested After Bizarre Video Meltdown

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

“In an interview with Defense Technology International [March 1], prominent Anonymous front man Barrett Brown alluded to the significance of the HB Gary hacking in the movement.”
— Mandy Nagy (aka “Liberty Chick”), Breitbart.com, “FBI Bust, Aided by ‘Anonymous’ Snitch, Reveals Left-Hacker Alliance,” March 9, 2012

“I got to find out, thanks to a hack — thanks to another f–king stroke of luck, thank God — that HB Gary, since mid-February, had hired an FBI informant . . . making up reasons to raid Barrett Brown and get his information.”
— Barrett Brown, “Why I’m Going to Destroy FBI Agent Robert Smith Part Three,” YouTube.com, Sept. 12, 2012

“And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”
— II Thessalonians, 2:11-12 (KJV)

* WARNING: INTENSIVE WEIRDNESS! *
Do Not Read This If You Can’t Handle
Full-Strength Industrial-Grade Crazy

The latest bizarre turn in the strange saga of Barrett Brown came to my attention Wednesday evening while I was on the phone with a friend talking about the (equally bizarre) attacks against me by Larry Sinclair, notorious for his claim of having once been Barack Obama’s gay lover.

Damn, I get some of the weirdest enemies, don’t I?

So I was on the phone talking about this and related stuff, and I’m not quite sure how the name Barrett Brown came up, but my friend said, “Have you seen his latest videos?”

When I said I had not, my friend said, “Oh, man, you’ve got to go check it out. It’s funny as hell. He’s talking all kinds of crazy stuff about the FBI and HBGary. It’s hilarious.”

This aroused my curiosity. When last I encountered Brown, it was Tuesday, Sept. 4, and I’d just gotten a call from Charlotte, informing me that they were waiting for me to come pick up my media credentials for the Democratic National Convention. The day before, Brown had gotten up in my face on Twitter, threatening to sue me for having reported the widespread suspicion that he was cooperating with authorities investigating the “Anonymous” hacker conspiracy.

Now, this is simply a fact: A lot of the Anonymous people never trusted Barrett Brown, regarding him as an untrustworthy egomaniacal fame-seeker trying to cash in. He did a TV interview with Michael Isikoff of NBC and announced a book deal with Gregg Housh, and did all of this while promoting himself as the official spokesman for Anonymous, whose members are . . . well, anonymous, and with good reason, because the cops would very much like to put a lot of them in prison.

After the FBI raided — but did not arrest — Brown in March, he became completely radioactive, especially after court documents in the “LulzSec” case (a rogue splinter of Anonymous) showed the feds were getting information from “unindicted co-conspirators.”

Hackers are generally smart enough to add 2 + 2, and if Brown’s get-out-of-jail-free card was contingent on him becoming an FBI informant, he had a serious problem, because none of his hacker buddies trusted him as far as they could throw him.

All of this was just plain fact, and when Brown threatened to sue me for having reported it, I laughed off his threat as absurd. I sent him an e-mail reply that ended with this advice:

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.

Evidently, Brown refused to heed this advice. And so Wednesday when my friend told me about Barrett’s latest “hilarious” video, I was curious — and shocked by what I saw when I clicked on his YouTube channel. Are you sure you can handle the intense craziness? Because this is 13 minutes of absolute 100% bugfucking nuts:

Somebody should transcribe that before it’s deleted. You may not get all the references — HB Gary is the security firm that got hacked by LulzSec, Aaron Barr is the executive whose e-mails were stolen in the hacking, and Jennifer Emick is the former Anonymous member who identified LulzSec leader Sabu. A lot of this “Team Themis” stuff that Barrett Brown was ranting about shows up, by the way, in Neal Rauhauser’s conspiracy-theory document “Andrew Breitbart’s ISR Cell?”

Rauhauser sent that to the FBI in February after weeks of ominous warnings about a “Kookpocalypse.” And it is almost certainly not a coincidence that Barrett popped up on Twitter a couple weeks ago threatening both me and Patterico. Rauhauser’s own connections to Anonymous are extensively documented, but the exact nature and extent of his collaboration with Barrett Brown is unknown.

