Persecuted Hackers as mini-Nelson Mandelas of the Transparency Activism Age

(And thankfully, the Relaunch of Barrett Brown's Pursuance) by Andrea Liu

“Unjust laws exist;

shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them,                                         and obey them until we have succeeded,

or shall we transgress them at once?”

                                    -Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1849

Never trust an American activist unless he/she has been to prison. It’s only if he/she has been to prison that you know they are willing to sacrifice their well-being, their material comfort, and a non-felonious future, for a principle or an ideal. It’s only if he/she has been to prison that you know they became a threat to the state. For an Olympic Runner, the highest accolade is a gold medal in the Decathalon. For a film actor, the highest accolade is an Oscar award by the Academy of Motion Pictures. For a trial lawyer, the highest achievement is winning a big case. For an activist in the U.S., going to prison is the highest accolade one can achieve: it is the proof of one’s authenticity.  Anyone who claims to be an activist (in the U.S) but is short of this mark ultimately can only be seen as ornament or decoration. (I keep saying “the U.S.” because it is so easy to be arrested in the U.S. If one cannot even clear this very low bar to entry, one has no “street cred” as an activist). Of course, different people have different roles within an activist movement—some are there to provide logistical or tech support, some are good rally organizers and email list compilers, others are excellent fundraisers. I am not talking about such people. I am talking about the “big cheese”, the central node, the ideologue, the catalyst, those who claim to be the “front lines”  or the vanguard of an activist movement—in such a case, never trust such a person unless they’ve been to prison.  Prison consecrates an activist with an aura of self-sacrifice, selflessness and altruistic courage; on an instinctive level, one cannot take seriously an activist in a “leader”-like (however their respective movements may profess to be against leaders) position, unless they had been to prison. (Some may ask, “Do you mean jail or prison?” Jail is a temporary holding pad after one is initially apprehended/arrested, before one sees a judge. Prison is where one goes after sentencing. “Can we only trust American activists who have been to prison? Or will jail qualify also?” Jail is probably better than nothing, but prison is still the Brass Ring, the Palme D’Or of American activism).   

Contrary to what limousine liberal haute bourgeosie activists (who have never been arrested) may tell you, the purpose of activism is not to “feel good.” The purpose of activism is not to raise one’s self-esteem and be cocooned in a “safe space.” The purpose of activism is not to hold hands around a drum circle singing kumbah yah, burning incense candles and affirming with each other how peace will prevail in the world.  The purpose of activism is not to add another line to your CV so you will get hired for an NGO. THE PURPOSE OF ACTIVISM IS NOT AFFIRMATION. THE PURPOSE OF ACTIVISM IS NEGATION.

If this is our measure (never trust an American activist unless they have been to prison), then we can trust Barrett Brown. Brown spent over 5 years—that is, 63 months—in a federal prison, for doing what Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald (Democracy Now interview) called “some of the most intrepid and important journalism in the United States”, characterizing Brown’s persecution by the U.S. government as “probably one of the most significant threats to press freedom that has happened in the United States in the last 2 decades at least.”(1) Brown first got on the radar of the FBI in 2011 due to Project PM, his crowd-sourced

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wiki to investigate the mushrooming cyber-security industrial complex, the opaque and often nefarious world of intelligence contractors. Project PM built up a database of who is doing what with who, what intelligence firms are working with what contractors, what firms were getting which contracts. Here they uncovered “Team Themis”—a tripartite of corporations including Palantir, Berico, and Endgame Systems who proposed a plan to, amongst other things, discredit Wikileaks and its defenders (such as Glenn Greenwald) through “dirty tricks,” such as deliberately sending Wikileaks false intelligence and have them proclaim it as true, as well as planting other false flags. As Professor Peter Ludlow describes, “The plan called for ‘disinformation,’ exploiting strife within the organization and fomenting external rivalries—'creating messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization,’ as well as a plan to submit fake documents and then call out the error.”  (2) While the plans were never implemented, the breezy equanimity with which the intelligence contractors bandied about and brainstormed such blatantly corrupt shenanigans to deceive the American public was breath-taking. (For a more thorough explanation of the significance of Project PM, see: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/strange-case-barrett-brown/ OR https://www.vice.com/en/article/xd433j/why-is-barrett-brown-facing-100-years-in-jail).

But for alot of you, your eyes have already glazed over at the mention of “intelligence contractors” “false flags” or “Wikileaks”. For a lot of you, this is all so foreign and alien to anything in your world. So for all you people who never heard of or are not sure what the term “hacker” even means, for all you people for whom the world of Barrett Brown is as incomprehensible, alien and impenetrable as a jaunt on the planet Mars (a reaction I often experience when I bring up these topics), let me explain it in terms you might understand or relate to, so that finally something “clicks” in your mind.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER AS METONYMIC SHORTHAND

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a critically acclaimed television series which acquired a cult following from 1997-2003 (being nominated for American Film Institute awards, Golden Globes, and various other Television Critics Association Awards).  The show took place in an idyllic suburban American town called “Sunnyvale” with a sinister underside which nobody sees, consisting of a complex interlocking metaphysical/ social ecosystem of demons, half-demons, Old Ones, angels, vampires, vampire slayers, wizards, witches, sorcerers, walking dead, the undead, dangerous immortals, enhanced humans, ghosts, spirits, deities, human-demon hybrids, pure demons, and monsters. It is not exactly that nobody sees this world, but only the anointed, called “slayers”—only those either blessed or cursed with inhabiting a liminal space between twilight and nightfall, between consciousness and subconscious, between alive and dead, between agency and powerlessness, between salvation and futility—only they can perceive, even inhabit, this complex, thick, parallel universe.  In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this parallel microcosm runs alongside a cheerleader-and-prom-night/ apple pie/ idyllic American high school, the workaday humdrum routine of American suburbia, complete with its Volvos, soccer moms, and baby showers. The Buffy universe was the flipside dark obverse of the status quo—a larger-than-life parallel microcosm with an almost chiaroscuro-like dramatic contrast between good and evil, salvation and damnation.

