1. Barrett Lancaster Brown was born on August 14,1981 and is an American activist, and a former journalist, essayist, and associate of Anonymous.
65 Facts About Barrett Brown
1. 2.
In late 2020, Barrett Brown restarted Project PM and claimed asylum in the UK on the basis that he had been persecuted in the US for his journalism.
3.
Barrett 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.
4.
Barrett Brown was convicted of causing intentional harassment, alarm or distress.
5.
Barrett Brown has been praised for his columns and writing, and bringing people together in activism.
6.
Some have said Barrett Brown's behavior is "a result of addiction, paranoia, PTSD and not enough postprison support".
7.
Barrett Brown was born and grew up in an affluent part of Dallas County.
8.
Barrett Brown's father Robert was a wealthy real estate investor until the FBI investigated him for fraud and he lost the family's money.
9.
Robert Barrett Brown was charged in a real-estate-fraud scheme, but the charges were eventually dropped.
10.
Barrett 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.
11.
Barrett Brown went on to contribute to his school newspapers, and interned at several weekly newspapers during his teenage years.
12.
Barrett Brown 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.
13.
In 1998, Barrett Brown spent his would-be junior year in Tanzania with his father who was residing there for a logging business and safari hunting.
14.
Barrett Brown had some paid writing gigs, but mostly published on unpaid, self-edited websites like Daily Kos and The Huffington Post.
15.
In 2010, Barrett Brown began work on his crowdsourced investigation wiki, Project PM, which was labeled a "criminal organization" by the Department of Justice.
16.
In 2016, after Barrett Brown was released from prison, he posted crude videos and conspiracy theories online and was accused of harassing women, which he denied.
17.
In 2017, Barrett Brown launched the Pursuance Project, which aimed to unite transparency activists, investigative journalists, FOIA specialists and hacktivists in a fully encrypted platform.
18.
Barrett Brown said that Pursuance would take hacktivism into the future, letting anyone sort through troves of hacked documents and even recruit teams of hackers.
19.
In 2018, Barrett Brown raised over $50,000 for Pursuance Project on Kickstarter.
20.
In February 2020, Barrett Brown shut Pursuance Project down, writing that Pursuance would resume work later that year funded via settlements from libel suits.
21.
The Pursuance Project fizzled and in a December 2020 update, Barrett Brown said they used the money but weren't able to make a prototype.
22.
Barrett Brown 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.
23.
Barrett Brown said that his drug use and time in drug rehabilitation was one reason Pursuance hadn't been updated, but that the Project was back from hiatus.
24.
Barrett Brown publicly burned the award three years later in protest of The Intercept closing their Snowden archives.
25.
Barrett Brown has written for Vanity Fair, the Guardian, the Huffington Post, the Onion and other outlets.
26.
Barrett 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.
27.
In September 2011, Barrett 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.
28.
The book was never released, Barrett Brown said in a podcast that he spent the money.
29.
In November 2011, Barrett 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.
30.
Barrett Brown later said the member was then released and that there was a truce with the drug cartel.
31.
On November 4,2011, Barrett 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.
32.
Barrett Brown repeated the allegation to WLOS the next day and said he had numerous sources in the area to back up his accusations.
33.
Barrett 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.
34.
In December 2011, Barrett Brown told reporters that Anonymous had hacked millions of emails from Stratfor over Christmas and that they would be released by WikiLeaks.
35.
Barrett 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.
36.
Barrett Brown didn't participate in the hack or know how to code.
37.
In November 2017, Barrett 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.
38.
Barrett Brown said Assange had acted "as a covert political operative", thus betraying WikiLeaks' focus on exposing "corporate and government wrongdoing".
39.
Barrett Brown 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".
40.
Barrett Brown has had several legal issues in the United States and the United Kingdom.
41.
On September 12,2012, Barrett Brown was arrested in Dallas County, Texas for threatening an FBI agent in a YouTube video that has been called "unhinged".
42.
Barrett 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.
43.
Barrett Brown's arrest occurred as he left a computer linked to Tinychat in which the raid could be heard in the background.
44.
On December 4,2012, Barrett Brown was indicted on an additional 12 federal charges related to the December 25,2011 hack of Austin-based private intelligence company Stratfor.
45.
Barrett Brown was ordered to pay $890,250 in fines and restitution.
46.
Barrett Brown was released from prison on November 29,2016, and moved into a halfway house close to downtown Dallas, Texas.
47.
Barrett Brown was ordered to pay at least $200 of his $890,000 restitution every month.
48.
In 2021, Barrett Brown claimed he overheard officers discussing sealed charges in the US against him when he was arrested in London.
49.
The Home Office later wrote they accepted that Barrett Brown was "of interest to the FBI and Department of Justice in the United States of America".
50.
Barrett Brown suggested the subpoena related to restitution payments he was supposed to make, but commented that they should already have the information readily available.
51.
In 2020, Barrett Brown moved to Antigua to live in a house a wealthy patron rented for him.
52.
Barrett Brown threatened to kill a taxi driver that he thought was trying to scam him.
53.
Claims spread online that Barrett Brown was an undercover police officer, under police protection, or an agent provocateur.
54.
Barrett Brown has joked that he holds the record for most Twitter permanent bans.
55.
The fourth and final ban was prompted by Barrett 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.
56.
Barrett Brown featured in Relatively Free, a 2016 short documentary by Alex Winter about Barrett Brown's drive to a halfway house after he was released from prison.
57.
Barrett Brown has 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.
58.
Barrett Brown's case was included as a plot point in Season 2 of the US TV series House of Cards because of input from Brown's friend and fellow Anonymous member, Gregg Housh.
59.
Barrett Brown served on the advisory board of the International Modern Media Institute.
60.
Barrett Brown identifies as an anarchist who opposes arbitrary power and is driven by a personal code of values.
61.
Barrett Brown believes that American citizens are too complacent to affect a government he describes as fully corrupt, and so has contempt for both American law and voters.
62.
Barrett Brown previously dated Nikki Loehr, a graphic designer, Evie Paradise, and Tess Wright.
63.
Barrett Brown has talked publicly about his history of drug use and treatment, including methylphenidate in the third grade until it made him suicidal, then later sertraline.
64.
Barrett Brown has been diagnosed with severe ADHD and depression and describes himself as a narcissist, a role that plays up for comedic effect.
65.
On July 9,2024, the day his book My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous was published, Barrett Brown announced that he was sober again and going to start a twelve-step program.