Barrett Brown in infamous Youtube series where he threatens FBI agent.
Barrett Brown is not on trial for journalism, but for abetting the hacking of HBGary and Stratfor through publication in operational fashion of links to stolen files including credit cards, first in private communication in the Anonymous IRC ops channel, where other hackers made use of them, then public communication on a Daily Kos blog combined with his threats in public written statements on Pastebin against the victims of the hacks, and finally threats against law-enforcement on Youtbe.
Barrett Brown is a cross-platform hacking phenomenon, and you can't just look at one paste of one URL in one channel, but have to see the context of his other statements and actions at the time to understand that there is nothing innocent or needing of protection by the First Amendment in these acts.
Barrett Brown has always been known as a hacker who happens to write an occasional piece about his group Anonymous' hacking and his own convoluted fights with conservative bloggers whom he loathed and tried to put out of business by organizing cyberattacks attacks on their websites and exposing them to harassment through "doxing," or release of their private information. He has only very recently has been dubbed a "journalist" supposedly removed and not directly participating in hacking -- in what I call the Barrett Brown Beautification Barrage, a social-engineering or social hack project orchestrated by veteran prankster Prof. Peter Ludlow (Urizenus Sklar). Ludlow is a Chomskian linguist now at Northeastern University long known as a troll of virtual worlds and MMORPGs and who has in recent years broken into the big-time as a psy-ops promoter for Anonymous and WikiLeaks posing as a journalist. (I counter his hoax here).
To understand how someone like Barrett Brown can come to be called "a journalist," you have to realize that pretty much anyone can get a blog at Daily Kos and post there even with few viewers -- Brown was never on the main pages of Daily Kos but only on his own blog there which is still visible -- he had about three dozen posts in 2011 , mainly about his own fights with other bloggers and Anonymous, and sometimes just reprinting posts that appeared elsewhere like Huffpo.
Brown is often described as "writing for the Guardian," but he has only 9 pieces, often in "Comment is Free" which is easy to get into -- there are more news articles *about* Brown and his antics in the Guardian than his own first-person community journalism, and what he does write involves propagandistic white-washing of the hacker group Anonymous (as with the Sony hack) and deep knowledge of the HBGary hack, which he brags was committed "by those of us in the Anonymous activist collective".
I marvel that anyone could go on calling Brown a "journalist," or pretend he is not on trial for hacking when he writes (emphasis added) about himself as a direct participant:
The next day, our hackers infiltrated Barr's personal data as well as that of HBGary Federal and its parent company HBGary, thereafter releasing tens of thousands of company emails, as well as the very document that Barr had planned to sell to the FBI – a document that turned out to be both hilariously inaccurate and not-so-hilariously destined to get some undetermined number of innocents raided by government agents, despite them not having any connection to Anonymous whatsoever
(No wrongful arrests were made on the basis of these documents and instead, ultimately Barrett himself was arrested, with others in the group of "our hackers.")
Brown wrote only 6 blog posts for Vanity Fair in 2009-2010 at a time when blogging was being encouraged by major magazines and there was more access to it even for oddballs. As anyone can see from his column on Charles Krauthammer , it is rambling and hateful (he makes him out to be racist and Islamophobic with the usual "progressive" leftist tropes) when it isn't incoherent and would likely not have made it to Vanity Fair if it weren't for that major magazine's desire to be cool and hate on the right wing at the time.
One of these Vanity Fair blog posts is a hatchet piece report about how Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs broke with the right. But later, Brown had a falling out with Johnson himself, and ordered a hacker to harass him and to have Johnson's website taken down. Before that, for a time, Brown had posted some blogs on LGF, where, like Daily Kos, pretty much anyone can get their own blog.
Brown also published at the Huffington Post -- again, where just about anyone can get published in the blogs. There he has about 18 posts, many of them incoherent ramblings like this one supposedly about Sarah Palin but really about his own unhappy past and Robert McCain, trying to settle scores with the conservative bloggers he's decided to fight. There are numerous links to his second book purporting to expose these conservatives, but it was never completed and remains only as an excerpt of an incoherent diatribe against McCain, is no longer there on Amazon and Brown's claims that the late Michael Hastings endorsed it or was involved with Brown in some way remain unconfirmed.
The "journalistic credentials" that the hoaxers try to invoke for Brown mainly seem to involve these amateur blog posts from a time when these major publications opened up to ordinary people during the blogging craze and are primarly notable for truly being incomprehensible, vindictive, and incoherent and are few in number (6-12 for only a brief period in most places; only one on McSweeney's which is often cited to give him credence with the Silicon Valley set).