If we subtract the supernatural element, the dilemma that the protagonists of Buffy the Vampire Slayer find themselves in is similar to those of the hacktivist/whistleblower generation of Anonymous, Wikileaks, Julian Assange, Aaron Swartz, Barrett Brown, Jeremy Hammond, Lulzsec, Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer (and grand patriarch Glenn Greenwald) that coalesced and came to national attention in the U.S. between 2008-2015. Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, hacktivists (hacker activists) of this time period had a startling and dangerous faculty that allowed them to penetrate beneath the candy-color coated veneer that most of us settle for and accept as “reality;” therefore allowing them to delve into the sordid, if not at times sinister, workings of the political realities beneath this veneer (for hacktivists this remarkable

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faculty was computer programming; for Buffy, it was supernatural powers. For Buffy this sordid reality consisted of different gradations of demons—in hacktivism, this sordid reality consisted of certain aspects of the U.S. federal government/military, the CIA, and Intelligence contractors). Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, hacktivists dwelled in an alternate reality that none of us see (one consisting of players like Booz Allen, Stratfor, Trapwire, encrypted communication channels) and their actions and decisions in this reality effected and changed our lives, even saved us in some cases—without most of us (certainly not the mainstream corporate news) ever knowing or acknowledging it.  Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the hacktivists I named of this period took on an extraordinary burden upon themselves—to sacrifice their well-being and their safety to fight an invisible war (against suppression of information by various actors in the U.S. government), taking risks and summoning a defiance towards “business as usual” that most of us could never imagine.  And like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, hacktivists from this period operated in a parallel society, living in this world but not of it, seemingly appearing as “regular people”—living in apartments, shopping at grocery stores, driving in cars, doing all the things regular people do—but actually engaged in an underground, un-seen war that ordinary people were scarcely even aware of.   

If we look at the above diagram, what is remarkable is that every aspect of this world had some crucial connection to (or some dealing with) Wikileaks/Julian Assange. It is telling what an overridingly central role Wikileaks played in upholding/maintaining this world.

WHAT A TIME IT WAS

“Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is/ Do you, Mr. Jones?”

                                       -Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man” (1965)

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”

                                      -Voltaire

“What a time it was. A time of innocence. A time of confidences. Long ago it must be, I have a photograph. Preserve your memories. They’re all that’s left you.”

  -Simon & Garfunkel, “Bookends” (1968)

“I can’t remember who met who first or who fell in love with who first. All I remember is the seven of us together all the time.”   

                                      -St. Elmo’s Fire (1986)       

Something extraordinary and rare coalesced during this period (roughly 2009-2014): a period of internet civil disobedience, of “electronic Robin Hoods”, a renaissance and a revolution, a new brand of IT guerilla warfare, or what the Rolling Stone called “The New Political Prisoners: Leakers, Hackers, and Activists: Meet the new generation of dissidents being locked up for taking a stand against the government”(3). Let’s take a step back and take stock of the fact that here was a generation of “child prodigy” tech geniuses, who in another world, a non-Buffy universe, might have become multi-millionaire tech CEO’s sitting pretty by the swimming pool of their multi-million dollar house in Malibu with the likes of Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel—but instead used their tech skills to expose the mendacity and corruption of the U.S government. One journalist described them as “boy-men”— with the exception of Julian Assange, all the “cause célèbre” hacktivists persecuted/imprisoned by the US. government during this period were between the ages of 19 and 29. At an age when most people are still lining up internships to figure out what they want to do with the rest of their life or fumbling around trying to “find themselves” trying on different identities—these people were thrust into a hyper-confrontational arena where they had to make an ethical decision as to whether they were going to sacrifice their well-being and their future for a principle (to fight corruption in the U.S. government). At an age when most people were still transitioning from childhood to adulthood, these hacktivists had in the palm of their hand the ability to delve in the inner bowels of the American

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CIA, the dirty laundry of the U.S. military, to help overturn tyrannical governments in Tunisia (and much more)—thanks to their computer programming skills. Here is a brief timeline:  

In 1958, beat poet Allen Ginsberg wrote in his epic poem “Howl”:

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning of the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”

What we are in need of is an Allen Ginsberg of the hacker generation, to proselytize on the zeitgeist of this period and write a poem, “I saw the best hackers, leakers, and whistleblowers of my generation destroyed by the National Security State and the Department of Justice, roaming around the IRC chats, making 3 part Youtube videos lambasting the FBI while going through heroin withdrawal, squashed with draconian 80 to 105 year prison sentence for tendentious, if not at times absurd charges, forced to flee and seek asylum in Russia (Snowden), Eastern Europe (Weev), or the Ecuadorian Embassy in London (Assange), paranoid about FBI penetration, all their contacts and donators to their legal funds subpoenaed by the Department of Justice (Brown), arrested simply for giving an interview to NPR (Brown), all because they held up an (unwelcome) mirror to the National Security State.”  