Being a paranoid conspiracy theorist is not illegal, and Brown’s tinfoil-hat rantings about HB Gary and Jen Emick were just so much noise. But his threats to “destroy” FBI agent Robert Smith? Yeah, the feds don’t take that kind of talk lightly:

Dallas law enforcement authorities have arrested self-professed Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown in what appears to have been a dramatic raid of his apartment late Wednesday night.
Barrett was having a live online video chat session with a few others when law enforcement officers can be heard storming into the room and shouting at him to comply with their commands to submit to his arrest. . . .
A spokeswoman for the Dallas County Sheriff’s office confirmed the arrest and said Brown was booked into the county jail at around 11 p.m. CT and has since been transferred to an FBI facility. A spokeswoman from the FBI field office in Dallas said the agency had no comment on the arrest. . . .
No official reason has been offered yet as to why Barrett was arrested. But it may be connected to a YouTube video Barrett released yesterday in which he appears to threaten an FBI agent named Robert Smith. In the rambling 13-minute expletive-laced video, Barrett accuses Smith of getting his mother into trouble on obstruction of justice charges over a laptop that Barrett had attempted to conceal from authorities. . . .

You can read the whole thing, which actually has video of the raid, which went down while Barrett was having an online video chat with his fellow crazies. Hilarious? Not at all.

Brown is mentally ill, but he’s also young and handsome and intelligent, which permitted him to attract a sort of fan club of enablers who encouraged his anti-social deviance and — hey! — it’s all just fun and games until somebody goes to federal prison.

What did Barrett Brown think he was doing? How has he come to this sorry end? He was playing at being an “investigative journalist,” hoping to achieve fame and fortune by exposing those corrupt evildoers using his amazing Internet skilz.

The White Knight rides forth in shining armor on his noble steed to slay the dangerous dragon!

It’s a common enough amateur fantasy nowadays, and these cyber-Walter Mitty types magnify their dragons — “Islamophobic extremist” Aaron Walker, “convicted felon” Ali Akbar, “racist neo-Confederate” Stacy McCain — in order to inflate their own glory as the triumphant White Knight. The Narcissist as Self-Imagined Hero — they’re a dime a dozen nowadays. When his long-awaited exposé of the evildoers falls flat, when the long-promised triumph doesn’t result in fame and fortune, the narcissist can’t comprehend his own failure.

“Who the hell is Jen Emick?”

You see? There is a tiny fringe of kooks who are obsessed with Jen Emick, Aaron Barr, HB Gary, yadda yadda, and a guy like Barrett Brown plays to that kook fringe, imagining that their fixation with these things represents a potential worldwide interest.

If only Barrett can prove what the fringe kooks believe — that the villains they hate are part of a vast Watergate-sized scandal — then he can imagine the unspeakable glory that awaits.

Yeah, and who the hell is Jen Emick?

You see the grandiosity, paranoia and persecution complex in e-mails Brown sent to the Daily Caller before his arrest:

“Yesterday began releasing revelations from stolen e-mails and other research on Holder/HBGary/Endgame Systems conspiracy against myself and potentially other activists associated with the transparency movement,” he wrote to TheDC late Wednesday afternoon. . . .
“My previous leaks … got me banned from Daily Kos last week after 8 years of writing there,” Brown told TheDC.

This is not merely bovine excrement, it’s delusional. Once you understand paranoia as a narcissistic disorder, you see that Barrett’s fantasy of becoming a latter-day Sy Hersh involves a vast chasm between his grandiose ambition and his actual abilities.

Barrett Brown is not as smart as he thinks he is. More to the point, Stephen Hawking is not as smart as Barrett Brown thinks he is.

Delusions of grandeur are symptomatic of a damaged ego, but we’ll leave aside the armchair analysis and deal with the reality: Barrett Brown went chasing a dream of eternal glory, and had contempt for lesser mortals who were merely trying to make a living as reporters or bloggers, and he actually had a better-than-average run, as such things go. He got himself interviewed by NBC News, was quoted by multiple publications as the spokesman for Anonymous, and even scored a book deal.

And it’s all fun and games until somebody goes to federal prison.

Probably there’s a Moral of the Story, but I’m too tired and depressed to figure it out today. All this swirling craziness — thank you, savage Islamic movie critics! — has pretty much ruined my entire week. Remember, I’m supposed to be covering a presidential campaign, instead of writing 1,500-word dissertations about Internet fame junkies.

Larry Sinclair called up a Mormon housewife in Colorado to tell her what an evil person I am. And how was your week, huh?