With Brown's very thin online blogging presence, and his one book raging against creationism, co-written with Professor of Sociology Jon P. Alston, Ph.D, who probably did most of the work, it's hard to understand how he could be converted into a "journalist" -- but it's more about the need of activist Glenn Greenwald and others seeking the cover of journalism for anarchist hacking and assaults on the state in court cases they may face for their participation in major hacking escapades, including that of Edward Snowden.
Far from being a journalist persecuted for his work, Brown is a disturbed, drug-addicted and likely psychotic individual who engaged in a series of radical hacking expeditions and bragged about them, along with threatening business and bloggers he didn't like online, who for various reasons was adopted as a "case" by those with an agenda against the United States.
So...To summarize my findings -- easily available in open sources on the web:
o Barrett Brown is a long time hacker, i.e. participant in hacking operations in virtual worlds and online communities and websites; his technical expertise may be minimal but he found his way into the IRC (Internet Relay Channels) of the anarchist hacking collective Anonymous and has been active with this destructive movement for years, socializing with various Anonymous activists and participating in the harassment of conservative bloggers and politicians;
o Barrett Brown has served as a spokesman for the group Anonymous, has written press releases before hacks warning about them and after hacks explaining them with deep knowledge;
o Barrett Brown has knowingly participated in real time in the hacking of bloggers whose views he disliked or who were critical of Anonymous, notably Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs and Robert Stacy McCain of The Other McCain.
o From all indications, Barrett Brown participated in the planning and execution of the HBGary and Stratfor hack, which is how he was able to paste a URL to the stolen documents first in a private IRC Anops channel, and later on a Daily Kos blog which he used in conjunction with a chat with the wife of HBGary's CEO Greg Hoglund to threaten them with revelation of the stolent files;
o Barrett Brown published a press release threatening a bank in relationship to a planned hack;
o Barrett Brown published numerous tweets inciting violence against police in Occupy and blackbloc violent protests, and also published Youtubes threatening law-enforcement agents who investigated his case;
o Barrett Brown obstructed justice in collusion with his mother.
These are all acts that Barrett Brown acknowledges and even brags about; Brown himself doesn't do half as much lying about his own nature, acts, and crimes as the circle of supporters hoaxing the public about him and the cynical radical journalists -- and gullible liberal journalists -- writing about him.
Only some of these acts known in the community are contained in his indictment; evidence of some of it is contained in IRC chat logs which were once posted and widely available but have recently been deleted after they came to the attention to Charles Johnson, who was one of the targets of the hackers. Even so, ample evidence still remains online at Pastebin, on Twitter, on blogs, and on Daily Kos that explain the criminal acts of this person and make it amply clear he is not on trial for his scant blogging described as "journalism".
His journalistic project called "ProjectPM" related to "the security state" and "mass surveillance" was barely developed, was only an aspirational project, and had no other participants in it -- it would never have been noticed if it had not been for the Snowden case, which the hoaxers could then use to try to make Brown's "journalism" seem significant.
Barrett Brown hardly faces "100 years in jail" -- only hackers guilty of stealing millions of dollars form credit cards get anything remotely like such a sentence, and the longest such sentence in the US has been 20 years (Albert Gonzalez). The overwhelming majority of hackers in the category of Brown either obtain mental illness releases; turn informants and are not prosecuted; receive suspended sentences; or get sentences of about 6 months to about 2 years.
Currently the thinking is that since the judge succeeded in obtaining a gag order on Brown's lawyers in order to restrain them from lawfaring and misrepresenting the case in collusion with activists like Glenn Greenwald, and as he has been in prison for some time, it is likely that he will inform on other hackers in his group in exchange for a lighter sentence or a release.
Groups like Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders -- about which I will do a separate post -- that have blessed him as a "persecuted journalist" are either insufficiently familiar with the actual particulars of his case, don't understand what the IRC channel and Anonymous are and how they work, or are guilty of lawfaring themselves (given that CPJ's new lawyer for Internet issues was last seen defending Occupy Oakland, I think in his case, it's lawfaring for the cause). When the full facts come out at trial, these organizations will be embarassed and discredited, and should be challenged now to explain why they are embracing thuggish hackers who take other people's civil rights away in hacking to cause exposure of privacy, crashing of servers, and theft of documents, all under the guise of "protecting journalists."
