Barrett Brown's ranting and rambling story of the HPGary hack -- and his threat against agents.
Oh, dear, there's our Urizenus Sklar (Peter Ludlow) poisoning young minds again.
You know, nobody paid much attention to Barrett Brown except a few of us following Second Life, the hacker movement, Anonymous and such.
Barrett Brown was actually once a griefer (someone who deliberately tries to make other people miserable in virtual worlds by harassing them, bullying them, spamming them, crashing their servers, etc.). He went on to become a sort of paranoid conspiracy nut and fame-whore for Anonymous, saying he was its speaker. Of course, Anonymous always tells you they don't have speakers and leaders. That's nonsense, because actually they are a rigidly hierarchical organization with eschelons of ranks and duties like an army or terrorist cell, but they just feign this whole loosy-goosy non-structure egalitarian movement as a dodge. Obviously, some of them are leaders, make the plans, get others to execute them, and some take a spokesman's role when they need to, and some are just wannabee hangers'-on -- that was Barrett's story. The feeling was that Barrett Brown was doing this more on his own than with any great acclaim by his Anon buddies, but whatever.
Since Brown was arrested on charges of hacking, stealing credit cards (because he linked to the pages with the information, which the edge-casers always want to pretend is "journalism"), and threatening FBI agents and their family -- none of which are cool things to do and all of which are crimes -- there's been a sense that even by Anonymous standards, he's pathetic. Those crazy, paranoid, ranting rages of his on Youtube where he threatens the FBI agent, and the ones where he goes off on drug-addled tangents about all the people out to get him -- these are just...sad. He is not an avatar of the, er, transparency movement and he doesn't have the animal magnetism of Assange or the nerd charisma of Edward Snowden -- er, such as they are.
No, he's just a beat loser, and it's pathetic. He was ratted out by others and helped rat out himself. But suddenly, with the NSA Snowden thing, his value to the Movement rose, and none other than Peter Ludlow, founder of the Alphaville Herald, decided to make much of him.
So now we get this ridiculous story in The Nation (where else), The Strange Case of Barrett Brown with a mini-editorial screeching that he faces 105 years -- and then a cunning link at the end of the story to Michael Hastings' obituary, as if he *was* murdered by some evil US spy agency.
Uri -- as we call him in The Sims Online and Second Life -- knows just how strange this story is, and just how pumped-up his version of the story is now, and just how much LESS there is than meets the eye. That has never stopped Uri, who has always exaggerated and told wild tales about these worlds that he thought nobody would ever check or object to. In fact, it was my objecting to them and getting quoted in the New York Times years ago, plus my setting up of a sting operation with some other TSO regulars to out his bad journalism on fake scandals, that set Uri on a path of revenge -- he got his virtual tabloid sleuths and fake mafia kingpins to stalk me until they could finally put together enough clues to match my real-life identity and my sims' avatar and then my Second Life account.
Since then, I've always made a point of linking them myself so that no one has to go to all that trouble or think that they have grounds to silence or blackmail. They really are a nasty, unethical bunch there at the Herald.
In any event, this story is just so hyped now that I don't know where to begin. Start by looking at the "data base" of all these companies that supposedly spy on us all to see how pathetic it is. All of this revolves around the HBGary and Palantir and Stratfor stories -- but none of the things these companies did or planned to do are crimes, and everything that those who hack and harass them and their clients are.
The entire thing makes me think of The Wrong Hands and the Justice League -- a story in Second Life that prefigured many of our woes in real life today. The Justice League, spandex-clad superheros, chased a bunch of hackers and miscreants and griefers in SL, keeping a database of their identifying features -- their names, their groups, their hangouts, as they created endless new accounts to dodge bans for their bad behaviour. When there was attack somewhere, say, on a music festival or a bible study or a housing rentals sim, they would document it and cross-hatch it on the dbase. They would also tend to draw fire as the one force willing to openly fight these 4channers and other bad actors in SL. I would just abuse-report them and move on, sometimes blogging about them to name and shame them, but I wouldn't go after them with firepower or get into battles with them. The JLU held meetings and planned strategies and staged actions to try to get these chronic griefers that the managers of SL, Linden Lab, never seemed to lick -- possibly because some of them were found to join them on their off hours, as I documented, and some of them found it useful to settle scores with customers they didn't like.
The JLU's data base then became more elaborate as the conflict escalated. It was then tied to any other manifestations they could find connecting bad actors in SL under avatar names to RL names if the people outed them. This was all open source information and didn't involve outing privacy or hacking into people's accounts, but the group of hackers they targeted for their bad deeds tried to distract from their own bad actions, and decided to try to turn public opinion against those documenting and reporting and fighting back.