In film criticism, there is a term “Cinema of the Sons” coined by University of Chicago film theorist Tom Gunning, to refer to silent film stars like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Frank Lloyd, etc. “Cinema of the Sons” was premised upon rupture, disjunction, subversion of order and logic, as opposed to other filmmakers of the Silent Era like DW Griffith who believed in monolithic, grandiose, close-ended narratives. (Although there is no such term as “Cinema of the Fathers,” I see the films of DW Griffith as representative of the patriarchy, whereas Cinema of the Sons as a rejection or rebellion against it). By the same token, some of the most iconic musicians in the U.S. (Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash) have at the core of their life story (and how they became a musician) an antipathy towards, prolonged tension with, or rebellion against their (stern or “macho”) father. In Freudian psychoanalytic theory, it talks about how a male baby grows up viscerally identifying first and foremost with his mother. But as he gets older, he realizes he has to “switch gears” and identify with his father, because his father has all the power. So he “sells out” and suppresses/ represses his earlier primordial identification with his mother, he kills anything inside of himself that would be considered feminine or that identifies with a female’s disempowered position in society, in order to “become a real man.” Perhaps “Cinema of the Sons” film actors/directors  were those who rejected “selling out” and identifying with the Rule of the Father.           

I bring this all up to say, perhaps we can understand this spate of hackers, leakers and whistleblowers as rebellious sons (who have not sold out yet to join the patriarchy) rebelling against (corrupt) fathers. I don’t mean this literally; by all accounts, Julian Assange’s father (John Shipton) has spoken poignantly and heartbreakingly in defense of his son and seems like an erudite, compassionate man. (Swartz also appears to have had a harmonious, close relationship with his father, who was also a computer programmer and in all likelihood the one who provided the milieu which nurtured Swartz’s early precocity with computer programming). I don’t mean that these people were literally rebelling against their own fathers. I mean in a metaphorical sense, that this revolution of hackers/leakers/whistleblowers between 2008-2015 (which were overridingly young men between the ages of 19 and 29) was a rebellion against the National Security State, which above all else is the Rule of the Father, the rule of the patriarchy, the “Old Guard” the rule of (sometimes power-hungry) men ensconced in the Establishment.

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A TEXAS BAH MITZVAH

But let’s return to the story of Barret Brown.  A deadpan redhead from Dallas who started his first communist cell at age eleven (4), Barrett Brown spent much of his time growing up reading Dostoevsky (5), described by his editor at D-Magazine as “both a hero and a goof”(6), whose father was a Dallas multi-million dollar real estate developer who eventually lost all his money. A hybrid journalist/activist/satirist/anti-authoritarian free-wheeling self-proclaimed anarchist, Brown made a prescient remark in his 2010 Huffington Post article on Anonymous that, “I am now certain that this phenomenon is among the most important and under-reported social developments to have occurred in decades, and that the development in question promises to threaten the institution of the nation-state and perhaps even someday replace it as the world’s most fundamental and relevant method of human organization.”(7) This comment garnered Brown an invitation from Anonymous member (part of “marblecake”) Gregg Housh to begin sitting in on Anonymous IRC chats and meetings (8). Eventually Brown became an integral member of Anonymous, later bringing the tactics and toolboxes he acquired from Anonymous to launch Project PM. It is a testament to how influential Brown was that of all the people in this milieu: Jeremy Hammond, Julian Assange, Aaron Swartz, Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, Brown was the only one who knew nothing of computer coding and had no computer skills whatsoever.  And yet he is firmly embedded into this pantheon of hacker-activists who challenged/defied the U.S. government during this period.  

Once in an interview with Russia Today, Brown was asked if he was afraid that his involvement with Anonymous would eventually land him in prison. With signature deadpan sardonicism, Brown replied, “Texas indictments is like a Texas Bah Mitzvah. My Dad was indicted, I have friends that were indicted, gone to prison, I mean, you know it happens.” (8) At the 2018 “Hackers on Planet Earth” Conference in New York, during an interview of Brown, interviewer (and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist) Spencer Ackerman commented that “the most famous thing about Barrett Brown is that he went to prison.” (9) While in prison, Brown wrote a column, “The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Jail” for The Intercept for which he won the National Magazine Award (2016).  He wrote them with pencil on paper, and then had his mother transcribe them to a computer.  One journalist describes that “prison just made Barret Brown bigger,” it turned him into a cause célèbre, a folk hero, a political prisoner (witness the website “www.freebarrettbrown.org).  In fact in the year 2013, according to “Reporters Without Borders,” Brown was the only journalist imprisoned in the United States for journalism.  

(In a similar vein, a colleague of hacktivist Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer said it took Weev several years before he acquired 5000 Twitter followers, but once he was incarcerated in a federal prison for hacktivism he accrued 5000 new Twitter followers in one month (10). Weev live-tweeted the first month of his time in prison, and released dispatches from his 13 month prison stint on Soundcloud). The fact that prison amplified and fortified the good reputation of both Barrett Brown and Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer is indicative that people other than me agree you can never trust an American activist unless they’ve been to prison. It is almost comparable to the status of rappers, and how some feel you should take more seriously a rapper who has been in prison vs. one who has not: in essence, rapper-as-celebrity-prisoner, or hacker-as-celebrity-prisoner, or imprisoned hacker as a mini-Nelson Mandela for the transparency activism age. For both rappers and hackers, prison adds a cachet or a halo of credibility (perhaps even verifiability)—”street cred”— to their ideological positions.

But the purpose of this article is not to talk about the time Brown spent in prison. Brown has been out of prison since 2016 and in 2019 finished serving his probation in Texas. The purpose of this article is to say Brown is now re-launching his successor project to Project PM, called Pursuance. Pursuance is a mass collaboration platform, a decentralized activism network applying lessons Brown learned in Anonymous and Project PM, an attempt to provide rigor to the dynamic of online collaboration for activist purposes. In describing the Pursuance Project, Brown makes a distinction

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between “processual democracy” vs. “institutional democracy”. Brown appears wary of institutionality and seems averse to ever creating an institution (at least certainly not with Pursuance). Gleaning from his interviews, it appears he defines processual democracy as a series of standardized procedures, a means to an end, whereas with institutional democracy the institution becomes an end unto itself (which he seems to want to avoid).  Brown is fond of using the “jellyfish analogy,” whereby this group of activists would still have the flexibility, amorphousness, and changeability of a jellyfish, but Brown wants to give this group an exoskeleton so that there are standardized procedures or processes within which this group of activists can operate. (In his interview with Gregg Housh, Brown called this group of activists a “meta-unified supra organism”).  

