They see me rollin’

There are three quick-and-easy methods by which one may deduce that there is something seriously wrong with the story that NPR did on me and my non-profit organization Pursuance earlier this year, even if one is entirely unfamiliar with the subject matter. The first is to take a glance at the unusually long list of corrections one finds at the bottom of the online article that accompanied the original broadcast. The second is to look at how many other journalists and authors have taken the unusual step of openly mocking the story and its author after it was brought to wider attention last week by EFF Director of Cybersecurity Eva Galperin, who deemed it “uniquely awful in that it fails to understand anarchists, hacktivists, Anonymous, Barrett Brown, and Mr. Robot all at once” — a sentiment thereafter echoed by every other specialist who subsequently weighed in. The third is to merely skim the other articles that have covered Pursuance in the year and a half since I announced the project upon my release from prison — and to note that The Observer and Wired, for instance, seem to have reached conclusions regarding my intentions that differ rather dramatically from those that NPR broadcasted to the whole of the United States last February and have seen fit to leave up on its website ever since.

I’d considered writing a thorough rebuttal of the story when it first came out; that I didn’t is only partly due to laziness, and has more to do with the fact that complaining is usually poor strategy. And the first thing one learns upon becoming a subject of press interest is that there’s actually very little one can generally do in the face of inaccurate or even malicious press coverage.

In 2012, for instance, when I was languishing in a federal jail unit under a gag order and facing 100 years worth of trumped-up federal charges that had been universally denounced as retaliation for my work exposing illicit, government-linked surveillance and propaganda efforts, then-Gawker contributor Adrian Chen attended a fundraiser intended to raise money for both me and hacker Jeremy Hammond. Chen subsequently wrote a rather strange article in which he denounced me as a “real asshole” and referred to me as having “once starting a bogus ‘war’ with the Zetas drug cartel for attention,” referring to an Anonymous operation that, as widely reported at the time, was started by Mexican Anons whom I later assisted in relaying developments to the American press well after it had already started. Perhaps Chen had forgotten that he’d previously admitted to me that, in his words, “I’m not saying that you made it up”, “I don’t think you’re the person who originally made it up,” “you might believe it,” and so on and so forth — and that I recorded the call in question. More likely he simply doesn’t care; if his current employers at The New Yorker were really bothered about these sorts of ethical discrepancies, they presumably wouldn’t be running articles by a guy who a few years back denounced Anonymous in a book review without seeing fit to disclose that he’d once tried to buy stolen documents from a couple of its more prominent hackers, and even placed a shoe upon his own head at their request in a vastly pathetic attempt to get those documents — documents which, to add injury to insult, turned out not to have ever existed. I don’t think Chen was the one who originally made them up, mind you; he might have believed in them. (In contrast, the Anonymous/Zeta incident, though inaccurately reported in most U.S. outlets and assuredly a baroque and complicated , was indeed a real thing — which is why the FBI, which seized all of my communications from that time, never mentioned it in its various filings over the course of a case in which it was quite intent on finding some means of discrediting me).

Adrian Chen

This sort of thing, whether motivated by maliciousness, mediocrity, or incompetence, is simply part of the cost of doing business for anyone who seeks to do anything at all in public view. Here and there, I’ve cited inaccuracies in the reporting on me and the various strange but necessary enterprises in which I’ve been involved. But unless there’s a chance of doing so quickly and in a fashion sufficiently amusing that other journalists are likely to bother reading it to begin with, there’s rarely anything to be gained by doing so (which is not to say that journalists don’t ever face consequences for irresponsible reporting; but the process is a haphazard one, as with much else in a society such as ours). Indeed, all one can really hope to accomplish in documenting such errors is to shine light on the problem. And even this is really only helpful in a policy sense to the extent that there are solutions on offer; but we’ll get to that.

For now, let us take a look at the NPR segment, because a journey of a thousand miles, etc.

We begin with the one portion of the article for which the author and radio presenter who wrote it, Laura Sydell, can probably not herself be blamed — the headline, which, by tradition, tends to be handled by an editor who may or may not have paid a great deal of attention to what the headline is supposed to be summarizing:

An Anarchist Explains How Hackers Could Cause Global Chaos

This is certainly grabbing, in the best tradition of those little online ads meant to look like actual news, but unfortunately the subsequent article never actually cites this one weird trick that causes global chaos, as we shall discover, and the anarchist in question (governments HATE him) fails to deliver on the billion-dollar premise that was thought up in [your city]. With this self-parody of a fucking headline having drawn in the rubes, we come to the first paragraph:

Artists and criminals are often the first to push the boundaries of technology. Barrett Brown is a criminal who has actually helped inspire art — the TV show Mr. Robot. Its protagonist is a hacktivist — a hacker who breaks into computer systems to promote a cause.