This is a long, detailed post because the issues are complex, and the recurrent problem of hoaxing, dissembling and distracting by hackers constantly turning values upside down needs to be addressed in detail to counter their massive social hack.
THE HALL OF MIRRORS KNOWN AS THE INTERWEBS
I go back to the early 2000s with Peter Ludlow (Urizenus Sklar, or Uri, as we called him), a scholar who seems to change his university job every other year, and whose university lawyers at one point refused to let him publish his first book on virtual worlds, fearing libel suits (he published it elsewhere).
I first encountered him in The Sims Online after particpiating in the 2002 beta in about 2003 (here's an article from 2004 in the New York Times referencing both of us), where he was infamous for uncovering what he claimed was an underage virtual brothel. His goal seemed to be more about embarrassing game companies like EA.com, maker of the Sims, and getting material to write egghead linguistic papers and sensational blog posts for Terra Nova and other gaming publications than it was about serious anthropological field research.
I happened to find out that the brothel was fake and may have involved an adult and not a teen; others were also skeptical of his sensational claims. I also found Uri, despite his claims to "think about the children," was strangely indifferent to the shocking exposure of children to brutal BDSM cults in TSO. A group of us then easily hoaxed him by pretending collectively to be a teenage wiccan lured by a warlord online -- a story he wrote about as if it were true, thereby proving our point: that it is very, very hard to prove the facts of people's identities and claims online, you can be mislead very easily and much more rigour has to go into scholarship and journalism online -- which is why the real journalists' community needs to do A LOT MORE DUE DILIGENCE regarding the persona of Barrett Brown.
The difficulty in checking facts online didn't stop Uri/Peter -- he went on to get himself a perch in the Opinionator section of the New York Times, regular articles in the Nation and other venues to pitch his perverted pranks and social hacks trying to get the general public to believe that hackers were in fact innocent, and that really, these felons guilty of millions of dollars of losses for businesses and disruption of commerce and government and personal lives were just Tragically Misunderstood Artists.
SOCIAL HACKING TO PRETEND BROWN IS ON TRIAL FOR JOURNALISM
The reason there is a barrage of "news" about Brown now is precisely because Ludlow and other provocateurs have cranked up their social engineering campaign, and all of the Free Barrett Brown campaigners are providing the foot-soldiers for the re-tweets and the blogs and the general agitation everywhere on comments. Rolling Stone and the Nation were easy to convince; they are already pre-disposed to exonerating hackers and suspecting the "security state." Not surprisingly, they succeeded in even socially-hacking David Carr at the New York Times, who wrote a widely-quoted article, A Journalist Agitor Facing Prison Over a Link -- which references the link in the IRC channel -- without any mention that it was in an operational IRC channel, or Anops. Carr makes no mention of the hack's context -- Brown's membership and activism and spokesman status for Anonymous -- or the press releases, or the chats directing hacks or threatening victims of hacks, or anything about the ample evidence of Brown's brutal hacking past, and instead all this becomes merely "pasting a link" and "all about link journalism on the Internet."
You can see what a deceptive tale is weaved as Carr strives to make the facts line up with the Snowden case:
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.
None of the Stratfor files have shown any "inappropriate" let alone illegal ties with government clients, even if they are close; this is legal in a democratic and free society. And it doesn't matter if Brown didn't personally made use of these credit cards -- others in the hacking collective did, and he was involved in planning the hack; he knew many deep details about it; he served as spokesman while they were engaged in the hack and its aftermath; he threatened victims of the hack; and he continued to harass others whose speech he disliked.
With Brown himself calling the provocative activist-lawyer Glenn Greenwald right from the courthouse to make his case (that's why the lawyer's claim that the interview appeared before the current legal team was appointed is irrelevant), and with these crazy lying stories appearing in the Rolling Stone and the Nationand many other publications, the judge called for a gag order. It was one that the lawyers had to concede and worked with the judge to formulate. The gag order was actually for Brown's own good. While Ludlow and Anonymous fans agitating for him are trying to portray him as a journalist to exonerate his crimes, the average jury in Texas will find all the many facts coming out about him such as his heroin addiction and his vendetta against the FBI over his father's bankruptcy in a real estate case -- some relevant to the case, some not -- as a climate that will lead them towards indictment.
THE FAKERY OF PROJECT PM
Taking advantage in particular of the mass hysteria around the Snowden case (although he began his whitewashing exercise earlier), Ludlow has tried to trump up the story as one whereby Brown was creating an open-source online file of evil government contractors that were spying on us, and is now being persecuted for his work in exposing the security state and "mass surveillance programs".
