The Other McCain

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‘The Kook Who Knew Too Much’: Heroic Fantasy, Paranoia and Barrett Brown

Posted on | February 19, 2013 | 19 Comments

Sept. 12: Barrett Brown rants on YouTube about his plan to ‘destroy’ an FBI agent

Ever since former “Anonymous” spokesman Barrett Brown freaked out on video and got himself arrested, various kooks have floated conspiracy theories to explain Brown’s arrest in terms of the paranoid delusion that Brown was an “enemy of the state” who got too close to the hidden truth about government wrongdoing. He’s like the pasty-white geek version of Chris Dorner or something.

No matter how often I’ve pointed to the far more mundane and obvious explanation — that Neal Rauhauser as “Carlito2000” provoked Brown’s final meltdown — Brown’s defenders keep pushing conspiratorial explanations that reflect their anarchist worldview wherein (a) shadowy government secrets are protected by illegitimate means, and (b) threatening to “destroy” an FBI agent is no big deal.

One typical manifestation of this phenomenon is Patrick McGuire’s article “Why Is Barrett Brown Facing 100 Years in Prison?”

Some of the charges against Brown are related to the hacking of Stratfor by the Anonymous splinter known as LulzSec. (The trial of the lead suspect in that crime, Jeremy Hammond, will reportedly “focus on the alleged theft of around 60,000 credit cards from which, say the prosecutors, charges of more than $700,000 were illegally made.”) McGuire pushes the “hidden secrets” theory of the hacking:

It’s obvious by looking at the most recent posts on Barrett Brown’s blog that while he is highly interested in Stratfor, it wasn’t the credit card information that motivated him. When those five million emails leaked, a product called TrapWire, which was created by a company called Abraxas, was revealed to the public at large. And it caused a media sh-tstorm. In 2005, the founder of Abraxas and former head of the CIA’s European division, Richard Helms, described TrapWire as software that is installed inside of surveillance camera systems that is, “more accurate than facial recognition” with the ability to “draw patterns, and do threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists.” As Russia Today reported, one of the leaked emails, allegedly written by Stratfor’s VP of Intelligence, Fred Burton, stated that TrapWire was at “high-value targets” in “the UK, Canada, Vegas, Los Angeles, NYC.”
TrapWire has since largely been dismissed as nothing to “freak out” over, and that hopefully is the case. However, far beyond what the surveillance software itself can or can’t do, the revelation that TrapWire exists has caused a chain reaction of discoveries that have seemingly revealed a mob of very powerful cybersecurity firms.
Barrett Brown was doing some very serious investigating into a company called Cubic from San Diego, that was alleged to own TrapWire as a subsidiary of their firm. This is an allegation that they officially denied. However, these tax filings from 2010 that Barrett uncovered clearly state that Cubic had in fact merged with Abraxas Corporation.

“Barrett Brown was doing some very serious investigating” — and, to finish McGuire’s insinuation, that’s why the feds busted him!

All this scary Big Brother-ish noise about “surveillance” and “threat assessment” — and OMG! the CIA! — permits McGuire to portray the merger between two software firms as a dark secret the feds are so eager to keep under wraps that they would arrest and prosecute Barrett Brown on a bogus pretext, because he was getting too close to the hidden truth. McGuire extends this theme:

Barrett started ProjectPM, a wiki that is completely dedicated to piecing together all of this information about surveillance companies in the United States. . . . Without Barrett Brown, tons of this research would likely have gone unearthed. Besides a few journalists, not many people have been looking into this information. The one other group that does is called Telecomix . . . They operate the Bluecabinet Wiki, and they worked very closely with Barrett Brown to uncover more information about the network of cybersecurity firms.
I talked to one of the volunteers at Telecomix, who strongly believes in the work that Barrett did to connect all of these very confusing dots: “I haven’t seen reporters really taking a hard look at what Barrett Brown, the investigative journalist, was researching and where it leads to. His discovery that TrapWire = Abraxas and that there is CIA involvement is very important. Do you know in Berlin right now a game was started to destroy surveillance cameras in public places? Barrett apparently was reading through the emails of HBGary and Stratfor, linking the data to the specific surveillance companies and contractors . . . It is an extremely time consuming task.”

Here’s a simple question: Who do you suppose, apart from avid civil libertarians, would be interested in uncovering “more information about the network of cybersecurity firms,” especially those firms working to protect government computer systems?

Here’s a simple answer: Criminal hackers, cyber-terrorists and hostile foreign governments, that’s who!

