Barrett Brown

Barrett Brown
Barrett Lancaster Brown (born 14 August 1981) is an American journalist, essayist, activist and former associate of Anonymous. In 2010, he founded Project PM, a group that used a wiki to analyze leaks concerning the military-industrial complex. It was classified a "criminal organization" by the Department of Justice. In late 2020, Brown restarted Project PM.
In January 2015, Brown was sentenced to 63 months in federal prison for the crimes of accessory after the fact, obstruction of justice, and threatening a federal officer stemming from the FBI's investigation into the 2012 Stratfor email leak. As part of his sentence, Brown was also required to pay almost $900,000 to Stratfor in restitution.
In November 2020, Brown claimed asylum in the UK on the basis that he had been persecuted in the US for his journalism. Brown says in 2021 he overheard officers discussing sealed charges in the US against him when he was arrested in London for allegedly overstaying his visa and incitement offenses. He was convicted of causing intentional, harassment alarm or distress.
Early life and education
Brown was born and grew up in an affluent part of Dallas County. His father Robert was a wealthy real estate investor until the FBI investigated him for fraud and he lost the family's money. His parents divorced when he was 7. After the divorce he lived with his New Age mother Karen Lancaster, who called him "an indigo child with an alien soul". Brown exhibited an early interest in writing and journalism, creating his own newspapers on his family's computer while attending Preston Hollow Elementary School where he was the poet laureate. He went on to contribute to his school newspapers, and interned at several weekly newspapers during his teenage years.
While in middle school, he began exploring the possibilities of online networks and reading Ayn Rand and Hunter S. Thompson. He attended the Episcopal School of Dallas through his sophomore year of high school, where he created the Objectivists Club and placed second in a national Ayn Rand essay contest. Brown spent his would-be junior year in Tanzania with his father who was residing there on business. While in Africa, Brown completed high school online through a Texas Tech University program, earning college credits as well as his high school diploma.
In 2000 he enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin and spent two semesters taking writing courses before leaving school to pursue a full-time career as a freelance writer. In 2007 Brown and a group of old friends moved to Brooklyn, where their apartment was used as a daytime base of operations by a group of marijuana dealers from Puerto Rico and Honduras. During this time, he became a griefer in Second Life and began socializing with other griefers on 4chan, forming the beginning of what later become Anonymous. In the documentary We Are Legion, Brown called his griefer period "the most fun time I ever had in my life". Brown had some paid writing gigs, but mostly published on unpaid, self-edited websites like Daily Kos and The Huffington Post. His work as an unpaid spokesman for the Godless Americans PAC led to his first TV appearance on the Fox News morning show Fox & Friends.
Journalism
In 2010, Brown began work on his crowdsourced investigation wiki, Project PM, which was labeled a "criminal organization" by the Department of Justice. By Brown's count, Project PM had 75 members at its peak who communicated through an IRC chat room and published their findings on the Project PM wiki. The group dug through huge amounts of hacked files and emails from intelligence contractors, hoping to expose companies like HBGary and Stratfor, earning the trust of the hacktivist community. According to The New York Times and Rolling Stone, Brown called his research subjects at home and harassed them, which some Project PM members considered pranks and joined.
In June 2011, he and Project PM released an exclusive report about a surveillance contract called "Romas/COIN" which was discovered in e-mails hacked from HBGary by Anonymous. It consisted of sophisticated data-mining techniques leveraging mobile software and aimed at Arab countries. After Project PM was shutdown by his 2012 arrest and incarceration, he restarted it in late 2020 while seeking asylum in the UK.
From September 2012, during his incarceration, Brown wrote a series of columns for D Magazine titled "The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Jail". In 2014 he self-published the book Keep Rootin' for Putin: Establishment Pundits and the Twilight of American Competence. In 2015 he transitioned from D to The Intercept. In 2016 The Intercept won a National Magazine Award for three of Barrett's columns. In 2019 he burned his National Magazine Award to protest The Intercept closing the Snowden archives.
In 2017, Brown launched the Pursuance Project, which aimed to unite transparency activists, investigative journalists, FOIA specialists and hacktivists in a fully encrypted platform. Brown said that Pursuance would take hacktivism into the future, letting anyone sort through troves of hacked documents and even recruit teams of hackers. Pursuance's goal was to offer task management and automation environment for collaborative investigations into the surveillance state. In 2018, Brown raised over $50,000 for Pursuance Project on Kickstarter. In February 2020, Brown shut Pursuance Project down, writing that Pursuance would resume work later that year funded via settlements from libel suits. The Pursuance software was last updated in October 2018 and is available as a demo on GitHub.