Pursuance is a mechanism by which journalists/whistleblowers could accrue constituencies to promote a type of massive civil disobedience by way of an open-source, end-to-end encrypted collaborative “pursuance” system platform. It is a project several years in the making, with various fits and starts. Having raised enough money with a Kickstarter in 2018 to pay $48,000 for an Executive Director, and having composed a Board of Directors with transparency activism heavyweights like John Kiriakou and Birgitta Jonsdottir (Icelandic Parliament member, former member of Wikileaks), the Pursuance project then went into hiatus for several months. It has now kicked back into gear, with Brown holding weekly Pursuance meetings since December 26, 2020.

I learned of this project only when I discovered Brown’s Facebook account had been destroyed, which was devastating to learn in the Fall of 2020. Brown’s Facebook wall was as delightfully and unpredictably eclectic as Brown himself. Plastered over his Facebook account was the cover image photo of Brown posing with 3 other prisoners in orange jumpsuits (presumably prisoners he lived with during incarceration). Unlike Aaron Swartz, who disdained the prospect of going to prison as an unacceptable blemish on his record and believed himself to be of a privileged class of people exempt from going to prison (quoting from Auernheimer: “Ivy league educated and wealthy, Aaron dealt with his indictment so badly because he thought he was part of a special class of people that this didn’t happen to (11)), instead Brown embraced prison. Most intriguingly, Brown said in his interview with Gregg Housh that “being in prison was easier than getting out of prison.” (While I have the utmost respect and admiration for Aaron Swartz, his chauvinism which viewed people in prison as beneath contempt—as well as the fact Swartz did not want his record sullied with an association with such a caste in society—is indicative there was something grossly wrong with Swartz’s value system; a “real activist” would know getting into prison is the sole proof of one’s authenticity.

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THE FRONT ROW STUDENT VS. THE BACK ROW STUDENT

But let me try to explain a measure of difference between the attitudes of Swartz and Brown in this way: in high school, there were always two types of students—the Front Row Student vs. the Back Row Student. The Front Row Student always sat in the front row—clean-cut, perky and eager—sitting perfectly upright in his/her chair, always raising his/her hand high when the teacher posed a question. He/she always wanted to get in good with the teacher (or was a “teacher’s pet”). The Front Row Student always answered the question correctly, but he/she could only conceive of things in the limited, schematic paradigm prescribed by the teacher (his/her desire for knowledge was only to succeed within the system, it was not an intellectual curiosity for knowledge’s sake). Then there was the Back Row student. The Back Row Student sat in the back row, and was less eager to accrue brownie points within the existing merit system of the classroom, but simply watched the entire dynamics of the classroom with wry irony (muttering caustic observations to himself). The front row student was an obsequious Yes Man. The back row student was the counterculture. The back row student was just as intelligent as the front row student, but in a more all-encompassing (less sterile) way.

(For example, in the film Casablanca, the Humphrey Bogart character is the back row student, Victor Laslow is the front row student. The Victor Laslow character always says the right thing and is always championing virtue with a capital “V”, but his virtue is colorless and sterile. Meanwhile, Bogart is wry and self-deprecating and complex and full of contradictions [unlike Laslow, who seems one-dimensionally virtuous.] For example, witness the scene where Bogart mocks the Nazi officer’s interrogation with sarcastic quips about his passport saying his eyes are blue. It is impossible to imagine, if Laslow were in the same situation, doing the same thing—coming up with mordant and witty non-sequiturs. If Laslow were in the same situation, he would probably give a tediously “virtuous” lecture about how it was wrong for the Nazi officer to interrogate him]. In the end, the Bogart character has as much virtue as Laslow, but Bogart arrives at his “virtue” in a more paradoxical, subtle, and complicated way).  

However, the most important difference between the back row student and the front row student is that the back row student understands the Bob Dylan quote, “When you live outside the law, you have to be honest”; whereas a front row student will never in a million years understand it. The front row student is baffled by this quote because he/she naively believes everybody who “follows the law” is honest and good, meanwhile those who break the law are “bad people,” untouchables, mutants. Meanwhile the back row student has the perspicacity and the insight to know that law is merely a false sense of security, an artificial set of dictates that we conform to that is not necessarily coterminous with justice, much less virtue.

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For example, when a person goes into McDonalds and shoots 25 people, it elicits horror, disapprobation, and is termed “mass murder,” but when the “founding fathers” of the U.S. commit wholesale decimation of American Indian populations, it is hailed and celebrated as “nation-building.”  This tells us that whether something is a crime or not does not depend on some moral or principle applied indiscriminately to all sectors of society but rather on who committed the act and whether it was done on a large enough scale to become integral to the survival of the establishment and hence exempt from punishment. 

In other words, THE FIRST RULE IS THAT THERE IS NO RULE. As Ambroise Bierce said, “There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy.” Eugene O’Neill (Nobel Peace Prize-winning Irish-American playwright of the 1920’s) said, “For the little stealing, well that gets you into jail sooner or later. But for the big stealing, they make you king, and after you die you get your name in the hall of fame” (referring to imperialist seizure of land, from his play The Emperor Jones). In other words, lawlessness is ingrained at the very foundation of our law: a polity of people had to commit crimes on a large scale (stealing land from Native Americans, slavery of blacks) before they had enough power to be able to designate what counts as “lawful” or “unlawful.”  As a cognate to the aphorism, “History is written by the victors,”  we can add the corollary, “Law is determined by those with enough brutality and ruthlessness to commit enough crimes such that they control the entire system of who gets to be a called a criminal and get to exempt themselves from their own standards” (of which the American “Founding Fathers” theft of land from Native Americans was quintessentially emblematic). Law rarely has to do with any system of ethics or morality, but merely provides a justification, even a glorification, of one’s own self-interests.