Since the show’s creator was also interviewed for this piece, we may assume that there is some basis to the claim that I served as partial inspiration for the protagonist — or at least we could have normally assumed this if we were not about to find all kinds of other things wrong with the article.

Brown was connected to Anonymous, a group that hacked a private security firm to reveal secrets. He is now out and living in a halfway house in Dallas.

I’m actually pretty sympathetic to journalists like Sydell who, mindful of the need for brevity, refer to Anonymous as a “group,” rather than a movement, as any collection of individuals can indeed be correctly referred to as a “group.” In actual fact I worked closely between 2011 and 2012 with an especially productive segment of Anonymous based out of a server called Anonops — but, again, this is hardly necessary to state in the course of a short piece such as this. It’s worth noting, though, that Anonymous-affiliated hackers actually hacked quite a few private security firms to reveal secrets. And I had in fact moved out of the halfway house months prior to giving the interview, and nearly a year after this segment actually ran; this is one of those instances in which the journalist has decided to take information from previous articles on her subject, in this case without having considered that time flows and that circumstances change, and that it is for this reason that we don’t refer to Gerald Ford as the current president. (It’s also probably telling that I explained this to Sydell in one of the several fact checking e-mails she sent me after the broadcast had already gone out, and that the error is nonetheless still there. And I rarely feel the need to resort to italics, but Jesus fuck.)

He had spent years in a prison cell thinking about what he might do when he got out. And he says he is ready to change, so next time he gets involved in hacking a corporation he is able to inflict maximum damage.

One will notice that I am not actually quoted as saying this exact thing, which is unfortunate, since it would seem to be a matter of some import. As the actual people who performed the hacks in question have always been quick to point out, I was never actually “involved” in any hacking, a practice for which I would not be of much use, having zero experience with programming. What I was actually “involved” in, for the most part, was the investigation of the materials discovered. And the “damage” I sought to inflict was the same sort of damage that Sydell is about to inflict on me and my struggling new organization — writing about them — except that in my case I tended to support my assertions with evidence, a practice in which Sydell does not herself indulge.

“Certainly, I haven’t gotten any less militant in the course of having these things done to me,” Brown says.

Certainly I said this, though presumably without the inappropriate comma. Just as certainly I was referring to my actual work, which does not involve hacking things, and to my actual politics, which do indeed lead me to praise those who risk their freedom to conduct these hacks so that the criminal institutions that tend not to get prosecuted for the crimes we’ve exposed in the past can at least be brought to the attention of that small portion of the press capable of handling nuance.

Since most hacktivists operate in the shadows, Brown offers the best look at these cyber-revolutionaries and their motivations.

Given that Sydell has just defined hacktivists as those who actually “break into computer systems”, and given that I have never done any such thing and have little idea of what it might entail, and given that many of those who are best known for actually doing these things were caught six or seven years ago and are now giving interviews to Morgan Freeman for a National Geographic series and holding speaking engagements at London University and writing articles from prison and have names like Jake Davis, Hector Monsegur, Mustafa al-Basham, Jeremy Hammond, and Ryan Ackroyd, I would submit that it is not entirely true that I am the best person to ask about the “hacktivists” that “operate in the shadows”. On the other hand it does serve to convince the editors and producers upon which traditional media ultimately depends that the writer has found the most relevant and authoritative possible subject for their story. So, although not strictly true in the sense of being true, Sydell’s claim is at least true in the sense of being convenient to Sydell. As with much else here, this sin is not unique to her; it is among the original sins of the editor/writer model of journalism that has its roots in 17th century London and which the major outlets have not been terribly interested in updating since.

The 36-year-old Brown was born in Dallas. His father was a wealthy real estate investor, until he was investigated by the FBI for fraud. Brown’s father was never charged, but the family lost all its money and his parents divorced.

My father actually was charged, which is part of the reason he lost all his money in the course of hiring lawyers (other factors included his penchant for hunting wild game in war-torn African nations, a pastime he pursued with the same unyielding vigor that I would later bring to opiate addiction and attacking others in print). The judge dismissed the charges because they were visibly nonsensical (I would not be lucky enough to get quite as fastidious of a judge when it came time for my own Texas bar-mitzvah). The money evaporated, to be sure, and I spent the next year sharing a bedroom with my mother in my grandmother’s apartment, which taught me the lesson that things can change.