Even if you are willing to accept protestations of noble “information freedom” motives by the Anonymous hackers, you have to recognize that there are reasonable limits to how much penetration of computer systems the feds can ignore without risking truly serious consequences, perhaps with national security implications.

So there are good reasons why law enforcement would take the activities of Anonymous and LulzSec seriously, and why illegal intrusions targeting a “network of cybersecurity firms” might arouse especially intense law-enforcement scrutiny. Nevertheless, the indictments against Barrett Brown do not charge him with being an “enemy of the state,” but rather specify three sets of crimes:

  1. Threatening harm to an FBI agent and the agent’s family;
  2. Illegally accessing credit card information from the Stratfor hacking; and
  3. Obstruction by attempting to conceal evidence.

The fact that the cumulative potential prison time for these federal crimes amounts to 100 years behind bars may seem shocking, but (a) it’s highly unlikely that Brown would be put away for the maximum term, and (b) don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.

It’s not as if Barrett Brown had no warning that there were risks involved in his very public association with Anonymous. But Barrett’s flamboyant arrogance — giving interviews to NBC News and signing a book deal — would permit no heed to caution. Less than two weeks before he was arrested, I tried to warn him:

You don’t need a lawyer, Barrett. You need a psychiatrist, or perhaps a priest to exorcise your demons. You are traveling a road to destruction, as harmful to yourself as to any of your chosen enemies. Get help.

Obviously, he didn’t listen, and it was therefore scarcely surprising to learn from his hearing in federal court last month that Barrett is being treated with Zoloft, an anti-depressant, and another drug, Risperidone, an anti-psychotic medication used to treat symptoms of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Didn’t I tell you he was crazy? Maybe not legally insane — he was, after all, ruled competent to stand trial — but certainly it would not be libelous to describe Brown with the colloquial term “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.”

The unabashed media love affair with Anonymous — their depiction as crusading progressive activists — plays into the heroic fantasies of demented people like Barrett Brown, who saw this movement as his best shot at that big narcissistic payoff, the Moment of Glory.

Some people have seen too many spy thrillers in which the evil government/corporate conspirators are exposed and brought to justice by the Misunderstood Lone Protagonist, and the Internet is a convenient vehicle by which they can pursue that heroic fantasy.

It’s never enough for these Moment of Glory chasers to do mere reporting or commentary. No, they’re conducting an “investigation” that will expose the Hidden Evil and Corruption! A sort of outlaw-vigilante mentality grips their imagination. They exaggerate their own importance and, as confirmation of that delusion, cherish the idea that sinister powerful forces are arrayed against them.

This narcissistic fantasy is inspired by elements of popular culture — The Last Honest Man as a heroic ideal — and also involves the paranoid fears that were stoked by the Left after 9/11: Endless scaremongering about “warrantless wiretaps,” portraying the Bush administration as engaged in unconstitutional domestic surveillance. A 2005 Daily Kos headline, “Echelon, the NSA, and Bush’s wiretapping initiative,” captures the climate of fear engendered by the Left in the post-9/11 era. We are therefore not surprised that the amateur enthusiasts who nowadays play-act the role of “investigative journalist” are mostly found on the Left.

Memo to the media: Stop indulging their fantasies.

As an example of coverage that portrays these “hactivists” as heroes, here’s an excerpt by Karen McVeigh in the U.K. Guardian:

Jay Liederman, an attorney who has represented a number of high-profile hackers, accused the government of employing the [Computer Fraud and Abuse Act] to stifle dissent.
“It’s as if with the explosion of hacktivists and activism, this is the government’s new toy. It seems like they took a new look at the CFAA and realised they can chill this type of activism that they don’t like,” he said.
Liederman has represented Commander X, a hacker who is on the run from the FBI for an attack on a website in Santa Cruz, California, and Raynaldo Rivera, a suspected hacker from LulzSec, accused of stealing information from Sony last year. He has described illegal hacker activities such as Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS) as “digital sit-ins” or ” the equivalent of occupying the Woolworth’s lunch counter during the civil rights movement” and has called for the law to be changed.
He sees a common thread running through prosecutions of activists for DDoS attacks and those of Swatrz, Auernheimer and Barrett Brown, a former affiliate of hacktivist collective Anonymous currently in prison facing charges under the CFAA, whose prosecution has also attracted criticism.
“They are very closely related,” said Liederman. “It is one rich tapestry of prosecutorial overreach and government oppression.”
Brown faces 45 years in prison and $3m in fines for charges relating to a Christmas Day attack in 2011 against Stratfor, a US intelligence-gathering firm, in which Anonymous hackers stole 5.5m emails, some of which were later published on WikiLeaks.
Brown was not involved in the hack, but allegedly facilitated it by posting a link in a chatroom, thereby providing others with credit card information and identities of thousands of individuals in the Stratfor database.
He has also been charged with internet threats to FBI agents, relating to his Twitter and YouTube feed. All three were “popular, free-thinking information activists” facing “stunningly abusive” prosecutions, according to Liederman.
“With [Aaron] Swartz, with Weev [Andrew Auernheimer] with Barrett, there was no hacking, yet they are being prosecuted by statutes that were made for hackers.”
Each took a “contrarian notion” against established principles, he said.
“Aaron Swartz had the outrageous notion that information should be free, and that future generations should be allowed to enjoy and learn from academic articles. Weev had the outrageous notion that companies like AT&T, because they are sloppy with your information, should be called out on it. Barrett had the outrageous notion that governments and those private security companies that act like the black hand of the government should be transparent and the public should have the right to know.
“These were virtues extolled by our forefathers in this country and all of a sudden they are lost to us.”