These points were powerfully and unforgettably immortalized in the iconic 1993 rap song classic “Sound of da Police” by legendary rapper KRS-One:

Excerpt of lyrics:

“You better change your attitude

 Change your plan   

There will never be justice for stolen land                                                                        

Your laws are minimal                                                                                                              

When you won’t even think about taking a look at who is the real criminal”          

-“Sound of da Police,” Return of the Boom Rap (Boogie Down Productions), 1993, KRS-One                                                                                                                                                                                                  What KRS-One succinctly and vivaciously captures here is a nation based on crime (i.e. theft of land from American Indians, stealing of free labor from black slaves)—the United States—has no moral authority to thereafter designate what counts as “right” and “wrong” within the legal system. When KRS-One bellows, “Your laws are minimal/When you won’t even think about taking a look at who is the real criminal,” what he is touching upon is as long as the “Founding Fathers” of the U.S. (and the entire criminal justice system in U.S.) cannot and will not acknowledge, nor pay for their original crimes (stolen land)—crimes without which the existence of the U.S nation-state would not be possible—it annuls their credibility or moral authority to thereafter designate xyz to be “lawful” or “unlawful.” This is how we can arrive at the paradox that those breaking the law are more honest or ethical than those who made or enforced the law.

Given this context, what the Bob Dylan quote means is that when somebody lives outside the law, they have to come up with their own moral code and they only have their own ethics to keep themselves to this code; whereas for someone who lives inside the law, they simply passively acquiesce to and let the law determine their moral code for them. Furthermore, the law rarely if ever touches something so profound as a “moral code”, it is an artificial paradigm of external behaviors we are required to exhibit. Somebody could pristinely follow the law without their moral code ever being touched or impacted. When somebody lives outside of the law, it switches them into a pro-active mode, they have to test their own reasons for their beliefs, they are the only ones who will punish themselves if they fail that code—and not the artificial paradigm of “law.” 

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(It is analogous to imagine two students in college: Bob who follows a pre-determined already existing major vs. Jean who designs her own major. Bob just has to fulfill all the requirements of his major, he just has to make sure he acquires X credits in X academic departments. He never has to think about the reasons for those requirements, he never has to call upon himself to determine what he would ask of himself in order to consider himself worthy of a diploma in his major.  Jean has to design her own major, therefore she has to come up with her own evaluation of what she would require of herself to be considered worthy of a diploma, she has to decide how many credits she needs in what departments. Not only does Jean have to determine the standards by which she will be evaluated, but most burdensome—she has to determine herself if she has failed or succeeded. Bob waits for the institution to set the terms by which he will be evaluated and passively waits for the institution to tell him if he has failed or succeeded. Bob never has to foster in himself the autonomy to come up with his own vision and to hold himself to that vision.  In a sense, Jean’s path is a greater burden than Bob’s. The same could be said for those who live outside the law as opposed to those who follow the law).

That is why somebody living within the law could still be very dishonest (as “following the law” is not coterminous with actually being honest), whereas living outside the law forces one to build one’s own system of ethics. This brings us to one of the most important quotes of Barrett Brown: “If the U.S was a country that was actually governed in accordance with the rule of law, then I would be the first to oppose any crime against any company including hacking; but the fact of the matter is this is not a country governed by the rule of law.”(12) This shows us that Brown is a back row student with the perspicacity to know that the U.S. system of government/law/punishment is not coterminous with justice nor “virtue”—had it been virtuous, Brown would have been against breaking the law. But because the National Security State is corrupt, transgressing it actually constitutes an act of virtue (a case of the ”double negative”). Here Brown concurs with legendary rapper KRS-One, that the U.S. is not governed by the rule of law. What we need is somebody in a Ph.D program in a Cultural Studies department to write their Ph.D thesis about how rappers are allies with hackers (i.e. Assange, weev, Brown) in that both parties militantly denounce the double standard of justice of the state.

In a statement Brown made to the judge before his sentencing, Brown touched upon this “double standard of justice”. Brown pointedly illustrates how the court keeps changing the legal definition of the terms “journalist” and “spokesman for Anonymous”, sometimes sticking this label on Brown to incriminate him,  other times denying Brown as being either, changing on a whim depending on what best bolsters the prosecution’s case of Brown:  

“Your Honor, it would be one thing if the government were putting forth some sort of standard by which journalists could be defined. They have not put forth such a standard. Their assertion rests on the fact that despite having referred to myself as a journalist hundreds of times, I at one point rejected that term, much in the same way that someone running for office might reject the term “politician”. Now, if the government is introducing a new standard whereby anyone who once denies being a particular thing is no longer that thing in any legal sense, then that would be at least a firm and knowable criteria. But that’s not what the government is doing in this case. […]

In the September 13th criminal complaint filed against me, the FBI itself acknowledges that I do not claim any official role within Anonymous. Likewise, in last month’s hearing, the prosecutor accidentally slipped and referred to me as a journalist, even after having previously found it necessary to deny me that title. But, there you have it. Deny being a spokesperson for Anonymous hundreds of times, and you’re still a spokesperson for Anonymous. Deny being a journalist once or twice, and you’re not a journalist. What conclusion can one draw from this sort of reasoning other than that you are whatever the FBI finds it convenient for you to be at any given moment. This is not the “rule of law”, Your Honor, it is the “rule of law enforcement”, and it is very dangerous.” (13)