“It was something that I’m sure instilled in me the idea that there was a degree of arbitrary power out there that could come down at any time and disrupt your life, as it did to me when I was a child,” Brown says.

I did indeed say this.

He hates arbitrary power and always has. He is an anarchist who believes the U.S. government is fundamentally corrupt. And he says most Americans are too complacent to do anything about it.

I would hope everyone would hate arbitrary power. As for whether the U.S. government is “fundamentally corrupt,” I will here resort to quoting Dwight Schrute’s response to being told by a well-meaning acquaintance that alligators are dinosaurs: “Well… it’s complicated.”

“That’s what … in part brings me to contempt for the American citizenry,” he says. “Obviously, I have no respect for the laws, for the government or for the voters.”

I did indeed say this. My contempt for the voters in particular is shared by every presidential candidate in history who has ever hired a “messaging” consultant, which is to say all the candidates who have ended up winning. To put it another way, campaigns certainly spend quite a lot of money on balloons.

Instead, he says, his own code of values drives him.

I blush to consider that anyone with even a passing knowledge of history could in good conscience allow themselves to be driven by the moral vagaries held by default in the particular time and place in which they happen to be born.

He became a radical intellectual — more interested in spreading revolutionary ideas than in protesting in the streets. But in 2006, Brown saw a potential outlet for his anarchist dreams — the hacktivist group Anonymous. It was leaderless, crowdsourced and militant.

It certainly wasn’t militant in 2006, when it was still a trolling culture based out of 4chan, its time taken up largely by Dadaist attacks on a children’s game called Habbo Hotel. At the time, I was indeed struck by its unprecedented ability to coordinate large actions, and like any WASP worth his salt I immediately looked to its military potential, but it wasn’t exactly the Weather Underground, or much of anything, really.

Anonymous managed to organize a massive attack on Scientology, even taking down its website. Brown started covering Anonymous as a journalist but soon became deeply involved.

“Taking down its website” was the least of what Anonymous did in that particular instance, but on the whole, this passage, like several others in the story, manages to be completely accurate, which is a fine thing for a passage to be.

“I saw this as the very first ripples in something that would grow to be one of the great dynamics of the 21st century, that we would see more of this emergence [of] online warfare essentially against institutions including nation-states,” he says.

Yep.

For many years, Brown was a sort of unofficial spokesman for Anonymous, appearing in interviews dressed in a beige corduroy or navy blue jacket and dress shirt, a cigarette dangling from his hand. He looked more like a preppy than a revolutionary.

Fine, but keep in mind that actual preppies tend to wear sweaters, whereas I prefer to think of myself as a dandy. A CHAOS DANDY

In 2011, the group began targeting companies that contracted with the U.S. government. One of them was Stratfor — a global intelligence firm. Emails released after an Anonymous hack included sensitive information on top-secret government missions like the killing of Osama bin Laden. The emails also show Dow Chemical hired Stratfor to spy on activists trying to get money for families who suffered during the Bhopal disaster.

Once again we have a pretty accurate rendition. The problem here is that the original broadcast, and the original article, later yielded the following rather unfortunate correction, commemorated at the bottom of the piece:

Also, in the audio version we say that Stratfor was involved in top-secret government missions like the killing of Osama bin Laden. We should have said that Stratfor emails written in the hours after bin Laden’s death and released after an Anonymous hack included sensitive information about the mission, not that Stratfor was involved in that mission.

Actually they shouldn’t have said any of it, since the information was no longer “sensitive” when it was released, a year after the operation, and was not terribly important when it was written. But of course some huge number of people have now heard on the radio that the despicable little firm that spent its time engaged in insider-trading and spying on activists for Dow Chemical and Coca Cola was really out there killing bin Laden, and oh, the moral ambiguity!

Brown viewed this as a private corporate version of COINTELPRO — the FBI’s effort in the 1960s to discredit activists like Martin Luther King Jr.

