When Barrett Brown was arrested in his home by FBI agents in 2012---a moment captured by chance in a public videochat streamed to his fans and haters alike---the hacker group Anonymous was an online force to be reckoned with. Just nine months earlier the group had hacked the private intelligence firm Stratfor and dumped five million of its emails, the crime to which Brown would later be tied and sentenced to five years in prison.
Today, just a few weeks after Brown walked out of Texas's Three Rivers Federal Correctional Institute, Anonymous has shrunk to a thin imitation of the hacker army it once was. But with or without the hacktivist group that he championed, Brown can't imagine a better time to resume his work as a journalist and radical information agitator. “When things deteriorate, when the system destroys itself as it’s doing right now and does so in such an obvious and disgusting way, my ideas seem less crazy,” he says.
Brown, after his four years in detention, now lives in a halfway house 20 minutes from downtown Dallas and shares a room with eight ex-convicts. (To find a quiet place for a phone interview with WIRED, he spent most of the conversation in the shower.) But since leaving prison, he’s wasted no time in resuming his work and regaining his notoriety. He's already signed a low-six-figure book deal with Farrar, Strauss and Giroux for a combination memoir and manifesto. He's featured in a short documentary released today by director Alex Winter and production company Field of Vision, who filmed his release from prison. (Watch the film for the first time below.) And foremost in Brown's post-prison plans, he’s already plotting to launch a new and improved movement of online activists, one designed to pick up and expand his hacktivist muckraking from where he left off.
Over the next six months, Brown tells WIRED, he intends to build a piece of software called Pursuant, designed to serve as a platform for coordinating activists, journalists, and troublemakers of all stripes. Pursuant, as Brown describes it, would be an open-source, end-to-end-encrypted collaboration platform anyone could host on their own server. Users will be able to create a "pursuance," an installation of the software focused on a group's particular cause or target for investigation. The software would offer those groups the same real-time collaboration features as Slack or Hipchat, but also include a kind of org-chart function to define different users' roles, the ability to host and search large collections of documents, and a Wiki feature that would allow collaborators to share and edit their findings from those documents.
The software, in other words, would make it far easier to do the sort of work that Brown focused on before his arrest: crowdsourced digging through and making sense of massive collections of leaked or hacked files offered up by groups like WikiLeaks and Anonymous. And unlike the structureless anarchy of Anonymous, Brown says Pursuant's design will let users create efficient hierarchies, while still allowing anyone to start contributing without the hurdles of joining an organized NGO or media outfit. "People can just show up and begin working," says Brown. "It’s a protestant versus a catholic system of activism. We want a direct line to civic participation."
All of that, it's worth noting, may for now be more of a solitary-confinement fantasy than a real roadmap. Brown has yet to recruit a team of coders or volunteers to launch Pursuant. Aside from his own book advance, he isn't ready to name any sources of funding, either.
But Brown has never had trouble finding followers for his subversive schemes. A group he founded in 2010 called Project PM devoted to crowdsourced document analysis had around 75 members at its peak, by his count. It earned the trust of the hacktivist community and media attention for its investigation combing through documents stolen by the cybersecurity contractor HBGary Federal: The breach exposed HBGary's plan, conceived along with data intelligence firm Palantir and two other companies, to retaliate against WikiLeaks with cyberattacks and threaten its supporters.
In the years since, Brown's celebrity in the activist world has only grown, thanks in large part to federal prosecutors so zealously determined to put him in prison that they instead created a living martyr to the cause of free information. His name made a cameo in the television show House of Cards. And a column he wrote for the Intercept from prison using a pencil and paper---the Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Prison---won a National Magazine Award. "In a perverse sense, the government did him a favor," says Tor Ekeland, a defense attorney who frequently represents politically motivated hackers. "He’s emerging from prison bigger and stronger than when he went in."
Brown's crime, it's worth noting, was never actual theft of information from Stratfor---he was always closer to a public relations spokesperson for Anonymous than one of its hackers. Nonetheless, the Justice Department in 2012 accused him of sharing a link to an already-stolen trove of information from Stratfor to other members of a Project PM chatroom. That trove also included, unbeknownst to Brown, credit card data for thousands of the company's customers. (Brown was more focused, for instance, on the Stratfor emails that showed the group had spied on victims of the deadly 1984 Bhopal toxic gas disaster on behalf of Dow Chemical.)
For sharing that link, the FBI raided Brown's home and seized his computers. When prosecutors went so far as to threaten his mother with obstruction of justice for hiding his laptops in her kitchen cabinet, Brown posted a somewhat unhinged YouTube video threatening to launch his own personal investigation into FBI agent Robert Smith, to "ruin his life and look into his fucking kids." (Brown blames the threats on a manic episode brought on by withdrawal from his anti-depressant Paxil as well as heroin, an addiction he's been fighting for years.)
Brown was almost immediately arrested and charged with threatening a federal agent. In the trial that followed, prosecutors attempted to gag Brown from speaking about his case with the press and to seize defense funds raised by his supporters. On top of his prison time, his sentence includes $890,000 in restitution payments to Stratfor, which he's still paying, including 15% of his book sales advance. "The prosecution was completely overblown," says Ekeland. "It was draconian, disproportionate to any real harm, and indicative of the vindictive nature of the US government in these kind of cases, where there’s political speech they don't like."
Now Brown is out again, and he's ready to start picking new fights. He intends to not only build Pursuant as a platform, but to use it to continue his own investigations of intelligence contractor firms. In the age of Trump, he sees a greater role than ever for his form of grassroots, no-holds-barred adversarial journalism. He's kept tabs in particular on Palantir, the fast-expanding intelligence contractor whose founder Peter Thiel has become a member of President-elect Trump's transition team, and who Brown calls an "extraordinarily dangerous person."
Brown has no intention of going back to prison. His Pursuant work will be devoted to analyzing and publicizing leaked and hacked documents, not stealing them. But he concedes that those illegal data dumps are still a key part of his journalistic model. "I’m very much in favor of further leaks and hacks against select targets, those institutions we believe are engaging in crimes with the complicity of our government," he says. (As for the heroin habit that helped fuel his FBI threats, he says he's kicked it.)
But prison wasn't all bad for Brown, he says. Aside from honing his writing skills and winning the biggest journalist plaudits of his career, he also passed the time creating an elaborate Dungeons-and-Dragons-like tabletop roleplaying game based on the Nixon administration. And he read close to 500 books out of the thousands sent to him by supporters, getting the education in history he'd largely missed as a University of Texas dropout.
Of all those books, he found particular inspiration in the autobiography of Emma Goldman, the anarcho-communist agitator who served two prison terms in the 1890s and 1910s, and was eventually deported to Soviet Russia by J. Edgar Hoover's Justice Department. Her life, he says, serves as a reminder that a mere single prison stint doesn't give anyone an excuse to quit fighting. "It’s very easy to fade into nihilism, to say, fuck these people, they’ve made their own bed," says Brown. "But everyone’s compelled to consider that she did this, that she felt the need to do so. You can decide whether to emulate that. Or you can just accept that people like her have sacrificed so much for us, and then proceed to have fun with your telephone."