In a December 2020 update, Brown said they used the money but weren't able to make a prototype. He also discussed starting abusing methamphetamines a year and a half earlier, noting it elevated his work and his ability to wreak havoc on elements of the press and police agencies. He also discussed going to rehab. Brown said that his drug use and time in rehab was one reason Pursuance hadn't been updated, but that the Project was back from hiatus.
Brown has written for The Daily Beast, Vanity Fair, True/Slant, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, Skeptical Inquirer, WhoWhatWhy, and other outlets.
Association with Anonymous
Brown began working with Anonymous after watching it form in 2006 and being asked "to help run things in a way and to participate" and become directly involved when Operation Tunisia started in January 2011. He called himself a "senior strategist" and "propagandist" for the group, describing their work as "information operations" and "sort of an unconventional, asymmetrical act of warfare". Some media outlets have presented Brown as a self-proclaimed spokesperson for Anonymous, which he disputed, saying "it doesn't work that way."
Brown's relationship with Anonymous deteriorated and by May 2011 he had begun turning on the group and renounced his links to it. In September 2011, Brown announced that he and Gregg Housh, another former member of Anonymous, had signed a contract estimated at more than $100,000 with Amazon to write a book tentatively titled Anonymous: Tales From Inside The Accidental Cyberwar. The book was never released, Brown said in a podcast that he spent the money.
In November 2011, Brown came to major public notice when he said that 25,000 emails from the Mexican government containing the names of 75 members of the Zetas drug cartel and associates would be released if a member of Anonymous kidnapped by the cartel was not set free. Brown later said the member was then released and that there was a truce with the drug cartel. Others have said the kidnapping was fake, noting a lack of details and police reports and that the Veracruz state attorney general's office couldn't confirm the kidnapping. Some contended the Anonymous operation was fake and that there was no plan, or that it was staged as a way to promote Brown's upcoming book.
On November 4, 2011, Brown said he was sending the Mexican government emails to Der Spiegel and working with CNN on a story about a district attorney who was working with the Zetas. In another comment that day, he said that Anonymous was trying to link a US district attorney to Los Zetas. On November 5, Forbes reported that Brown alleged that emails showed that district attorney Ron Moore in Asheville, North Carolina had been cooperating with drug cartels. Brown repeated the allegation to WLOS the next day and said he had numerous sources in the area to back up his accusations. Ron Moore denied the allegation, calling it "libel" and saying "this allegation is not true and it is the height of negligent and irresponsible journalism to promote this untrue and unverified gossip."
On November 7, ArsTechnica reported that Brown wrote in an email that he "never said" Ron Moore worked with the Zetas and "specifically said otherwise in the very first quote that arose on that", writing that he had emails allegedly tying Moore to an American gang called the Houstones. According to Brown, the emails had been sent to him by someone from Asheville who had seen media coverage of OpCartel. Brown said he believed the information because it was "very specific" and "in accordance with other allegations that have already been made", referring to unconfirmed internet rumors from 2008. Brown commented that "I don’t know for a fact that Ron Moore is involved with these gangs, but I have information that I’ve provided to others that makes it look like that." Brown also said that a self-described hacktivist named Robin Jackson had ties to the Zetas, but offered no direct evidence of Jackson's alleged ties to the cartel.
In December 2011, Brown told reporters that Anonymous had hacked millions of emails from Stratfor over Christmas and that they would be released by WikiLeaks. Brown suggested that Anonymous tell Stratfor they would "consider making any reasonable redactions to e-mails that might endanger, say, activists living under dictatorships" before emailing Stratfor CEO George Friedman directly.
Legal issues
Brown has had several legal issues in the United States and the United Kingdom. In the United States, he agreed to a plea bargain in 2014 and plead guilty to accessory after the fact in the unauthorized access to a protected computer, threatening an FBI agent and obstructing the execution of a search warrant. In the United Kingdom, he was convicted in 2021 of one charge of causing intentional, harassment alarm or distress.
United States
Arrests and trials
On March 6, 2012, the FBI executed search warrants at Brown's apartment and his mother's house seeking evidence of alleged crimes. During the search, agents took possession of his laptop computers. The seized laptops included no less than 3,000 pages of chat logs from March 2011 to February 2012. These chats were produced as evidence in the trial against Jeremy Hammond and in Brown's trial. Journalists familiar with the evidence against Brown said the total number of pages of chat logs may have been in the tens of thousands, potentially revealing his contacts with hackers and other sources who thought they were speaking in confidence.
On September 12, 2012, Brown was arrested in Dallas County, Texas for threatening an FBI agent in a YouTube video. Brown has talked publicly about his history of using heroin and said at his sentencing that he was going through "sudden withdrawal from paxil and suboxone" on the day he made the video. His arrest occurred as he left a computer linked to Tinychat in which the raid could be heard in the background.