What a load of self-serving bovine excrement! And oh, “private security companies that act like the black hand of the government” — that is to say, firms hired to help the government protect information that might be very dangerous in the wrong hands — do the names Julius and Ethel Rosenberg ring a bell here, Liederman?

Is it not possible that the technology that protects government computers, or which enables the government to detect terrorist threats, would be as valuable to America’s enemies as the secrets of the atomic bomb were to Stalin’s Soviet Union? And isn’t it therefore a valid analogy to say that hackers targeting private firms which develop this cybersecurity technology are engaged in crimes as potentially serious as the espionage that sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair?

Now, I don’t mean to say that Barrett Brown deserves the death penalty, but I’m sick and tired of people trying to pretend that Anonymous is just a bunch of harmless pranksters, or that attacks on “private security companies” are benign civil disobedience.

Perhaps a more relevant criticism, however, is the simple fact that Barrett Brown is nuttier than squirrel farts. Just in case you’ve forgotten what a lunatic in full rant mode looks like, here’s the 13-minute YouTube meltdown that landed Barrett in jail:

Yeah, he had an “outrageous notion” or two, but what the public really has the right to know is, Barrett Brown is a dangerous kook.

 

Category: Barrett Brown, Conspiracy Theories

Comments

19 Responses to “‘The Kook Who Knew Too Much’: Heroic Fantasy, Paranoia and Barrett Brown”

  1. RMNixonDeceased
    February 19th, 2013 @ 4:39 pm

    RT @smitty_one_each: TOM ‘The Kook Who Knew Too Much’: Heroic Fantasy, Paranoia and Barrett Brown http://t.co/mBmjqR6e #TCOT

  2. Rob Crawford
    February 19th, 2013 @ 4:42 pm

    “Now, I don’t mean to say that Barrett Brown deserves the death penalty”

    I will. “For the lulz”.

  3. Finrod Felagund
    February 19th, 2013 @ 4:47 pm

    Crazy is a term of art, insane is a term of law, to quote HST.

  4. Adjoran
    February 19th, 2013 @ 5:10 pm

    Radicals also used the allegedly altruistic motivations of Black Panther bank robbers to justify the robbery of thousands of dollars of other people’s money at the point of a gun as well as the murder of police officers and the occasional innocent bystander (“collateral damage”).

    But the law is very clear on such things: they are not valid defenses to violent crimes.

    Sometimes lost in the bizarre craziness of the likes of Brown, Rauhauser, Kimberlin, and Smegmafeeler is that they are also evil to the core. Craziness is an adjunct to their evil, not a mitigation of it.

    While their defenders may not be as nutty as the leaders of the rat pack, they are every bit as evil.

  5. Bob Belvedere
    February 19th, 2013 @ 5:19 pm

    THIS.

  6. ThomasD
    February 19th, 2013 @ 6:05 pm

    Bipolar patients in an acute manic phase, or even the severely depressed, can progress to full blown psychosis. Not merely ‘cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs’ eccentricity, but full on straight jacket kind of behavior – hallucinations, delusions, clawing your own eyeballs out, etc.

    I doubt this fully explains Brown – there’s too much organization and presence of mind exhibited to blame it all on insanity. Unfortunately what his otherwise able mind lacks is reason, and common sense.

  7. ThomasD
    February 19th, 2013 @ 6:05 pm

    Don’t forget the Weathermen, or as POTUS calls them ‘friends from the neighborhood.’