Anyone who has followed Anonymous and Brown in recent years as I have knows that the "ProjectPM" is a total fake. There's hardly any there there. No one used it or referenced it in any journalism or even blogging. No one took it seriously, even among the conspiracy crowd of hackers -- it was just some files he threw up along with many others who rant and rave onthe Internet. No one took it as anything remotely like a Snowden case until Snowden -- then its relevance was applied after the fact. All that's happened is that Ludlow and others have skillfully wrapped it up to look like something it isn't.
Indeed, any cursory look at blogs, Pastebin and old Daily Kos pages fill us in on the reality of Barrett Brown which is far from a story about journalism, but a story of a cunning and duplicitious hacker's helper who best excelled at the social hack.
It pays first of all to read the indicments and actually see what Brown is on trial for, rather than indulging in distracting surveys of his blogging and rantings and crazy drug-fueled Youtube threats.
YES, HACKING IS A CRIME, YES, BROWN IS CHARGED WITH HACKING, AND YES, HE IS A HACKER
To understand this better, first you have to discard the hackers' insistence that nothing anyone does in hacking is negative or illegal; you also have to discard their skewed and contrived notion that computer crimes of various sorts "aren't hacks" or that persons who only help with social hacks "aren't hackers". The favourite thing of criminalized hackers is to cry whenever anyone uses the term "hack" to describe unauthorized access of a computer, or assistance of the thugs making that unauthorized access, IS that it "isn't a hack". Disregard them; they lie.
By saying curiously that "it isn't a hack," they mean it isn't a hack in their jargonistic technical slang, where the word "hack" is always portrayed as something clever and innovative and technical for the good of society, and where "hacking" in any negative sense only means precisely the cracking of passwords or use of special circumvention scripts to gain access, or log-on to systems without authorization, and never just plain unauthorized access or assistance of same -- period.
Thus, if someone uses a "social hack," i.e. tricking someone else into revealing their password through a ruse or deception, and then steals all the files on their server, that's "not a hack" in the parlance of these crooks. Or if they use a script that repeats an action numerous times rapidly trying various numerical strings, that is "accessing public data" and "not a hack". And so on. You get the idea. This is Eddie Haskell singing Gee, Officer Krupke.
LYING ROLLING STONE
Zaitchik in the Rolling Stone pretends that Brown is a clueless git who can barely operate a laptop and therefore "isn't a hacker":
Encountering Barrett Brown's story in passing, it is tempting to group him with other Anonymous associates who have popped up in the news for cutting pleas and changing sides. Brown's case, however, is a thing apart. Although he knew some of those involved in high-profile "hacktivism," he is no hacker. His situation is closer to the runaway prosecution that destroyed Aaron Swartz, the programmer-activist who committed suicide in the face of criminal charges similar to those now being leveled at Brown. But unlike Swartz, who illegally downloaded a large cache of academic articles, Brown never broke into a server; he never even leaked a document. His primary laptop, sought in two armed FBI raids, was a miniature Sony netbook that he used for legal communication, research and an obscene amount of video-game playing. The most serious charges against him relate not to hacking or theft, but to copying and pasting a link to data that had been hacked and released by others.
But...Sitting in the IRC channel while he directs someone to hack Charles Johnson in real time; sitting in the IRC channel while he threatens HBGary's Greg Hoglund and his wife with exposure of their private emails and files from hacking; publishing press releases before and after hacks with detailed knowledge about them; serving as the spokesman for a hacking group and actively seeking press coverage for himself and them as a PR agent; assisting in planning and making use of hacked materials; pasting links to stolen documents in a private channel and then a public blog while making threats -- this is all hacking. You don't have to be a skilled computer programmer to be a hacker.
So here's what Barrett Browning did in detail -- hacking, not journalism, some of which he is indicted for, some not, and which is separate from whatever journalistic activity he may have engaged in as essentially a cover:
1. Barrett Brown participated for years in the hacking movement Anonymous and its various spinoffs, including 4chan, so named for the website of that name and its various fora, He was involved for a time in the anti-gay and racist griefing group in the virtual world of Second Life called the Patriotic Niggers. That's where I first came across him and his pals, years ago, around 2005. He was involved in the anti-Scientologist groups made up of the 4chan people who called their campaign against Scientology "Project Chanology". These people existed in Second Life at its birth but became active in 2004-2005 and began forming the anti-Scientology groups and organizing demonstrations in the virtual world in 2007 *before* the real-life pickets against Scientology in 2008 that began by *others* (or maybe there's an overlap). Indeed, this is one of the reasons why I have come to the conclusion that Second Life isn't just a niche virtual world for cybersexers, as some scorn it, but a platform for hackers to prototype and practice major operations, particularly social hacks -- and possibly also for law-enforcement devising counter-strategies.