A magistrate denied bail because he was judged "a danger to the safety of the community and a risk of flight." On October 3, 2012, a federal grand jury indictment was returned against Brown on charges of threats, conspiracy and retaliation against a federal law enforcement officer. Various tweets, YouTube uploads and comments made by Brown before his arrest were cited as support within the indictment.
On December 4, 2012, Brown was indicted on an additional 12 federal charges related to the December 25, 2011 hack of Austin-based private intelligence company Stratfor. A trove of millions of Stratfor emails from the hack, including authentication information for thousands of credit card, was shared by the hacker collective LulzSec with WikiLeaks. Brown faced up to 45 years in federal prison for allegedly sharing a link to the data as part of Project PM. On January 23, 2013, a third indictment was filed against Brown on two counts of obstruction for concealing evidence during the March 6, 2012 FBI raid of his and his mother's homes. Brown's mother was sentenced on November 8, 2013, to six months of probation and a $1,000 fine for a misdemeanor charge of obstructing the execution of a search warrant.
As of September 4, 2013, Brown was under a federal court-issued gag order; he and his lawyers were not allowed to discuss his case with the media, lest it taint a jury. Assistant United States Attorney Candina S. Heath said that Brown tried to manipulate the media from behind bars for his benefit, that Brown's attorney "coordinates and/or approves of his use of the media," and that most of the publicity about Brown has contained false information and "gross fabrications". Defense counsel maintained the gag order was an unfounded and unwarranted breach of Brown's First Amendment rights.
In March 2014, most charges against Brown were dropped. In April 2014, Brown agreed to a plea bargain and plead guilty to accessory after the fact in the unauthorized access to a protected computer, threatening an FBI agent and obstructing the execution of a search warrant.
At sentencing, the government introduced additional chat logs seized from Brown's laptop. D Magazine wrote that the logs "painted Barrett as a leader of Anonymous, someone who knowingly stole and distributed credit card information, a wreaker of real and serious damage" in an attempt to secure a lengthy prison sentence. This caused further delays, as the defense was not given prior access. In January 2015, Brown was sentenced to 63 months in prison. He was also ordered to pay $890,250 in fines and restitution. Journalist Janus Kopfstein accused the government of making false statements about Brown before his sentencing. Much of Brown's December sentencing hearing was spent in drawn-out arguments over the definitions of Project PM and Brown himself.
Brown was released from prison on November 29, 2016, and moved into a halfway house close to downtown Dallas, Texas. Brown was ordered to pay at least $200 of his restitution every month. On April 27, 2017, Brown was arrested and held on unknown charges for four days.
In 2021, he claimed he overheard officers discussing sealed charges in the US against him when he was arrested in London.
Subpoenas
In February 2017, lawyers for donors to Brown's legal fund filed suit against Assistant United States Attorney Candina Heath for filing a subpoena against WePay that resulted in divulgence of their identities. The lawyers argued that the irrelevance of donor information to the case against Brown and the provision of the information directly to the Federal Bureau of Investigation rather than to the prosecutor or judge led to donors' belief that the information was intended to surveil and harass the donors for activity protected by the U.S. constitution, and filed for destruction of the data and monetary damages. On October 2, 2017, Judge Maria Elena James denied a motion to dismiss the case introduced by the Department of Justice.
In June 2017, the Department of Justice subpoenaed The Intercept for all communications and information on payments made to Brown. The Intercept's in-house counsel told the U.S. Attorney's Office that they would agree to turn over financial information but not communications between Brown and The Intercept. Brown suggested the subpoena related to restitution payments he was supposed to make, but commented that they should already have the information readily available. According to Brown, instead of using that information "they subpoenaed a media organization that they happen to have a great deal of interest in, The Intercept" which he called "an ill-thought-out fishing expedition".
United Kingdom
In April 2021, images and videos spread online of him holding a protest banner which said: "Kill Cops" near where an officer had been killed. Metropolitan Police tweeted they were trying to identify him and right-wing journalist Andy Ngô tweeted an accusation that he was "antifa-linked". Claims spread online that Brown was an undercover police officer, under police protection, or an agent provocateur. The Metropolitan Police told Reuters and Brown wrote online that the claims were false.
In May 2021, he was arrested on his girlfriend's canal boat in east London, being there since November 2020 to claim asylum, for allegedly overstaying his visa and two incitement offenses related to the banner. The arresting officer initially charged him under an incorrect code. An internal memo included a statement by Metropolitan Police Federation Chair Ken Marsh calling the banner "abhorrent, unacceptable, and dangerous behaviour" that could have resulted "in a tragedy." After he was released on bail, he was detained by immigration authorities for overstaying his visa. He pleaded not guilty and was convicted of one charge of causing intentional, harassment alarm or distress.
Criticism of Assange and WikiLeaks
In November 2017, Brown criticized Julian Assange for his secretive collaboration with the Trump campaign and then allegedly lying about it after it was revealed that the WikiLeaks Twitter account secretly corresponded with Donald Trump Jr. during the 2016 presidential election.