Sound familiar? It is. It's like the story of WikiLeaks and the story of the NSA, today. It is one of the many thing I feel were prototyped in Second Life where it was really easy to prototype -- a hostage community of people online that you could easily affect like dropping a rock in a pond, endless capacity for virtual harassment, endless edge-casing and lawfaring capacity with a troop of coders and developers of the same hacker tribe who are the managers of Second Life at Linden Lab.
So the griefers in 4chan and Woodbury University, a California commuter college with a presence in SL in the form of a digital arts department where the professor himself as one of the griefers -- with an avatar with an Afro crying "Pool's Closed!" like a b/tard -- formed a group called The Wrong Hands. Their point was that this data base of what they claimed was "private information" held by the JLU -- i.e. information about their misdeeds -- would fall into the "wrong hands", people would harass them in RL. So they waged this whole Eddie Haskell fake thing claiming privacy was violated by this ability of the JLU to do calls to their dbase to fetch up info on griefers, and on their seemingly close relationship with one of the Linden Lab employees who came to give them talks on their sims and didn't seem to mind their vigilante work, as they themselves had their hands full with abuse reports.
At first liberal journalists like me were like Glenn Greenwald is with real life -- we would express shock and indignation about the horrible breaches of privacy involved in aggregating information, especially with real-life connections, and then using it in a vigilante manner, maybe even harassing people in RL -- there was a famous story of first the 4channers coming to the home of the JLU leader on Halloween night in real life in Guy Fawkes masks and scaring him and his family, then the story of the JLU superheros calling some kid's father in real-life to complain about his sim-crashing. I was sent a sketch of the plans for making a more elaborate dbase and records call system which I published, saying that aggregating and intensifying the files on people was beginning to erode on their privacy and also constituted vigilantism. The JLU responded by filing a DMCA notice on me to remove the sketch from my blog as if it were "proprietary information" -- even though it wasn't code, just a description. They did the same thing to the Alphaville Herald, which also published the outline. The Herald had resources and lawyers, and fought Typepad, where they also had their online virtual newspaper -- and they won and got the material restored. I didn't bother.
In any event this all went on very, very predictably until The Wrong Hands claimed that the JLU had bugs put on sims where they taped people's conversations unbenownst to them and also did visitor tracking, which shows which avatars come into sims with other avatars. Metadata! Privacy disruption!
Except, it was hard to prove they were really doing this with the device in question, and it was hard to explain why those involved didn't just eject the objects from their sims as non-group or hostile objects, easy enough to do. It was all very strange...
In any event, the JLU got criticized by the community who became hysterical about privacy issues. The way to get people most hysterical in SL is to threaten to out the males who have female avatars -- this is a very big thing there. There were two cases of gay men that "the community" tried to manufacture into real-life persecution cases. I was very familiar with both and I knew it was a hoax. In one case, a transgendered person who once tried to join the JLU and was then kicked out of their group, and hung out with griefers, wound up committing suicide in real life. But their suicide came long after their involvement in SL, had more to do with a set of sad circumstances in real life and loss of support from relatives, and it was really contrived to try to blame the fact that somebody abuse-reported a harassment incident by this person when they griefed for the tragedy of them dying much later for other reasons. It was just one of those efforts to do emotional blackmail and distraction that hacker-anarchists so often try as a tactic to confuse and manipulate people -- and it failed.
Ditto the effort to try to turn the tragic death from AIDS of another avatar with a sad and complicated story, first as a griefer who actually waged racist and anti-gay attacks, then as a attention-attracting blogger who claimed to reform, and then as someone who later died of AIDS quickly, saying that he wanted to refuse treatment. When one of the JLU contacted the real sister of this former griefer for a brief information confirmation and expression of condolences, suddenly, this became "stalking" and "harassment" in the crazed minds of "the community" -- and not without whipping up from the Injured but Not Innocent -- the sister's FB was open, she openly wrote about her brother, and the note to her was polite. All of this was just hysteria.
In the end, interestingly enough, the whole The Wrong Hands crew were the ones banned from Second Life, not the JLU, who were supposed to be the evil privacy-busters. And the TWH were banned for various things -- griefing, harassment, sim crashing, the usual stuff -- but also for doing a sophisticated DDoS and malicious script that of course wasn't allowed. So that was the end of those people -- except they came back on alts and continued to harass, a story for another day.