In Second Life, by his own admission, Brown participated in raids which crashed the servers of people holding live music events or discussions or just hanging out. I have no idea if he personally crashed my servers, but I believe that he did, because he stopped by my blog here several times to heckle and the group was small in SL and tended to do everything together. The PNs as they were called were notorious and everyone knew about them in this relatively small community. I was singled out for attack because I began blogging about their vigilantism and harassment tactics starting in 2005. When they attacked the John Edwards Campaign in Second Life in 2006 and committed other coercive acts of hacking against speech they didn't like, I quickly saw that far from fighting for freedom from cults like the Scientologists, they were in fact engaged in a turf war for power over the Internet, and wanted to impose a regime where no one could live unless they accepted their arbitrary rule.
As we confirm from Brown in the Rolling Stone interview:
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."
Brown's SL misadventures are not included in the the indictment and hard to prove, given the anonymous nature of accounts in virtual world and the use of alts. They involved real monetary loss because in this virtual world, people rented or re-rented servers which were crashed, and they suffered down time. People like me who had small businesses renting "land" and selling content would see their businesses destroyed. For my tiny business, mainly run as a means to engage in observation of the virtual society, the amounts were trivial, but for large business owners, especially those running live music concerts or hosting malls or expensive rentals, the amounts could run to thousands of dollars.
Again, he himself has bragged of this involvement in hacking in SL in the D and Rolling Stone interviews and elsewhere. Yes, crashing servers through flooding with self-replicating prims on physics or particle-generating objects on physics that overwhelm buffers and use up resources until the simulator crashes is hacking. Hacking is using computers -- servers -- in ways that were not intended by their owners and in an unauthorized way. It is a violation of the terms of service but also of the law (under the CFAA and other laws). Once again: hacking is not how hackers themselves define it to dumb it down and minimize it but how victims define it under the law.
2. Barrett Brown became the spokesman for Anonymous when they went through a period of pretending to pick up activist causes like help to Tunisian or Iranian dissidents. Some people think there is a "good" Anonymous that engaged in these activities "helpfully" -- I don't. I view this as a contrived social hack all of its own, designed to try to distract the public from the true nature of Anonymous in its various forms which is really about a concerted attack on American institutions. The "good" Anonymous which claimed to "start the Arab Spring" (a false hypothesis easily refuted by studying basic resources) is totally dwarfed by the bad Anonymous that hacks individuals, blogs, magazines, newspapers, governments, military, law-enforcement, corporations -- and each other.
Anonymous figures are always telling everyone that we can never understand this cult. They are always hack-splaining and telling you that they aren't organized, don't have leaders, and are loose-knit. In some 10 years of following these groups, I have found that this is far from the case. They have leaders, they are organized, and some of them have been arrested.
Because Barrett Brown was the spokesman for a criminal hacking group whose members committed crimes and were arrested -- and is now indicted in relationship to those activities -- it is completely far-fetched to claim he was arrested for journalism.
3. Barrett Brown was the self-designated and recognized spokesman for Anonymous at the time of the HBGary and Stratfor hacks. Anonymous' group LulzSec -- whose distinctive avatar images had been seen in Second Life years before the wider public saw them and who I myself encountered in 2009 and earlier-- found out that a contractor to the government was preparing to attack them because the government was trying to find ways to stop the onslaught of hacks of the Pentagon, the CIA and other government sites. They found out because the head of this small consulting firm, Aaron Barr, was careless and cocky enough to go into their chat rooms on the IRC (the Internet Relay Channel, a popular means of communication for hackers), find out people he thought were responsible for hacks, and single them out. (He also apparently conceived of drawing their fire deliberately to gain intel on them, to his doom.)
Much has been made about the notion that Barr may have identified the wrong people. Except neither he nor any other persons have been wrongfully or mistakenly arrested. What really happened is that after Anonymous bit on this provocation -- described memorably by Stephen Colbert as Barr putting his penis in a hornet's nest -- their hacking of him and later of Stratfor, the geopolitical consulting firm which was among his clients then eventually led to them being caught and arrested.
