The Other McCain

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

The Bad Men Project

Posted on | September 9, 2013 | 44 Comments

Otherwise known as Ace of Spades HQ:

I hope this isn’t rude but that Blonde? When I was done with her she’d look like Daffy Duck after a safe falls on him. You’d have to peel her off and shake her out like a beach-towel until she got all of her dimensions back.

While researching Hugo Schwyzer, I came across a BuzzFeed story about a disastrous thing called the “Good Men Project,” which had the crazy idea that maleness could be a topic in the way feminists are always writing about What It Means to Be a Woman.

Guys just being guys without being ashamed of it — we don’t need any “studies,” we don’t need any “rights,” and we don’t need permission.

See that’s the thing: Guys who crave female approval so much that they’ll jump through hoops and degrade themselves to get it. The minute you start playing that game, you’ve failed. No woman worth having is interested in a guy without a basic sense of pride.

Frankly, nowadays, there aren’t that many women worth having. I married one. The rest of you losers are on your own.

Category: Feminism

Hugo Schwyzer Update: Professor Admits He Kept Boning His Feminist Students

Posted on | September 9, 2013 | 92 Comments

 

Remember when “male feminist” Professor Hugo Schwyzer melted down, he admitted he’d slept with more than two dozen female students but said it stopped in 1998? Yeah, he totally lied about that:

Pasadena City College’s porn professor Hugo Schwyzer admitted Thursday he had sex with students as recently as 2011 and said he has admitted himself to a psych ward for the fifth time this summer. . . .
On Tuesday a woman who identified herself as a former PCC student wrote on a blog about having sex with Schwyzer in his campus office in 2008. The former student said she knew of at least one other girl who also had sex with the porn professor. . . .
In a statement issued late Thursday afternoon, PCC officials said the college would “act swiftly to conduct an investigation and hold Mr. Schwyzer accountable for his actions while an employee.”
The student, who identified herself as “Megan Moore” said she enrolled in Schwyzer’s History 25B class “Women in American Society” in spring semester 2011. After meeting for coffee at Starbucks on North Hill Street and Walnut Avenue, the student said she developed a relationship with Schwyzer.
After that, “We continued to meet for sex, sometimes in his office with the door locked, for the next seven months until I graduated PCC in December 2011,” she wrote.
“Throughout his spectacular recent fall from grace Hugo has maintained that he never slept with his students after 1998,’ she continued. “That simply isn’t true. I know one other girl besides myself with whom Hugo was having sex the same semester.”

Hat-tip to Josiah Ryan at Campus Reform, the girl’s Tumblr is here. She says she “was one of the organizers of the 2011 SlutWalk in Los Angeles. I am 23 years old now and I was 20 when I helped with the event. I was also sleeping with Hugo Schwyzer before and for some time after the event. . . . I kissed him in the parking lot of the Starbucks on Hill and Colorado in early May 2011. The next week I brought him back to my apartment where we had sex. We continued to meet for sex, sometimes in his office with the door locked, for the next seven months until I graduated from PCC in December 2011.”

SlutWalk organizer, eh? I am so surprised . . .

Nothing says “equality” and “empowerment” quite like getting boned by your college women’s studies professor.

Pasadena City College officials say they’re investigating. They paid Professor Schwyzer more than $90,000 a year to bone his students.

UPDATE: Kathy Shaidle had this story last week, and quotes StudentActivist.net:

Today’s revelations make it abundantly clear, if it wasn’t before, that there is no place for Schwyzer in the classroom. Not now. Not ever.
Schwyzer should resign from PCC immediately. If he refuses to resign, he should be fired. Period.

But boning student feminists for $90,000 a year is his job. Certainly no one would do it for free . . .

UPDATE II: The former student who reported having sex with Schwyzer also reports on her blog that PCC officials and Schwyzer’s “fangirls” are harassing her. The two PCC students who organized SlutWalk LA in 2011 were Mon-Shane Chou and Simone Dugal Webster, according to online sources, so by process of elimination, it must have been one of them. It seems kind of odd that she would demand that “the truth” about Schwyzer be known, while concealing the truth about herself. But feminist “equality” means that women never have to take responsibility for anything.

UPDATE III: After doing some additional research, I’m going to guess (a) some facts in the Tumblr post were deliberately changed in an attempt to preserve the writer’s anonymity, and (b) Mon-Shane Chou was “my wonderful student” in more ways than one.

That’s just a guess, of course. Chou is now a senior at Cal-Berkeley, where she is involved with the student Democrat organization. Has Chou denied sleeping with Schwyzer? This would be problematic, because Simone Webster has had the same boyfriend for four years.

