As told in an internet relay chat server, by a journalist of irregular habits

* BarrettBrown (48b58340@198.167.222.230) has joined the channel

18:40 <BarrettBrown> Good news, everyone!

18:41 <+nullsign> is it bad if I heard that in Professor Farnesworth’s voice?

18:43 <BarrettBrown> It was inevitable

18:43 <BarrettBrown> Anyway I can prove New Yorker ran a fabricated account of Tunisian revolution

18:43 <BarrettBrown> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/08/masked-avengers

The Masked Avengers

Anonymous has targeted Middle Eastern dictators, the Church of Scientology, PayPal, and the Ferguson police. Does it do more harm than good? David Kushner reports.

18:44 <BarrettBrown> In January, 2011, Doyon contacted Barrett Brown, the journalist and Anon. “What are we going to do next?” Doyon asked.

18:44 <BarrettBrown> “Tunisia,” Brown said.

18:44 <BarrettBrown> “Yeah, it’s a country in the Middle East,” Doyon said. “What about it?”

18:44 <BarrettBrown> “We’re gonna take down its dictator,” Brown said.

18:44 <BarrettBrown> “Oh, they have a dictator?” Doyon said.

18:44 <BarrettBrown> A couple of days later, Operation Tunisia began.

18:44 <BarrettBrown> … so that’s what NYer says

18:45 <BarrettBrown> This is demonstrably impossible, though, since OpTunisia had begun by January 1

18:46 <BarrettBrown> And I’m pretty sure I wasn’t discussing it with fucking Commander X before it occurred, since I came in to Anonops via Gregg Housh specifically because OpTunisia had begun

18:47 <BarrettBrown> And certainly not in advance in “January 2011” a few days before it happened, since it happened Dec 31st/Jan1

18:47 <BarrettBrown> Having said that, their source on this, Commander X…

18:50 <BarrettBrown> … may actually still be telling the truth, which would mean that New Yorker fact checkers didn’t fuck up, and thus that despite what managing editor told me, they probably do need to review Adrian Chen’s articles…

18:51 <BarrettBrown> because, you see…

18:51 <BarrettBrown> … their source invented a time machine in 2009

18:51 <BarrettBrown> https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D4AxTlSXsAABLMv.jpg:large

18:52 <BarrettBrown> And tried to sell it

18:52 <BarrettBrown> Even if it wasn’t Commander X himself who used his time machine to somehow make this narrative possible, any of the people who bought his time machine could have done so

18:53 <+nullsign> wild.

18:53 <+nullsign> makes me want to learn more about the previous government.

18:54 <+nullsign> if this is right, there must have been a motive… that would yield a bigger story?

18:55 <+nullsign> journalism in 2019 — reverse engineering the news.

18:56 <BarrettBrown> There would be no conscious motive. Like many very capable media professionals, they were merely taken in by a man who calls himself “Commander” and has tried to sell time machines, and also wanted to be depicted as working with me in planning of OpTunisia, which I had no role in planning since it was started by people like Slim Amanou and

18:56 <BarrettBrown> other, like, Tunisians, who knew that Tunisia “has a dictator”

18:56 <BarrettBrown> And not by me, and not by Commander Psionic Time Machine

18:57 <+nullsign> ahhh, I missed a part of that till now.

18:57 <+nullsign> “Commander Psionic Time Machine” … i’m picturing a news outlet forced to read that name in a bumper.

18:58 <BarrettBrown> This could have been verified without access to my emails to and from several Tunisians on Jan 2 and thereafter, in which I provide early version of press releases on recent actions to be translated into French, etc, and with Michael Hastings around same time…

18:59 <BarrettBrown> … because the thing about press releases is that they tend not to be secret, like this one I posted on Jan 2, 2011, in English translation from Arabic

18:59 <BarrettBrown> https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2011/1/2/932975/-

Tunisia under attack by Anonymous; press release

The faction of Anonymous that launched the anti-Scientology movement Chanology and has more recently been supporting Wikileaks through various information and direct action campaigns has launched an …

18:59 <BarrettBrown> Quote from Willing Davidson, managing editor of New Yorker, to me, a month ago, via email:

19:00 <+nullsign> hereby referred to as #4.

19:00 <BarrettBrown> Dear Mr. Brown, thanks for your email. If you have spotted an error in a piece that Adrian Chen wrote for the New Yorker, we’d be very glad to know. We take fact-checking seriously, and our articles go through rigorous pre-publication review, but we’re always happy to issue corrections, when they’re warranted. But we can’t, of course, vouch for things that Adrian, or any other writer, has contributed to other publications. yours, Willing

19:00 <+nullsign> Adrian needs a new profession.

19:01 <BarrettBrown> “Our articles go through rigorous pre-publication review, but using time machines, we often wait until years after publication to do this, because I am Willing Davidson, King of the WASPS”

19:01 <+nullsign> “our articles are poorly sourced and often submitted hours before deadline.” — Willing Davidson.

19:02 * +nullsign isn’t wrong

19:02 <BarrettBrown> They’re often submitted several hundred years after the collapse of the Meta-Han Imperial Directorate in 2476, via time machine