The tech press is filled with so many gloating accounts of the hack of HBGary (and even I wondered if it were a sting) that it is hard to clear away the cloud of hacker obfuscation and social-hacking to realize: Aaron Barr and his colleagues did nothing wrong by planning to respond to the challenge of hacking through various measures which are legal -- and if unethical, no different than any that Anonymous itself first used, with far greater damage. Aaron Barr and Greg Hoglund were never indicted for any crimes, nor did any of the people they identified wind up being falsely arrested. Instead, real hackers who committed real crimes were arrested and sentenced, or turned informants, or are awaiting trial, like Brown.
HACKING THE HACKERS
A key reason is because Jennifer Emick (@AsheraResearch), an Anonymous "hacktivist" who had joined the movement in 2008 to fight Scientology for personal reasons of seeing a relative caught up in the cult, and had been inspired by the fight for Internet freedom in Tunisia and elsewhere, became repulsed and concerned when she saw the hackers turn against others including HBGary. She enlisted the FBI's cooperation, and eventually one of the chief LulzSec hackers discovered -- Sabu -- was turned into an informant, and his information led to the arrest of others. Naturally, those hackers who remain at large continue to attack her viciously in all the infamous ways that Anonymous has become known for -- exposing her private information, a form of harassment known as "doxing," stalking her and her family, making harassment phone calls, pizza deliveries and even prank calls to police or child welfare authorities. I've had a lot of this done to me over the years merely for blogging about the criminality of these people, so I have a sense of what it is like.
It is not journalism. It's crime.
4. Barrett Brown wrote a press release threatening HBGary before the hack was made, indicating he had knowledge of a crime before hand, and referenced other indicted persons. (He Blogger Robert McCain of The Other McCain, who has written extensively about Brown because he's been attacked relentless by him, pulls this helpful fact out of the transcripts of Brown's long, rambling Youtube videos:
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 [as Brown says:]
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. . . .
Notes McCain:
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:
Do read McCain's blog post -- this one and many others he has -- because he has done some of the best reporting on Brown. I don't care for McCain -- his violent statements and extreme views are really a turn-off for me on Twitter and his blog, although I occasionally read it. The nature of his speech is not the issue; it is lawful and no one deserves to be doxed or have their servers crashed by these thugs. Furthermore, he does the public service of curating and linking to Brown's own screeds, and these incriminate him thoroughly.
5. Barrett Brown was was present during, and directed, the hacking of Charles Johnson, the owner of the Little Green Footballs blogging site. The nature of LGF and Johnson himself, who has been criticized for his strange political transformations and harsh speech over the years, are not the issue (just like free speech groups don't want Barrett Brown's nasty speech to be the issue in his trial). The reality is, Brown has been recorded as aiding and abetting the hacking of LGF.
This chat log has been verified by some Anonymous who saw it at the time, and not disputed by Brown himself. Johnson himself, who seems to have learned about it only recently, says it tracks with dates and events regarding his loss of service or downed website and doxing and other harassment of him online. The transcript has been removed from Pastebin, not sure how or why, probably because it could lead to the person who first posted it.
Another Pastebin transcript reveals Brown in a discussion with Aaron Barr of HBGary, talking about how he will harass the blogger Robert McCain.
6. Barrett Brown brags that he took part in the HBGary hack both in this interview for D magazine, and in a speech videotaped and uploaded to Youtube on the courthouse steps before his trial and in other communications (see above and below). Far from denying that he is a hacker or pretending he didn't take part in this act, he has always bragged about it and sought credit. It's only Ludlow and some journalists like David Carr just tuning into the story that have tried to play down this aspect of his case to try to turn his direct-action radicalism into a kind of safe journalism.
7. Barrett Brown pasted a link (a URL) to a downloads site containing stolen files from Stratfor, including the stolen credit card information, in a private IRC channel which one had to know about and be invited to by being part of the LulzSec conspiracy, not a published blog.