Anyway, the idea that someone could anonymously expose Schwyzer for having such an affair seems rather dubious.

The Tumblr post says Schwyzer “did not abuse me or take advantage of me,” so she’s not the victim of a crime. In fact, she’s kind of bragging that Schwyzer “told me I make him weak with lust.”

Whoever wrote that needs to ‘fess up, because otherwise everyone will probably suspect it was Cal-Berkeley senior Mon-Shane Chou.

 

Category: Education, Feminism

Barrett Brown and ‘Team Themis’

Posted on | September 9, 2013 | 37 Comments

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 . . .

 

 

 

RECENTLY:

 


Category: Barrett Brown, Conspiracy Theories

Barrett Brown, Special Snowflake

Posted on | September 9, 2013 | 49 Comments

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:

 

Category: Barrett Brown

The Barrett Brown Whitewash Continues

Posted on | September 9, 2013 | 58 Comments

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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Category: Barrett Brown, Crime

LIVE AT SEVENFIVE: 09.09.13

Posted on | September 9, 2013 | 6 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Assad Denies Using Chem Weapons

Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad

Doing PBS interview tonight opposite Obama’s TV speech

Religious Riots Spread In Uttar Pradesh, 28 Killed
Hindu/Muslim clashes worsen despite army curfew, increased deployment of security forces

NAACP President Jealous Resigns
Wants to spend more time with family; credited with increasing donor base, online presence of organization



POLITICS
White House Pushing Hard For Syria Intervention

White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough

“Iran is watching”
Benghazi anniversary not helping
Congress Warns Sequester Cuts Hinder Syria Effort

AFL-CIO Opening Up To Non-Union Members?

Trail Life USA Launches Boy Scout Alternative

UAW To Organize Tennessee VW Plant?

Bloomberg Blasts DeBlasio For Running “Racist” Campaign

Early Turnout Strong In Colorado Gun-Control Recall Elections

Booker Slammed For Senate Bid Amid Newark Homicides

Groups Race To Hire, Train ObamaCare “Guides”



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Crude Oil Rises As Investors Await Syria Strike: NYMEX $110.31, Brent $116.13
PRC Exports Rise With Inflation Leaving Stimulus Room
Neiman Marcus Nears Sale For $6 Billion
The Greeting Card Industry Has A Special Message For The Postal Service
United Airlines To Recall Furloughed Pilots
JP Morgan Chase Exits Student Loan Business
Sony Unveils “Play Station Vita TV”, A Tiny Sub-$100 Game Console
Nissan Smartwatch Links Car And Driver
XBox Music Comes To iOS, Android; Ad-Free Web Streaming Launches
So Much For Facebook Ruining Instagram
Tech Crunch Apologizes For Sexually Explicit Apps



SPORTS
Hanigan, Reds Hand Dodgers Fourth Straight Loss

Reds fans celebrate as Zack Cozart evades Dodgers catcher AJ Ellis to score the winning run

Hannigan hits two-out double in 9th for 3-2 Reds win; first Reds sweep of Dodgers since 1992

Wild Pitch Allows Yankees To Avoid Sweep, Edge Red Sox 4-3

Wacha Leads Cardinals With Arm, Bat In 9-2 Thrashing Of Pirates; Sweep Widens NL Central Lead

O’s Blow It On The Bases, Chisox End 9-Game Skid


Chen Goes Seven Strong, Royals Top Tigers 5-2

Blue Jays Blank Twins For Sweep

Colon Ends Long Winless Streak As A’s Beat Astros 7-2

Giants Pull It Out In 11th Against Snakes, 3-2

Rays Rally Late Past M’s, Build Lead In Wild Card

Cowboys Need Every One Of Giants’ Six Turnovers To Win

Patriots Edge Bills 23-21

Wrestling Returns To Olympics In 2020, 2024

It’s Bush’s Fault: Lions Run Away From Vikings 34-24

Titans Stun Lifeless Steelers 16-9

Bears Rally To Beat Bengals 24-21

Strasburg & Nationals Overcome Rough Start To Beat Marlins 6-4



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Jennifer Lopez To Collaborate With Taylor Swift On New Album Track

One duet is not enough

Track will appear on J-Lo’s eighth album, due out early next year

Liam Hemsworth Wants “Clean break” From Miley After “Mortifying” VMAs

Anna Wintour Cancels Miley’s “Vogue ” Cover After VMA Performance


Gay Actor Admits Trying To Off Himself Multiple Times

Thandie Newton Pregnant With Third Child

Tom Daley Isn’t Gay But Doesn’t Care If You Think So

Tami Erin To Release Sex Tape After All

Zack Galifianakis Ditches Toronto Movie Premiere After Wife Goes Into Labor

Bruno Mars To Perform At Super Bowl Halftime

Demi Lovato Shares The Scoop On her “Glee” Character, Dishes On “X Factor” Season Three

