Category: WikiLeaks

Has Barrett Brown Scammed NBC News?

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In-freaking-credible!

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Barrett Brown is either, as Michael Isikoff reports, “an underground commander in a new kind of warfare” — a member of a criminal conspiracy who should be under arrest — or else he’s one of the most successful hoaxers in recent memory. What astonishes me is to realize that just two days ago I was exchanging e-mails with Brown after he threatened me via Twitter over a post I wrote Feb. 14:

Is the FBI Watching Barrett Brown? (And
If They’re Not Already, Shouldn’t They?)

Everything I know about Brown leads me to believe that his claim to be a leader of “Anonymous” is self-aggrandizing nonsense. But here’s the problem: Absent complete access to his computer records, how would you go about verifying or falsifying that claim?

Consider what bush-league crap Brown was up to less than three months ago: In late December, he was posting videos of himself arguing with his girlfriend’s roommate. Before that, he was getting himself banned from blogs. Before that, he had his lawyer threatening me for making jokes at his expense.

So here we have a guy who seems to have spent December trying to get himself noticed by somebody — anybody — and now in March he’s interviewed by Michael Isikoff on NBC Nightly News?

An ability to detect the aroma of bovine excrement is essential to a newsman’s trade and it is my considered judgment that NBC News has been bamboozled, hoodwinked and scammed by Barrett Brown.

There’s an old saying in this business: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” And unless the Justice Department announces that Barrett Brown is the focus of a federal investigation, I’m calling bullshit.

UPDATE: Let me explain further why I’m so dubious of Brown’s claim. Stars and Stripes reports:

 The Financial Times reports this week that U.S. law enforcement agencies are investigating plans by members of a hacking collective known as Anonymous to disrupt [Marine Corps Base] Quantico’s operations in protest over the alleged rough treatment of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, a suspect in the Wikileaks data dump that has sent countries around the world into a tizzy with the disclosure of state secrets big and small.

OK, so “Anonymous” is threatening the U.S. Marine Corps, and meanwhile Barrett Brown — who has been publicly claiming since mid-February to be involved with “Anonymous” — is strolling down the street doing an interview with NBC News? Doesn’t basic common sense tell you that there’s something wrong with that picture?

UPDATE II: Linked by Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs — thanks!.

Is the FBI Watching Barrett Brown? (And If They’re Not Already, Shouldn’t They?)

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One of those weird stories that just drops out of the sky: Regular readers will recall my occasional go-rounds with atheist blogger Barrett Brown, who first appeared on my radar amid the 2009 LGF blogwar and has since occasionally popped up from time to time. My status as a sometimes combatant with Brown resulted in me getting a tip that Brown has evidently become a public-relations agent for the hacker group “Anonymous,” which launched cyberattacks against critics of WikiLeaks.

Via his DailyKos account, Brown has posted a series of messages purporting to be press releases from “Anonymous.” One of Brown’s posts claimed that the hacker group successfully breached the computer systems of HBGary Federal after an official of that firm was quoted in a Feb. 5 Financial Times article warning that members of “Anonymous” had been identified and were vulnerable to prosecution.

Unfamiliar with (and not hitherto interested in) this aspect of the WikiLeaks controversy, I’m not sure what Brown’s trying to do. Some of what he has posted on behalf of “Anonymous” reads like demented satire. He may be joking, or perhaps just trying to insert his name into the middle of a story that interests him.

On the other hand, if he’s serious, he’s insane, because to make himself an online spokesman for “Anonymous” would almost certainly suffice as probable cause for a search warrant to determine how Brown is in contact with a group suspected of criminal activity online.

Maybe Barrett Brown’s computer activities are squeaky clean and perfectly legal, and he therefore feels entirely safe using his DailyKos diary to bait the Justice Department into launching an investigation of him. They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but trying to elicit a search warrant that results in the FBI seizing your computer would seem rather an elaborate P.R. stunt, even for a self-dramatizing narcissist.