-Barrett Brown

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But returning to the front row student/back row student dichotomy, the reason some of us are loath to fully embrace Swartz as an activist is because it seems he was in shock and horror at the thought that “he could get in trouble.” WELL GETTING IN TROUBLE IS THE ENTIRE POINT OF ACTIVISM. IF YOU  DON’T GET IN TROUBLE, THEN YOU ARE NOT AN ACTIVIST. If you have never been arrested then you are not really pushing up against the system and were never a threat in any real way. If you have never been arrested, you remain a limousine liberal Verso-reading “boutique activist.” It seems Swartz was thrown into an existential crisis at integrating the back row student and the front row students parts of himself. (The Front Row Student never gets in trouble with the teacher. The Back Row Student is always getting in trouble).  Here he was, all his life a boy-genius child prodigy—always the front row student, always the one with the “right answer”, invited by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig at age 14 and flown out to San Francisco to come up with the Creative Commons License, always accruing accolades within the existing system of merit and valuation: basically, the Establishment. For the first time, he was going to be forced to become part of the subaltern or “disfavored” class by going to prison, and this was unacceptable to him (if we even accept the story of his suicide to be true).

Unlike the case of Aaron Swartz who was blind-sided and completely taken by surprise when he was arrested for hacking, Brown knew 6 months ahead of the time of his arrest that the FBI was preparing an indictment against him. And yet, whether it was masochism or a death wish, Brown continued his activities.  All his life Swartz had been “clean”—the thought of being labeled “unclean” (going to prison) terrified and disgusted him. (This, more than anything else, is why it is difficult to take Swartz seriously as an activist—plus the admission in the New Yorker article “The Darker Side of Aaron Swartz” that Swartz “despised” working class people(14)). Brown was a trickster, he had more heterogeneous resources within himself to adapt to a new and dehumanizing situation—going to prison—than the clean-cut Front Row Student Swartz; Brown was more dynamic. Brown was a consummate Back Row Student—an old soul. That is why we can trust him.  

Most astonishing were Brown’s writing for The Intercept (written while he was in prison). For instance this article of his (https://theintercept.com/2015/12/02/barrett-brown-the-government-explains-why-it-took-my-email/) describes the workaday bureaucracy involved in being moved from a low security prison to a medium security prison, chronicling everything from how rival Hispanic gangs “Tango Blast” and “Texas Syndicate” cannot be put on the same prison bus, to how certain prisons are trying to increase their proportion of white inmates, punctured by hilariously mordant quips that made me laugh uproariously like, “Of the 18 inmates on the bus, though, there was only one other white guy, but then he had a swastika tattoo on the back of his head, so he may have counted as two or three white guys for accounting purposes.” (From his writings for The Intercept, one might surmise Brown would get along fantastically with Holden Caulfield [from J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye], as Brown has the same off-handed acerbic hyper-sensitive perception of the foibles and absurdities of humanity).

But perhaps the most important thing about Brown’s writing is that he achieved something not many writers can: when you read his work, even if you were not told beforehand who was the author, you would know it was written by him. Unlike the generic paint-by-number dross or even the extremely “respectable” polished writing sometimes found in (humanities, or worse yet, social sciences) academic journals, they almost all sound exactly alike.  Even though the subject matters of such articles differ wildly, they basically sound like they were all written by the same exact person: their form, their structure, their syntax, their word choice have all been “standardized” so that they all sound indistinguishable from one another. In all likelihood, the reason they all sound alike is because they were usually written by Front Row Students.  Front Row Students all diligently remember to dot their I’s and cross their T’s, they always follow rules, but their writing is so boring. (Unlike Barrett Brown, they have no distinguishable writing style, they have no predilections, they want to be “balanced”, staid and proper). A Front Row Student could never be an artist. (A Front Row Student would make a good technocrat or bureaucrat). The Front Row Student has nothing interesting rustling in his/her soul—that’s why he/she is such a bad writer. In this sense, perhaps we can understand Brown as coming from a long tradition of soulful and often acerbic writers from the South, from William Faulkner to Mark Twain to Tennessee Williams to Dave Hickey. (If you want to experience the antithesis of generic “Front Row Student” writing, read Dave Hickey. One critic said, “After you read Dave Hickey, everything you read afterwards will seem about as interesting as your tax returns.”)

Brown’s Facebook Wall was like a pedestrian scramble (an intersection of many different streets, both diagonal and horizontal) of eclectic and colorful characters—like Brown himself—unfailingly peppered by the inimitable Barret Brown flippant yet pithily incisive quips. Here is a person who probably has more interesting, random and colorful things happen in his life in 5 months than most of us experience in a lifetime: whether it is being pursued by Zeta gangs, 17-year olds in Norway being subpoenaed by the DOJ for writing Brown’s Wikipedia entry, Brown holding a live-streamed press conference in his bathtub on TinyChat (while taking a bath), Brown burning his 2016 National Magazine Award after The Intercept shuttered access to the Snowden Archive (15), or Brown making three-part Youtube video messages to the FBI that predict his own death before the age of 40. (Brown also has a quirky predilection for referring to people he is in a heated argument with as “sweethearts”— a term he turns into a dryly derisive epithet). It was devastating that this online space (Brown’s Facebook) where allies of Brown could converge, discuss, trash talk, and commune with each other was destroyed.  