On the other hand, I’m not being held without bail in Texas, so maybe I’m doing a little better than Barrett Brown.

 




 

Sociopaths and Democrats

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But I repeat myself. A sudden change of plans requires me to leave soon for Charlotte to cover the Democratic National Convention.

After the car trouble that turned my trip home from Tampa into a three-day ordeal, I had hoped to spend a few days at home before going back out on the campaign trail, but . . . well, a sudden change of plans.

Meanwhile, it appears that the ever-amusing Barrett Brown has decided to throw in with Neal Rauhauser. Yesterday, Brown popped up on Twitter threatening to sue me, demanding I call him, etc. Readers may recall that Brown made himself the public spokesman for the international criminal conspiracy known as “Anonymous,” and was subsequently raided by the FBI at the time of the LulzSec arrests. Brown himself, however, was not arrested, which led to the obvious suspicion that he was one of the “unindicted co-conspirators” cited in the charges against the hackers. In case you’ve forgotten why this matters, I’ll remind you of the headlines:

Barrett Brown evidently considers it libelous to suggest that he would actually co-operate with law enforcement to help apprehend and prosecute criminal hackers. Therefore, I will state for the record that Barrett Brown hates cops and, in fact, Barrett Brown wishes violent death on all law enforcement officials. He is a dangerous outlaw, a menace to society and Public Enemy Number One.

This probably won’t be accepted as a “retraction,” however — it’s damned if it you, damned if you don’t with this guy — so whether I describe Brown as a violent radical anarchist, a gutless snitch, or a laughably pompous douchebag, he’ll still threaten to sue me, which was the subject of my e-mail to him last night:

First of all, spare me your lawsuit threats. Ever the publicity-seeking opportunist, you chose to make yourself the spokesman for an international criminal conspiracy, and if the consequences of that foolish decision did not cross your mind, that’s not my fault.
It was blindingly obvious to me, the minute I heard of this, that you could not speak for Anonymous unless you were in communications with its members and privy to their plans. The FBI seems to have reached the same conclusion.
The references to an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the LulzSec indictments? Well, who else could that possibly refer to? If not you, then it must have been Gregg Housh, with whom you announced a six-figure book deal shortly before the LulzSec raid went down.
While I am not aware of exactly how the FBI solved the case, I assume it was pretty easy once you announced yourself as the Anonymous spokesman: All they had to do was get a wiretap warrant to monitor your communications and, eventually, you would lead them to members of Anonymous. Once other members were identified, they would in turn be put under surveillance, and so on.
This was a typical narcissistic error, and a typical narcissistic response: You think you’re such a fucking intellectual giant that all your schemes will succeed, and when they fail, you start hunting around for scapegoats to blame, because it’s impossible for you to accept responsibility or admit to yourself that you’re not as smart as you think you are.
Your narcissism and your anti-social resentments are thus inextricably intertwined: You consider yourself superior to others and blame society for not recognizing your superiority. In the last e-mail I had from you, in March 2011, you wrote: “Why should the states hold a monopoly on violence? As long as it’s directed towards the state and those who act with it, violence is quite appropriate. … [I]t’s hard for me to get upset about my fellow anarchists attacking armed riot cops for any reason they choose.” This hatred of authority is symptomatic of an anti-social personality and yet, in typical narcissistic fashion, you think of such an attitude as evidence of your superiority: “All smart people think like me. I hate cops. Therefore, anyone who doesn’t hate cops is stupid.”
Or consider, for example, your use of YouTube: Arrogant lectures, the basic theme of which is your own superiority and contempt for anyone you dislike. You bounce from one embarrassing failure to another, yet none of your failures ever convinces you that you’re on the wrong path, or that you have overestimated your own abilities. You have no real friends because, knowing your own inner worthlessness, you have a special contempt for anyone who admires you. You serially alienate would-be friends until eventually your enemies list encompasses the entire world, but the root of your problem is not other people — it’s you, hiding your emotional weakness behind a fragile façade of bravado.
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.

Arrogant sociopathic punks think they can go around threatening people and if you dare say a word back to them, you’re the bad guy.

Speaking of punks, an obscure talentless assclown named Bill Schmalfeldt is threatening to sue Aaron Walker.

Patterico has important background and urges readers to go contribute to Aaron’s legal defense fund.