‘Voluptuous Blonde Ukrainian Nurse’

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That’s the kind of headline you don’t see often enough, and I guess we have Julian Assange to thank for it:

In what appears to be the first diplomatic casualty from the latest WikiLeaks revelations, the U.S. ambassador to Libya has returned to Washington and is likely to leave his post, U.S. officials said Tuesday.
Ambassador Gene Cretz, a veteran American diplomat, authored several secret cables to Washington that speculated on long-time Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s health, and described his personal proclivities, including his reliance on a “voluptuous” Ukrainian nurse. . . .
Cretz, who in November 2008 became the first U.S. ambassador to Libya since 1972, wrote in a leaked September 2009 cable, entitled “A Glimpse Into Libyan Leader Gadhafi’s Eccentricities,” that “Gadhafi relies heavily on his longtime Ukrainian nurse, Galyna . . . who has been described as a ‘voluptuous blonde.'”

If you’ll hit the tip jar, I’ll be glad to go to Tripoli and do some investigative reporting on this important story.

(Via Memeorandum.)

Julian Assange, Libertarian ‘Reactionary’?

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Donald Douglas has another link-heavy roundup about the Julian Assange rape case, including a link to leftist blogger Bill Weinberg’s post called, “Enough with the Julian Assange hero worship”:

The most blatantly irritating thing is abject demonization of the women who have made the charges of sexual abuse against Assange. In any other context, the summary dismissal of a woman’s rape accusations would be seen as utterly politically incorrect. But Assange gets away with anti-feminist rhetoric that would do Rush Limbaugh proud.

See what he did there? Weinberg (who loves the anti-American aspect of WikiLeaks) does the Signifying Jive by comparing Assange to the hated Limbaugh. Weinberg also disses the suddenly unfashionable Naomi Wolf and otherwise puts himself on the side of the angels in the interminable “Was it rape-rape?” argument.

Tempting as it would be to engage Weinberg about the “abject demonization” of Assange’s accusers, however, my attention was instead riveted by what Weinberg calls “reactionary” statements Assange made in a Time magazine interview:

“The United States’ Founding Fathers took [Enlightenment principles] further and the federalism of the United States also, of relatively powerful states trying to constrain federal government from becoming too centralized. . . .
“But after World War II, the federal government of the United States started sucking the resources to the center, and the power of states started to diminish. Interestingly, the First Amendment started overriding states’ laws around that time, which I see as a function of increasing central power in the United States.”

Wow. Assange praising federalism, criticizing the centralization of power and even taking a shot at the so-called “incorporation doctrine”?

Has he been reading Lew Rockwell?

Has he been watching Glenn Beck?

Is there some kind of Rothbardian anarcho-libertarianism influence on Assange’s worldview? Will we next find Assange favorably citing General Lee’s prophecy to Lord Acton that “the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it”?

Does the SPLC know about this?

Meanwhile, CNN’s Jessica Yellin defends herself against Glenn Greenwald’s accusation that she is “leading the crusade against the transparency brought about by WikiLeaks.”

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!


‘I Feel Like I Just Found Out I’ve Been Living on the Moon’

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So says a progressive feminist, in agreeing with Ace of Spades’ take on the Julian Assange rape accusations, as described in an Australian newspaper account:

She says they had consensual sex but she woke up the next morning to find him having intercourse with her to which she had not consented.
When she asked him if he was wearing anything, he had allegedly said: “I am wearing you.”

Ace’s conclusion about this:

Maybe some date-rape charges are a bit grey-area, but this charge doesn’t seem gray-area, if true. It sounds like rape.

Yes, if true. But that’s just the problem, isn’t it? It’s her word against his, and convicting Assange of rape would require — at least in the Anglo-American system — that a jury find her testimony convincing beyond a reasonable doubt. Continue reading ‘I Feel Like I Just Found Out I’ve Been Living on the Moon’ →

Unwatchable BloggingHeadsTV Episode in Which I’m Mentioned

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Amanda Marcotte and Maureen “Moe” Tkacik discuss the rape accusations against Julian Assange — including the feminist rage over “rape apologism” — and one of my posts is allegedly discussed but (a) like most episodes of BloggingHeadsTV, this is quite nearly unwatchable; and (b) even if it were watchable, my house is too doggone noisy today for me to listen and transcribe it. So if anyone wants to watch this and try to transcribe it, please be my guest. But I warn you: That’s an hour and 22 minutes of your life you can never get back.