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HISTORICALLY CONTEXTUALIZING BROWN’S COMPLAINT THAT THE U.S. MEDIA IS “SERVILE”

Brown often castigates the (American) media for being spineless and subservient to the powers that be. I feel it is important to point out that this spinelessness started to coalesce and really kick into high gear after September 11th. As a counter-example, I once watched Youtube footage of a press conference of President Nixon, and I WAS SHOCKED HOW DIFFERENT THE U.S. MEDIA WAS IN THE 1970’S. In the 1970’s, U.S. media was feisty and contentious and (and even hostile) to authority. There is a belief (amongst Nixon and the U.S. government) that “American journalism is what ended the Vietnam War,”  that the U.S. media offered such a scathing, harrowing depiction of the Vietnam War such that it was able to turn the tide of public opinion against the Vietnam War. (Think of the infamous Malai massacre Nepalm bombing photograph that elicited disgust in the American public towards the dubious claims of why the U.S needed to be involved in the Vietnam War):

After realizing that the U.S. media was able to turn the public against the Vietnam War, the US government then intentionally kept out media from the next war (Iraq War 1990), doing away with “embedded reporters during wartime,” leaving media depiction of the Iraq War to devolve into a disembodied Missile Command-like videogame. After September 11th, 2001 and the fall of the Twin Towers, U.S. (corporate) media became even more outrageously subservient and meekly obsequious to mindless clarion calls for patriotism, never once questioning President Bush’s fraudulent “Weapons of Mass Destruction” claim.  The likes of Brown, Glenn Greenwald, Assange would have fit in much better with the tradition of adversarial journalism of the 1970’s.

This is all to say that I don’t believe the U.S. media’s subservience to the U.S. government is necessarily an intrinsic or immutable trait, seeing as just 40 years ago during the Vietnam War, American journalists behaved completely differently. For those (like Brown) who believe the American corporate media is irredeemable, think of it: just 40 years ago the American news media stopped an imperialist racist war in the Far East (the very thought of it conjures up the line from the 1979 film Hair, “The Vietnam War is about White People sending Black People to fight a war in a far away land to oppress Yellow People, to defend the land we stole from the Red People (Native Americans).” Forty years ago the U.S. media (including even Walter Cronkite) shamed the U.S. government into admitting that their “positive thinking happy talk” narrative about how the Tet Offensive was a big success and the Vietnam War was going great did not correspond to the situation on the ground. It is hard to believe there was a time when Americans were not so ethnocentric, self-involved, and narcissistic—the 1970’s—that a large proportion of the public actually cared about the fate of non-white people in a country halfway across the globe (Vietnam). As both the 1990 and 2003 American invasions of Iraq shows us, the capacity of the American public to stand up against U.S. military aggression of non-white people in a country far away clearly evaporated already by the 1990’s.

I would just like to point out that the above renowned photograph (of which you would have to have been hiding under a rock for the last 50 years to have never seen)—the photo of the Viet Kong soldier being summarily executed in Saigon during the Tet Offensive in 1968 (explained here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_of_Nguy%E1%BB%85n_V%C4%83n_L%C3%A9m )—actually made it into the wallpaper of Woody Allen’s apartment in the film Stardust Memories. I just find it remarkable that this undaunted effort on the part of U.S. journalists in the 1970’s to shame the U.S government about the arbitrary atrocities propagated by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War—it was such a part of the zeitgeist (or cultural milieu) of the 1970’s that it made it into the wallpaper of an apartment of Woody Allen’s in a seminal Woody Allen film!

I would also like to bring to attention how different the attitude towards war was in the U.S. in the 70’s as compared to the Iraq War in 2003. Opposition to the Vietnam War was deeply ingrained in popular culture, entertainment, and cultural production in the 70’s—the “zeitgeist”— as prominent artists and cultural figures were unabashedly strident in their opposition: from Eartha Kitt, to Joan Baez (who went to North Vietnam), to Academy Award-winning actress Jane Fonda. Fonda not only went to North Vietnam in 1972 to witness firsthand the U.S. bombing of dikes, but did a two week radio broadcast on “Hanoi Radio” describing her visits to villages, hospitals, schools, and factories that had been bombed and denouncing U.S. military actions in Vietnam all along the way, earning her the nickname “Hanoi Jane”. Also we had the notorious Kent State Massacre (killing of 5 Kent State students by U.S. National Guard during a protest against the Vietnam War expanding into Cambodia), and of course the unforgettable statement of mega-watt superstar World Champion boxer Muhammad Ali when he refused to be drafted in the Vietnam War:

“My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. […] And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father. … Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.”

(The story of how Ali was thereafter charged with 5 years in prison, a $10,000 fine, and stripped of his boxing license for 3 years for refusing to fight for the U.S. in the Vietnam War—becoming something of an anti-colonialist’s cult hero along the way—can be found here: https://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2016/06/muhammad-ali-vietnam/485717

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Now if we fast-forward to 2003 and the Iraq War, the only prominent “celebrity” in the U.S. who speaks out against Bush’s Iraq War is the Dixie Chicks, whose lead singer Natalie Maines announced to the crowd at a concert in London on March 10, 2003, “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence. And we’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas” (Dixie Chicks were from Texas). This comment sparked a huge backlash, with hordes of Americans calling into radio stations demanding Dixie Chicks be removed from playlists, with certain radio stations calling for a boycott of Dixie Chicks’ latest album release and upcoming tour. It was considered something “outré” or “beyond the pale” at the time, for a person in the public eye to say they were “ashamed” of the U.S. for starting the Iraq War. Whereas in the 1970’s, ALL the celebrities (i.e. rock musicians, folk musicians, film actors/actresses, John Lennon/Yoko Ono, etc.) were saying they were against the Vietnam War; it was something commonplace and nowhere near as controversial as saying you were against the Iraq War in 2003.