No, I viewed the entirely separate Team Themis operation, which was the thing I was actually targeted for my role in disrupting (as per my search warrant, which lists the firms involved in that insane conspiracy as subjects for search without mentioning Stratfor at all, and which was made public on Buzzfeed by the late Michael Hastings shortly after my first FBI raid but might as well have not been) as akin to COINTELPRO, and so does pretty much everyone else who knows what it was. Even CNN and NBC picked up on Team Themis at the time. Stratfor, while important, was never my main focus, and I never had a chance to go through those Stratfor e-mails myself — contrary to, say, this Rolling Stone article that claims I discovered a program therein called Trapwire which I supposedly thought was the most important thing ever, and then goes on to mock me for thinking this thing that I’ve never thought or said (and on which I’m thus not quoted — perhaps just as well, since the author, Alexander Zaitchik, also made up a host of other details, a practice for which he was later criticized by Washington Post media critic Eric Wemple and about which I’ll have a few more things to reveal when the time is right — for prison has made me a patient man, if not a less arrogant one).

Brown created Project PM, an online chatroom where participants looked through thousands of hacked emails to find the most incriminating. One email contained thousands of credit card numbers — and stealing credit cards is a crime.

Project PM was more than an “online chatroom”, which is why the FBI also cited it as the focus of their investigation, along with the website on which we compiled our data. It was, as can be gleaned from the vast array of other articles and documentaries and books that have covered it since, a crowd-sourced investigation into subjects sufficiently sensitive as to have been listed on an FBI search warrant a few months after I begin pursuing them.

In September 2012, Brown was at home talking online with members of Project PM. “I heard a rustling at my door and I walked over to the door. I was holding a beer in my hand,” he says. “[I] thought it was another friend of mine.”

So far so accurate.

But when he opened the door there was a SWAT team equipped with shields and helmets. Brown says they were yelling, “Put your hands up buddy.” Brown says they had him on the floor and put a boot on his back. The audio of the arrest was recorded by someone in the Project PM chatroom.

… which is why we can easily determine that this is not what the SWAT team said, and it’s certainly not what I said they said. I don’t recall them using the term “buddy,” for instance. Mostly they were screaming “stop resisting,” presumably to my ribs, which promptly complied. Then I screamed, too.

Brown faced up to 100 years in prison. His mother was charged with hiding his laptops.

True again, though I should make clear that she’d actually been threatened with that charge months prior, after her home and my apartment were both initially raided during the execution of the search warrant that listed all those companies that aren’t Stratfor.

Brown admits he went a bit off the rails. He posted a video on YouTube attacking an FBI agent. “I was a former heroin addict,” Brown says. “I was getting off Suboxone at the time, which is a synthetic opiate. And I was sort of suddenly feeling emotions again that have been kind of bottled, kept down a few months. I was very upset about my mother being threatened with indictment.”

Yep.

Still, Brown was a cause célèbre among certain activists and journalists. Many felt he was being put away for simply looking through hacked emails — something any journalist would do.

Yep.

Brown eventually pleaded guilty to threatening a federal officer and to two other charges. The government imprisoned other members of Anonymous. The group kind of faded away, but its tactics did not.

Yep.

During the 2016 election, Russian state-supported hackers used some of the same tools as Anonymous — hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee and posting them on WikiLeaks to embarrass Hillary Clinton.

Well… it’s complicated. Anonymous didn’t actually invent hacking, for one thing.

I wondered, is there really any difference between a foreign agent trying to undermine our democracy and hacktivists like Anonymous? Is Brown a hero or a villain?

This is less complicated.

I turned to an unlikely expert to help me figure that out — Sam Esmail, the creator of the TV show Mr. Robot. “Their spirit is in activism,” Esmail says. “Their spirit is in exposing these frauds and abuses by people in power. And that’s just something on a human level I respect.”

Apparently Esmail is a villain enabler and a potential threat to democracy like, uh, me.

But Mr. Robot is hardly a glowing portrait of hacktivists. Its hero, Elliot, is a drug addict who can’t access his own emotions. Sound familiar? Elliot leads a group called fsociety that takes down the world’s largest corporation — erasing everyone’s debt. Chaos erupts.

If Laura Sydell and I were on a date, my drug addiction and emotional unavailability would definitely be something she should concern herself with, although still less than firm evidence in support of the theory that I’m a potential a threat to democracy (this might be a good time to point out that the firm I’m best known for going after, HBGary, was conspiring with Palantir and several others to set up watchdog groups inimical to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on fraud charges; that Palantir itself would later work with Cambridge Analytica on the U.S. election; and that another firm I brought to public attention, Archimedes Global, was already working with Cambridge on a similar project directed at Yemen, and that it could be argued that these firms, not me, constitute the real threat to democracy). And if I were somehow responsible for the actions of a fictional television character that is supposedly loosely based in part on things I did seven years ago — and if I trusted Sydell to accurately summarize the plot line of this show, which I kind of don’t — then the “chaos” that seems to have ensued after that character does something entirely different than what I’m trying to do would certainly be something that NPR’s listeners need to think long and hard about, unless I’m being sarcastic, which is certainly a possibility we must consider.