Here's what the indictment says:
On or about December 25, 2011, in the Dallas Division of the Northern District of Texas and elsewhere, defendant Barrett lancaster Brown, aided and abetted by persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury, in and affecting interstate commerce, did knowingly traffic in more than five authentication features knowing thta such features were stolen and produced without lawful authority, in that Brown transferred the hyperlink "http://wikisend.com/download/597646/stratfor_full_b.txt.gz" from the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel called ""#Anops" to an IRC channel under Brown's control called "#ProjectPM," said hyperlink provided access to data stolen from the company Stratfor Global intelligence, to include in excess of 5,000 credit card account numbers, the card holders' identificatoin information, and the authentication features for the credit cards known as the Card Verification Values (CVV), and by trransferring and posting the hyperlink, Brown caused the data to be made available to other persons online without the knowledge and authorization of Stratfor Global Intelligence and the card holders.
It is not like Adrian Chen of Gawker writing about a hack, and in the course of writing, in parentheses, putting a link to the stolen docs as somehow "a matter of public interest, all the while chiding the geeks in charge of security for not having better cybersecurity, making it "their fault". Adrian Chen is a journalist, and can skate just up to the line here because he regularly reports on hackers and could argue that his linking is part of his story in the context of his news site and his regular journalism.
PASTING IN PRIVATE ANOPS CHANNEL
Not so Barrett Brown. He didn't originally paste this link in a journalistic story on a news site of any kind. He didn't post it on his blog at first. He didn't write about it for an alternative culture shopper or Rolling Stone. He pasted it first in the Anops (Anonymous Operations) IRC channel, which is the operational channel widely used by geeks and is used by hackers go to coordinate their criminal acts, then in his own personal ProjectPM channel. The pasted link led to Pastebin, a coders' site which is also widely used for hackers to paste their loot anonymously, particularly "dox," i.e. the private files of people they have hacked. In fact, to this day, the list of unfortunate persons whose credit cards were stolen in the Stratfor hack can still be found on that site, and while their CCs may have been cancelled, their private addresses and phone numbers are still available for them to be harassed by Anonymous!
The results of that pasting wasn't just "news," but crime. Hackers really did get access to those credit cards and steal from them. We know that far from "giving to the poor" in charities, as they claimed, in fact they did things like order World of Warcraft games online. We know this because Stratfor did a very brilliant thing when they were victimized. Rather than remaining silent, as victims often do, in a damage-control mode, they were very public about everything that happened, and live-blogged it all on their Facebook page. Hundreds of their victims came to complain, and in doing so, we could learn how their credit cards were misused. In fact, even in cases where they gave to charities, those non-profits were harmed, because they had to pay a fee to the credit card companies to reverse the charge.
I realize that precisely because the court case may hinge on a distinction of private channel, the Barrett Browning Beautification Barrage may try to whittle away at this and claim it wasn't so private, that "everyone knew," that you didn't need an invitation, that it was "out there" -- and blah blah. It doesn't matter. It's important that the indictment does note this, and that also, he did in fact make a public post *but in the context of blackmail*.
PASTING ON DAILY KOS WITH THREATS AGAINST VICTIMS
Then, in fact, Barrett Browning himself confesses in a jailhouse communique to having put this link up on a Daily Kos blog - which is what McCain discussed (see above with his link). In his chat with Penny Hoglund, the wife of HBGary CEO Greg Hoglund who was trying to bargain with the hackers to stop exposing their private emails, he makes it clear that he has pasted the link to the 70,000 emails as an act of blackmail and harassment -- not journalism -- and was bargaining with her about taking it down:
On that day, as recorded on pastebin from the discussion on the #OPHBGary channel at Anonops, I was referred to in passing as “our public face” to a journalist. I was on the phone to HBGary President Penny Hoglund at the time, apologizing that HBGary’s e-mails had been seized by Sabu in addition to HBGary Federal’s, instructing her on how to get on IRC in order to make her case directly to the hackers, and promising to remove the link I had put up to the 70,000 e-mails acquired in the operation, a link I had placed upon a Daily Kos post put up to explain the situation to the great many who would miss the “makeover” done to HBGary.com. Had I known that Penny was lying to me about what she and husband Greg Hoglund had known about Barr’s irresponsible attempt to save his own career at the expense of the innocent and heroic alike, I would have simply hung up. Instead, I was polite – but I recorded the call, just as I recorded the next call with Barr, the next call with HBGary exec Jim Butterworth, and finally the drunken call I received months later from Greg Hoglund himself. “Trust but verify,” as Reagan said in the context of a different set of villains.
Some people have raised the question of whether the recordings that Brown made with the victims of the hack and law-enforcement might be used to charge him with crimes, but it does not appear in the indictment.