  8. SPQR9
    February 19th, 2013 @ 7:15 pm

    RS, as for the reference to the Rosenbergs, you know that Liederman would give you a long rant on their innocence, don’t you?

    Liederman is hardly more rational than his clientele.

  9. richard mcenroe
    February 19th, 2013 @ 8:08 pm

    Or he could just be, oh, what’s the clinical term I’m looking for here, one evil, twisted little shit…

  10. Adjoran
    February 19th, 2013 @ 9:01 pm

    It’s amazing people still argue this after their names – and those of their co-conspirators – were discovered in KGB files made public after the fall of the Soviet Empire.

    For some it was never a matter of the facts, it was always a matter of faith.

  11. Dustin
    February 20th, 2013 @ 12:04 am

    Another amazingly thoughtful post about these weirdos.

  12. Rick Bulow
    February 20th, 2013 @ 7:31 am

    My response to Barrett Brown:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4pMXAtE0Ms

  13. Kooky Tuesday Continues: Is Social Media Breeding Monsters? Oh, Hell, Yes! : The Other McCain
    February 20th, 2013 @ 7:32 am

    […] about a maniac professor at Columbia University, and then added a discussion of the (allegedly) felonious kook Barrett Brown, let’s stick with the theme, […]

  14. John Tiessen
    February 20th, 2013 @ 10:18 am

    you must get a lot of hits writing stories on Barrett Brown. when are you going to tell us what we really want to hear like what happened the day you got fired and escorted out of the Washington Post?

    Tell us what it was like growing up as a kid who was picked on by all the cool kids in school? Did you have bad acne due to the fact you didn’t wash your face? Did you have big sores on your back that would bleed through your T-shirts?

    Did you really think the girls in school wanted to have a freak standing in front of them with acne all over his face, Green teeth and bad breath talking freaky sh^t to them?

    tell us why you would take off all your clothes in a strip bar were men go to see naked women? Did you think these good-looking women would really want anything to do with you?

    We already know your a grandiose racist why I don’t get, is it may be your picked on by African-Americans? Well I’m sure you’re picked on by everybody being the skinny pimple face weird kid in school with bad breath in green teeth.

    just tell us the story behind this picture http://twitpic.com/bz13sg I’m sure you get a ton of hits.

  15. Noctis Lucis Caelum
    February 20th, 2013 @ 10:32 am

    Stacy sure has become an expert psychologist over the course of this episode. Can I call you “RS McCainhammer, *certified* serious investigative journalist”? Let’s see.. Barrett had paranoia, bi-polarity, depression, delusions of grandeur – yep, seems like a heroin junkie! By golly, Holmes, I think we cracked the case! Quick, now lets run to our blahg and pontificate in suggestive generalities about how everybody who enjoys a little escapism & pretend on the internet must be Barrett. The people must know the truth and we’re the only ones who can explain it to them, McCainHammer!!

  16. John Tiessen
    February 20th, 2013 @ 11:42 am

    well said! I just want him to ell us the story behind this picture I’m sure he’ll get a ton of hits.

  17. John Tiessen
    February 20th, 2013 @ 12:19 pm

    I found a video of Stacy and it seems Stacy has a big audience there listening to him, there’s eight of them ha? ha ha ha this guy is even a bigger loser today than he was in school how can that be?
    I think I’ve done one speech in my life at the St. Paul capital in Minnesota I had close to 1000 people clapping and cheering after my speech. And I’m not even a speech giver. ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQYBk48JKLQ

  18. The Frenzied Mania Of Bill Schmalfeldt « The Camp Of The Saints
    February 20th, 2013 @ 9:06 pm

    […] Stacy filed an update on the case of another deranged social media misfit, one Barrett Brown, who is connected to the Kimberlain / Rauhuaser Axis as well as to the Nihilist terrorist group […]

  19. Johnny Commenter
    February 22nd, 2013 @ 12:26 pm

    Obviously Neal as Carlito is no fucking joke. But Brown’s “defenders” would take you much more seriously if you didn’t have a history of writing such inflammatory false crap about him. And you continue to do so even while he can’t defend himself. Why don’t you explore the actual reasoning Brown provided for his threatening videos, rather than attributing it to all to mental issues? He says specifically that Palantir’s general counsel Matt Long had signed off on Team Themis– “I know what’s legal, because I know what’s been done to me.” You readily discount the intelligence/security contracting/surveillance angle as self-serving fantasy, even while records related to those companies were listed directly on his search warrant. And wouldn’t you be mad if the FBI was filing charges against your mother?