Esmail says he is looking at an age-old dilemma. “Do we commit a criminal act for something that we feel is just, even though the consequences could be great?” he says. “That’s such a kind of loaded, huge, but very relevant question today.”

Yep. But in my case, many observers in the press and other sectors that have actually familiarized themselves with my case before writing about it would tend to agree that I actually didn’t commit any crimes at all.

Brown doesn’t seem interested in examining the moral ambiguity of hacktivist crimes. But he says he is learning from past mistakes. Ultimately, Brown feels that Anonymous was disorganized and lacked leadership.

Actually I’m well known for examining the moral ambiguity of “hacktivist crimes,” which is one reason why I’m persona non grata among the Wikileaks crowd these days. Sydell herself “doesn’t seem interested” in explaining why she’s seen fit to depict me as unconcerned with morality. And please refrain from taking Sydell’s summary of what I think about Anonymous as my actual position, which I’ve presented elsewhere.

So he is designing a software program called Pursuance, which he says will take hacktivism into the future. It will be fully encrypted, anyone could use it to sort through a trove of hacked documents, and it could even be used to recruit a team of hackers.

Here we come to the part that most clearly required a response — for this silly passage is not the original version that went out to NPR listeners and to that majority of those who read the piece when it was first published. The original version had nothing about sorting through documents — “hacked documents”, naturally. Instead it solely depicted Pursuance as being for recruiting “a team of hackers” — a use that we have never promoted, that can also be done (and has consistently been done) via other mediums like Facebook and internet relay chat networks, and that is at any rate not particularly viable, since “teams of hackers” are rarely in the habit of responding to random people’s requests that they come and help them for free. Even when Anonymous was in full swing, and hacking intrusions against dictatorships and corrupt corporations were happening with unprecedented frequency, much of it was done by a small handful of people. It would hardly be worthwhile to spend a year and a half overseeing the creation of an entire networking platform merely to allow people to “recruit hackers,” or for this to be even a common intended use. It would also be pretty unlikely that we could have set up a U.S. non-profit to this end, with a board of directors that includes a professor at Bard College, former Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir, actor/filmmaker Alex Winter, and torture whistleblower John Kiriakou — or that The Observer would have written a great big article about what this is all for, based on having actually looked at what it is and how it works, without once mentioning the part about the hackers causing global chaos.

When I publicly objected to this, Sydell claimed, “I said it could be used for more than one thing, which is true.” I objected that “[t]he broadcast that vast majority of audience actually heard referred to one function — ‘recruiting a team of hackers.’” There was no reply. A few days after the piece aired, my probation officer came by to ask why NPR was claiming I was trying to help people recruit hackers. I spent a few minutes showing him the other articles that had been written on Pursuance — as well as the post-broadcast e-mail exchange between Sydell in which she admits to some serious problems with the fact checking process. This satisfied him, and he left. But things could have gone the other way; I was re-arrested last year for giving an interview to Vice, never charged, and only released again after D Magazine publisher Wick Allison spent $11,000 of his own money to hire a major law firm to threaten to take this to a judge. Hence another reason why I’m going to be spending more time correcting falsehoods and sloppy reporting directed either at myself or at my project: I have no other choice.

Finally, check this out:

Brown is casting himself in a starring role in the new world. And in his mind Mr. Robot is no fantasy. It’s what the future really looks like.

I can’t even express how irritating it is to do a bunch of things that supposedly inspired a TV show and then have the very person who keeps comparing me to the guy in that TV show claim that I’m the one who thinks the TV show is real. I haven’t even seen the fucking show yet. I’ll get it on DVD when I’m done catching up on all the video games I missed in prison.

I’ll simply end by noting that one of the actual key functions of Pursuance, aside from helping activists and NGOs defend open societies on a vastly more efficient level, is to help journalists establish crowd-sourced research networks so as to improve their accuracy. Perhaps you can see why this is important, and actually helpful to democracy, even if Sydell cannot. And it just so happens that I have a link to our Kickstarter, which ends in three days. However much potential support we’ve lost over the widely-broadcasted claim that I’m plotting “global chaos,” we’d like to make that up in actual support from those who see the failings of our institutions with a bit more clarity than do the people who are part of that ongoing failure in the first place.