Brown says the release is mostly made up of Mexicans with ties to the Zetas cartel. There is one United States district attorney on the list, however. "The DA has worked with another organized crime outfit that may or may not be peripheral to the Zetas, but which is probably not connected in any significant way," Brown told us in an email. "That info was provided by a separate informant yesterday and I'm investigating now."

Compared to many previous, widely reported Anonymous activities, Operation Cartel sounds particular grizzly. After the release, Brown says that the cartels things will "take these things into their own hands … and in some cases will probably kill the people" unmasked by Anonymous. Brown, a fast talker with the slightest hint of a Texas drawl, didn't skip a beat when he told us this. It seems like a diversion from more innocent activities like taking on PayPal for blocking WikiLeaks, the attack for which Anonymous is probably best known, and the prank-like antics of the spin-off hacktivist group LulzSec. But Brown tells us that these kinds of high stakes operations are nothing new for the collective. He also gives Anonymous credit for helping turn a small protest into Tunisia into the wave of revolutions that is the Arab Spring.

"This is nothing compared to North Africa," Brown said. "A lot of journalists weren't covering us at the time, but Anonymous was very very involved in a lot of the movements in North Africa. We were very much involved in turning the Tunisian revolt into a broader regional thing."

And if people die because of Operation Cartel, it won't be the first time that Anonymous played a hand in someone's demise.

"This is just inevitable," Brown told us. "A bunch of collaborators, a long time ago, a lot of them were killed in Egypt. We required the names and pictures of a number of Egyptian police collaborators and certainly some of them were killed."

We can't confirm what exactly happened to the Egyptians collaborators or even what the details of Anonymous's activities in North Africa. But Brown has long been close with a core group of Anonymous organizers and says he's correctly predicted the outcomes of their planned operations in the past. To learn more about his tenuous relationship with the group — Brown described himself to The Atlantic Wire as "someone who has worked with Anonymous, the founder of Project PM and a former journalist" — read this profile in D magazine. Brown is also currently shopping a book about his work with Anonymous to publishers in New York. To learn more about how Anonymous really works, however, the best anyone can do is pay close attention.

"There's a small group of people at Anonymous that really know what's happened at Anonymous and really understand where it's going," Brown said. "It's very much like the intelligence community only more amorphous."

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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