Why are BloggingHeadsTV episodes generally so unwatchable? Well, first off, if we wanted to watch TV, we’d be watching TV, not reading blogs. People who read blogs do so because they prefer reading to watching TV. The spoken word is seldom more than 150 words per minute, and fluent readers can read much faster than that, so that the experience of watching writers talk is much less satisfactory than reading what they write.

The second factor which makes BloggingHeadsTV so unwatchable is that, if bloggers were telegenic, they’d be TV stars instead of bloggers. And I don’t mean this purely in terms of physical attractiveness. Being good on TV is a skill, a skill that most people have had neither motive nor opportunity to develop. Most writers aren’t good at TV because we spend so much time alone with our thoughts and our computers that our ability to communicate via the spoken word atrophies.

So it’s painful to watch this BloggingHeadsTV show and see Mo Tkacik — a very witty and articulate writer — go “mmm” and “uhhh” while she searches helplessly for the right words to say what she wants to say.

UPDATE: Donald Douglas managed to watch 25 minutes of it, and says: “The discussion devolved into gratuitous and surprisingly prurient sex talk, with an extremely selective commentary on the Julian Assange allegations.”

Also, according to Donald, Moe Tkacik describes me as a writer for The Washington Times, which I haven’t been since January 2008. The weird thing about that is, when I resigned, I went out of my way to leave on good terms, but I’ve nonetheless been treated like persona non grata by the subsequent parade of editors.

Seriously: If I scored an exclusive interview with the Pope in which the pontiff revealed that he’s a huge fan of Sarah Palin, my scoop could not be mentioned in the pages of The Washington Times. And yet, despite three years of such ostracism, there are still people who — knowing of me only what they read on the Internet — continue to describe me as a writer for The Washington Times.

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What Line Did Sady Doyle Cross?

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Today I got a Tweet from the feminist who started the #MooreandMe campaign against Michael Moore. You will recall that Moore went on Keith Olbermann’s show and dismissed as “hooey” the rape accusations against WikiLeaks mogul Julian Assange. And when Sady Doyle started her Twitter campaign against Moore, my headline was, “Merry Christmas, America: Feminists Attack Michael Moore as ‘Rape Apologist’ Over Swedish Case Against Julian Assange.”

Certainly it was encouraging that Doyle (and other feminists, including Melissa McEwan) suddenly recognized what conservatives have known for years: Michael Moore is an obxnoxious hypocrite, the Hindenburg of liberalism, inflated with the gas of his own self-righteousness. And if this was to be his implosion at Lakehurst, well . . . “Oh, the humanity!”

But then Doyle went after Moe Tkacik, a writer for the Washington City Paper who had ridiculed the accusations against Assange. This was a different thing altogether, and I treated it differently. So then Doyle sent me this Tweet:

OK, boys and girls, why is trying to get Moe Tkacik fired a different thing than a public shame campaign against Michael Moore?

  • Michael Moore is a wealthy award-winning filmmaker.
  • Moe Tkacik is a young writer for a weekly tabloid paper.
  • Ergo, even if Moore and Tkacik had committed the same ideological “sin,” Moore was merely being embarrassed, whereas the attempted destruction of Tkacik’s career was an act of sadistic cruelty.

Also, Moe Tkacik is a girl. And picking on girls is mean. 

While I might sometimes be guilty of picking on girls — because nobody gets a free pass in the blogosphere — you’ll notice that I generally couch such criticism in gentle good-humored sarcasm.

Sady Doyle should stop picking on girls.

Now run along, sweetheart, and fetch me a cup of coffee.

Meanwhile, Donald Douglas has the latest developments in the Assange/feminist meltdown.

UPDATE: Julian Assange signs $1.3 million book deal.