Drunk Drama At Dior & Saks Fifth Avenue Party 

Alyssa Milano Thankful For Stylists



FOREIGNERS
Civilians Flee Al-Qaeda Rebels’ Capture of Syrian Christian Town Of Maaloula
Kerry: Assad Can Stop Strike by Turning Over Chem Weapons
Red Faces Over The Red Box: PM Cameron Leaves Ministerial Papers On The Train
New Van Gogh Painting Discovered In Amsterdam
Muslim Rebels Take Hostages In Zamboanga Raid
Apathy The Main Winner As Low Turnout Mars Moscow Vote
Kurdish Rebels Halt Withdrawal From Turkey
Italian Senate Debates Berlusconi’s Political Future
Norway Set For Swing To Right As Voting Starts
New Aussie PM Abbott Vows To Save Economy



BLOGS & STUFF
American Power: Radical Feminist Takeover At Harvard Business School
American Thinker: Obama’s Pending Attack In Light of 9/11
The Necropolitan Sentinel: Obamacare Watch – Things Moving And Not Moving
Don Surber: Auditor’s Day Weekend Scoreboard
Jammie Wearing Fools: Obama’s Army Deserts Him During Syria Debate
JustOneMinute: Samantha Power Agrees She’s Naive
Pat Dollard: Twice As Many Government Jobs As Private Sector Jobs Added In August
Protein Wisdom: At What Point In Time Did It Become Necessary To Tell Teachers To Wear underwear?
Shot In The Dark: This Is Your Obama Recovery
The Jawa Report: The US Capital On Fire Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Terrorist
Lonely Conservative: 2 Million Bikers Denied DC Permit, One Million Muslims Approved
Megan McArdle: Why Today’s Jobs Numbers Are A Drag


Category: Live at Five

Anti-Koch #Anonymous Hacktivist Belatedly Discovers He’s a Criminal

Posted on | September 8, 2013 | 39 Comments

During the 2011 union-thug campaign to recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a guy using the online handle “The_Hatchet” participated in a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on Web sites involving Koch Industries. The Left demonized the Kochs in the same way the Left had previously demonized, inter alia, Karl Rove, Halliburton and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, because having a demonized scapegoat is necessary to the Left’s worldview.

If “The_Hatchet” thought his online anonymity would protect him while he committed federal crimes, he thought wrong:

A Missouri man will plead guilty for his role in connection with a 2011 series of cyberattacks on websites associated with Koch Industries that occurred during the recall protests against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

From the Smoking Gun:

In a plea agreement struck with Department of Justice lawyers, Christopher Sudlik acknowledged his role in early-2011 distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on several Koch-related web sites. As part of the deal, a copy of which was filed this week in U.S. District Court, prosecutors have agreed to recommend that Sudlik be sentenced to two years probation on the misdemeanor charge.

Sudlik is actually the second individual charged in connection with the same attacks.  This past March, Eric Rosol of Black Creek, Wisconsin was charged with one count of conspiracy to damage a protected computer and one count of damaging a protected computer, for his role in the cyberattack on Koch Industries sites.

Read the rest at Legal Insurrection. These felonious assclowns had their heyday of terroristic mob intimidation, and there isn’t enough Desitin on the planet to heal their butthurt now.

 

Category: Crime

War to the Knife, Knife to the Hilt

Posted on | September 8, 2013 | 52 Comments

David Horowitz on Saturday fired back at Diana West in the seemingly interminable war over West’s book American Betrayal.

What I can’t understand is why this back-and-forth has to continue.

This began, you will recall, when Horowitz published Ron Radosh’s attack on Diana’s book, an attack that would seem a continuation of the general line of argument Radosh began against M. Stanton Evans’ Blacklisted by History in 2007. Whatever Radosh’s motives, this has rapidly escalated into a war of annihilation. It is no longer just an argument about a book, but rather a demand that everyone in the conservative movement must choose one side of the argument and cast into outer darkness everyone on the other side.

Really? With everything we might otherwise be doing — hey, Virginia will elect a governor in a couple of months — we should set that aside so that we can take up cudgels to bash in the skulls of whichever side we find fault with in an argument over the extent of Soviet influence in the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt?

Damn. Just . . . damn.

You know matters have degenerated to an intense state of craziness when I’m the last rational adult in the room.

 

 

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