The correspondence shows how WikiLeaks actively solicited the co-operation of Trump Jr., a campaign surrogate and advisor in the campaign of his father. WikiLeaks urged the Trump campaign to reject the results of the 2016 presidential election at a time when it looked as if the Trump campaign would lose. WikiLeaks asked Trump Jr. to share a WikiLeaks tweet with the quote "Can't we just drone this guy?" which True Pundit alleged Hillary Clinton made about Assange. WikiLeaks also shared a link to a site that would help people to search through WikiLeaks documents. Trump Jr. shared both. After the election, WikiLeaks also requested that the president-elect push Australia to appoint Assange as ambassador to the US. Trump Jr. provided this correspondence to congressional investigators looking into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The secretive exchanges led to criticism of WikiLeaks by some former supporters. Assange had asserted the Clinton campaign was "constantly slandering" WikiLeaks of being a 'pro-Trump' 'pro-Russia' source. Barrett Brown, a long-time defender of WikiLeaks, was exasperated that Assange was "complaining about 'slander' of being pro-Trump IN THE ACTUAL COURSE OF COLLABORATING WITH TRUMP". He also wrote: "Was "Wikileaks staff" lying on Nov 10 2016 when they claimed "The allegations that we have colluded with Trump, or any other candidate for that matter, or with Russia, are just groundless and false", or did Assange lie to them?"
Brown said Assange had acted "as a covert political operative", thus betraying WikiLeaks' focus on exposing "corporate and government wrongdoing". He considered the latter to be "an appropriate thing to do", but that "working with an authoritarian would-be leader to deceive the public is indefensible and disgusting".
In 2018, three trustees of the Courage Foundation decided to remove Brown from the Courage Foundation's beneficiary list over "nasty adversarial remarks" he had made about Julian Assange, and a decision was made to prioritise the case of Wikileaks over all other beneficiaries. Courage trustee Susan Benn told Brown that Courage would no longer help him, writing in an email that "You have made a number of hostile and denigrating statements about other Courage beneficiaries who are facing grave legal and personal risks. Courage expects solidarity and mutual aid from its beneficiaries, especially when those among you face extreme uncertainty and danger."
In response, Courage Foundation Director Naomi Colvin quit in protest and Brown alleged that he had only been given about $3,500 out of the total $14,000 that had been donated to Courage for him. Renata Ávila called Brown's comments "disloyal and unacceptable."
Social media bans
In 2019, Brown's Twitter account, @BarrettBrown_, was permanently banned from Twitter four times and remains banned. He has joked that he holds the record for most Twitter permanent bans.
The first three bans were overturned. According to a Counterpunch journalist, one of the bans was prompted by Brown posting what he said was proof he didn't rape a woman, a ban described by Twitter as errors after journalists inquired, but the fourth was not. The fourth and final ban was prompted by Brown tweeting that Assange should not be on trial but that he would "deserve to die by other, cleaner hands" if he knew of Erik Prince's alleged ties to Roger Stone.
Brown's Twitter account for the Pursuance Project was also banned for ban evasion and platform manipulation after it was falsely reported, according to The Daily Dot.
Mental health
Brown has talked publicly about his history of drug abuse and treatment, including heroin and injecting suboxone in the 2000s and early 2010s and ecstasy, acid, methamphetamines and marijuana from the 2000s through the early 2020s. Brown has said he was going through withdrawal on the day he made the video he was convicted for. In a June 2022 interview, Brown said he has "done drugs on major national outlets," and that he used suboxone for the last ten years.
In 2022, he accused his friends of working to put him in prison, before attempting to commit suicide. According to Brown, the episode resulted from him suffering from Complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Twelve days later, Brown said he had mostly recovered. Brown has been diagnosed with severe ADHD and depression.
In the press and the arts
Relatively Free is a 2016 documentary by Field of Vision about Brown's drive to a halfway house after he was released from prison. He has also appeared in the 2012 documentary We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists, the 2014 documentary The Hacker Wars, the 2020 documentary Sensational, and the 2021 documentary The Face of Anonymous.
Barrett Brown's case was included as a plot point in Season 2 of the U.S. TV series House of Cards because of input from Brown's friend and fellow Anonymous member, Gregg Housh.
According to NPR, Elliot from the TV series Mr. Robot was based on Brown - "a drug addict who can't access his own emotions."
Brown served on the advisory board of the International Modern Media Institute.
See also
References
Further reading
External links
Keep Rootin' For Putin at Internet Archive
1981 births
American male criminals
American investigative journalists
Anonymous (hacker group) activists
Living people
People associated with computer security
People associated with WikiLeaks
Twitter controversies
Writers from Dallas