Even if it was public and even if it was even put on a blog site as a blog post, it would still be abetting a crime. David Carr did not write about any of this context or post that link in his piece in The New York Times. If Adrian Chan did, it was probably safe in the knowledge that it became inoperative soon enough. (That's a point worth researching).
8. Barrett Brown issued a press release in 2011 explaining the Stratfor hack revealing his deep knowledge of the hack and its contents. He explained that the credit cards weren't the only target of the hack, and admitted that the real goal was to get numerous emails that he and his co-conspirators believed contained sensitive political information. WikiLeaks continues to this day to release the stolen Stratfor emails, claiming they are sensational, although most journalists have ignored them and they appear to containing anything unlawful or even interesting. Brown intones about the Stratfor hack as if he is attacking the "security state" at its heart, when in fact all that's happened is that Brown and his friends are just naive, and don't grasp enough about geopolitics to understand this contractor, despite having clients among government agencies, generally serves up benign and sometimes even ridiculed material (because it is not very sophisticated, in the view of regional specialists).
The nature of Stratfor doesn't matter; it has a right to exist, it is lawful, and it has committed no crimes. No investigation is underway of any Stratfor contractors or staff for anything they are researching. When "free speech" advocates make common cause with Anonymous hacker thugs and Barrett Brown who arrogated to themselvs the right to destroy this organization with force by breaking and entering -- hacking their servers -- they undermine the right of all individuals and groups to form organizations and collect news and make analysis. Far from striking any blow against some imagined "security state" harming free speech, this hack strikes at the very heart of a free society and the ability of people to make groups and freely pursue their research and publications. Note that in this press release, Brown also makes explicit that he believes the US is run on the premise of "might makes right" and that he and his fellow hackers reserve the right to use force as well.
9. Barrett Brown cynically planned to manipulate the press and pose as a journalist writing about "security state" issues. The transcript of his talk with the hacker radi0 -- since removed although copies remain -- reveals him bragging about his contacts at Rolling Stone and the Village Voice and others and his plans to try to get them to write about his Stratfor hack Anonymous' various hacking exploits and even indicates he has something he's holding on to that he may use -- "and it's being held in reserve just in case we need to fuck hbgary". He displays intimate knowledge of the hack before, during and after its occurrence.
10. Barrett Brown had a history of inciting violence against law-enforcrs, and made repeated threats and even Youtube videos threatening FBI agents and their families.
As we learn from the indictment:
On September 4, 2012, Barrett Lancaster Brown used his Twitter.com account BarrettBrownLOL and posted the following comments:
"a. Don't be a pussy. Call up every facist and tell them you're watching. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gcptY8ne14...#ProjectPM"
b. "Have you doxed a pig today? Be ready for the #revolution - have a list informationliberation.com/?id=40815 #Anonymous."
c. "Don't know how to shoot? You've got five years to learn. Maybe less. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkqSIZaBhUY&list=UUv1FlZ4TdveCyva7okPRmSA&index=1&features=plcp... #anonymous #ProjectPM #blackbloc."
d. "DHS stocking up on ammo. Are you? http://www.youtube.com/watch/v=wkqSIZaBhUY&list=UUv1FlZ4TdveCyva7okPRmSA&index=1&feature=plcp.. Don't wait. Retaliate."
3e. "Have a plan to kill every government you meet. #ProjectPM tinychat.com/BarrettBrown #Anonymous Echelon2.org."
Read the rest of the violent and threatening posts here.
Then the indictment states:
On September 10, 2012, Barrett Lancaster Brown used his Twitter.com account BarrettBrownLOL and re-posted the message "A dead man can't leak stuff...Illegally shoot the son of a bitch."
Then other links are placed with his Youtubes naming and threatening the FBI agent (see above).
He threatens then @AsheraResearch for informing on him. The indictment goes on to detail all his violent threats against the FBI agent and notes, "I'm armed, that I come from a military family, that I was taught to shoot by a Vietnam vet and by my father a master hunter...I will shoot all of them and kill them if they come."
There will be plenty of people to word-salad and edge-case and call this protected speech. It isn't.
The indictment finds that the defendant "knowingly and willfluly did transmit in interstate and foreign commerce communications containing threats to injure the person of another, that being Barrett Lancaster Brown transmitted messages through the Internet on his Twitter.com accounts and his Youtube.com account, threatening to shoot and injure agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and specifically focusing on Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent [RS].
11. Barrett Brown is charged with collusion with his mother to obstruct justice as we can see from the indictment describing his mother's efforts to hide his laptops from FBI searches.
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