Then followed a very long "trial by Internet" where on a forum, "the community" tried to mete out justice. They came to the conclusion that while those who believed there were genuine privacy issues and that vigilantism is wrong, they really couldn't pin anything on the people who were merely documenting crime and keeping a dbase of it to fight it better; meanwhile, the griefers who acted as if they were victims were persecutors themselves, and liars as well. The JLU grew less active, but so did TWH -- yet another privacy moral panic especially for the m2f avatars of SL had been averted.
Like I said, a perfect prefigurement and rehearsal for the NSA and WikiLeaks. This could be literally by some of the same people (and I have a hunch it is) or something more complex -- a prefigurement that happens because the circumstances and issues came together in an accelerated way that enabled it to play out quickly, for the same reasons that the issues play out on the wider Internet, i.e. it's the nature of the beast.
Barrett Brown was one of those weak confused mama's boys who becomes a drug addict and an Internet tough guy who lowered his voice deliberately to be cool -- like Edward Snowden - a feature that an SL diva captures perfectly in her blog and an insight for which I'm grateful. He is not facing any 136 years or whatever, it's the usual nerds taking the calculators out of their pocket-protectors and adding up literalist understandings of technical maximum sentences. The threat to the FBI guy makes it pretty serious, and the credit cards, so he might see not two years, but four or something like that. We'll see. He is not a freedom fighter and not a hero but a pathetic punk.
Just parking my reply to Uri on the Nation here, because it will be buried or who knows, risks being removed:
Dorothy Parker?! Uri, shame on you, that's just outrageous.
Barrett Brown, by his own admission, is a common Second Life griefer, a hacker, a heroin addict, a DDoSer, and a geek trying to work out long-standing grudges he has against the feds over what he views as improper prosecution of his father. You know that, so I don't know why suddenly you are playing journalist here. Word salad!
He is in prison on charges of hacking, stealing credit cards, and threatening an FBI agent on Youtube. This is not Hunter Thompson; this is felony.
Whatever Aaron Barr's own wrongdoings in planning anything that might have been illicit (which in fact he didn't actually do), the outrageous behaviour of Anonymous and LulzSec in harassing, bullying, hacking, disclosing and persecuting Aaron Barr and others is ultimately what led to some of them getting arrested. I don't know how you can bless this sort of behaviour. Oh, actually I do, you're a griefer professor. There's actually nothing wrong with planning to challenge Glenn Greenwald and his activism in defense of WikiLeaks. In fact, it's a public service. More people should take it on. While you're clutching your pearls at Barr's lame notions of disinformation plots and personas, you know full well that this is exactly the sort of active measures your little script kiddie friends do for 4chan and Woodbury and Anonymous and the big time movements that they feed into. So shame on you.
There's also nothing wrong with banks protecting themselves against hackers and using cybersecurity consultants to do this. I realize it sounds awfully lurid to have the Koch Industries mentioned but why is it okay to hack banks?! It's not. Even the socialists at the Nation don't call for that.
And we can't be sure, given how crazy the drug-addled Brown sounds in his Youtubes, that he is in fact explaining facts rationally and really has this evidence you claim. Let's see it in a court of law. Again: whatever lame nefarious things that Barr might have concocted to impress his potential clients wasn't carried out, and we don't have any evidence that the FBI would have carried it out so it doesn't wash. Meanwhile, the hacks of Anonymous and LulzSec *were* executed and that's why they're in jail -- duh.
But where you really get crazy -- spending too long in Second Life? -- is when you claim that the Stratfor leak had "discussion of opportunities for renditions and assassinations". Could we get a link to that? And even if it turns out to be true as an actual word-searched text-string, even your own description of it sounds like it was just a hypothetical discussion -- and somebody sounding off about "bugzapping" in an informal chat is hardly grounds of proof that these warmed-over Google-searchers were going to actually off anybody. Don't you get it about Stratfor?!
And then your completely unresearched claim that Endgame was supposedly selling zero-days to foreign actors and "the hammer" had to come down. Yes, they teleported Brown home after that, Uri, and crashed his sim.
You know, mothers don't get to conceal the laptops of their sons' crimes. You can cry the blues on this, but that's the law. Barrett Brown, like Bradley Manning and Jeremy Hammond and many others in this coercive and destructive movement are right where they need to be.
As for your this panic-mongering of "105 years," you should know better that sentencing is not accomplished like a nerd with a calculator but is application of the law. That's why, you know, Weev has 40 months. And why Aaron Swartz was offered 6 months in a plea bargaining. And why the whole host of all your hacker heros never get anything more than two years; often they get parole or psychiatric counseling.
The rule of law is exactly what suffers from all these unethical hackers. Your championing of them and pretense that they are uncovering human rights wrong has always been sick.
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