Comparing again to the Iraq War, recall the stunning case of how comedian and talk show host Bill Maher was punished in 2001 when he said that the September 11 attackers were not cowards: “We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building? Say what you want about it…but it’s not cowardly” https://www.pastemagazine.com/comedy/5-comedians-who-got-in-trouble-for-911-comments/#1-bill-maher. For this mere utterance, Bill Maher lost his entire TV show on ABC’s “Politically Incorrect” and President Bush’s Press Secretary Ari Fleischer denounced Maher at a press conference on national television the following day, saying that Bill Maher should “watch what he says”: (https://apnews.com/article/3252060d30bef9a1cc01fd20b9eeb85d). Another example is the shocking moment when so-called “liberal network” MSNBC cancelled and fired Phil Donahue from his 26 year old talk show “The Phil Donahue Show” because he opposed the Iraq War—Bill Moyers called it “The day that TV news died”: https://billmoyers.com/2013/03/25/the-day-that-tv-news-died/. Donahue never returned to the airwaves afterwards.

What I find so remarkable is that what the Dixie Chicks, Donahue and Bill Maher did in dissenting against the Iraq War in 2003 was much less extreme than what people in the 1970’s did to dissent against the Vietnam War—and yet in the 2000’s, they were punished in a much more pointed and vindictive fashion. The Dixie Chicks singer never went to Iraq to start broadcasting shows on an Iraqi radio station about how deplorable U.S. military action against Iraq was, the way Jane Fonda did in Vietnam. Of the handful of U.S. celebrities who opposed the Iraq War (2003), none of them actually went to Iraq to help Iraquis, the way Joan Baez and other artists of the 1970’s actually went to North Vietnam. All the Dixie Chicks and Bill Maher did was in the realm of language—all they did was offer their thoughts about the Iraq War—and yet this elicited more severe persecution than in the case of artists/celebrities in the 70’s who did MUCH MORE EXTREME things to dissent against the Vietnam War, and yet paid a MUCH lower price (or backlash) for their dissent. Jane Fonda didn’t lose her career, she didn’t have an offer to be in a film rescinded because of her dissent with the Vietnam War, the way Bill Maher lost his entire TV political talk show simply for saying the “9-11 attackers were not cowards”.

Regarding Muhammad Ali, it is almost impossible to imagine in this day and age a nationally recognized sports celebrity saying something so raw, so militant, so confrontational against U.S military policy on national television, describing the country the U.S is at war with as, “At least that country never called me a nigger.” (It feels like such a snapshot of the 70’s—one of those things that “could only have happened in the 1970’s.”) Of course there is the case in 2016 of San Francisco 49ers football quarterback Colin Kaepernick (African-American) who refused to rise during the National Anthem as a protest against how U.S treats blacks—but that was quite subtle and symbolic compared to saying in a public interview that you won’t fight in a U.S. war because at least that other country “never called me a nigger.” All this is to say the fact that artists/cultural figures in the 2000’s did much less extreme forms of dissent against war than did those of the 1970’s and yet were punished in a much more extreme fashion than those in the 70’s tells us that THE ENTIRE ZEITGEIST HAD SHIFTED. Dissent was much less accepted, much less commonplace. Dissent was more marginalized (even stigmatized or demonized) in 2003 during the Iraq War than in the 70’s during the Vietnam War. And so again I want to propose the possibility that the subservience of our current-day media (which Brown denounces) is not necessarily something intrinsic, but is something era-specific. It is emblematic that in general, for everybody AS A WHOLE (not just journalists, but artists, commentators, musicians, cultural figures), dissent against the U.S State has been much less tolerated since September 11th, 2001.  

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Those of us who support Wikileaks, Assange, Barrett Brown, etc.—we would probably all have been much much happier in the 1970’s, or with the state of journalism in the 1970’s. If it were the 1970’s, something like Wikileaks (an intervention into the obsequious, mendacious, corporate news media) would not be necessary (or not as necessary) because in the 1970’s, the mainstream press was bolder and more anti-authoritarian, less afraid to question power. In the 2010’s, how Julian Assange used Wikileaks to expose the atrocities of the Iraq War was considered radical or “avante-garde”, but if he had lived instead in the 1970’s what he did to expose the Iraq War would have been considered “mainstream.”

Now inevitably, someone will counter by saying I am romanticizing the 1970’s. Someone will likely say, “You think Jane Fonda/Muhammad Ali didn’t face backlash for going against the Vietnam War? You think everything just came up smelling roses for them and everyone in the 1970’s was cheering them on for opposing the Vietnam War? People hated them intensely for opposing the war.” While it is true a sector of American society hated Fonda/Ali for opposing the Vietnam War, there was also a sector of American society that hailed them as heroes. As opposed to the Dixie Chicks, for whom there was only a sector of society that hated them for opposing the Iraq War, with no corresponding counterpart or “contrarian” opinion that pushed back and maintained that Dixie Chicks were heroes for opposing the war. (This is ironic, as the Iraq War was much worse, much more indefensible than the Vietnam War). After stridently opposing the Vietnam War and supplying material support to the Viet Kong, Jane Fonda still went on to have a long, prosperous career, garnering two more Oscar nominations, still getting offers to be in films past age 60. At Muhammad Ali’s funeral in 2016, former President Bill Clinton, actor Billy Crystal, and news anchor Bryant Gumbel were amongst those who gave eulogies; in the long run, it almost appears Ali became something of a national hero for saying “at least no Viet Kong ever called me a nigger”.

Furthermore, while there were people who initially opposed what Ali did, once the tide turned against the Vietnam War, people went back to him and said, “When you first opposed the Vietnam War, it seemed too extreme. But now I realize you were right.” The Dixie Chicks/Phil Donahue never received the mea culpa that Ali did.  Even though American public opinion eventually turned against the Iraq War, nobody went back to all the people who early on opposed the Iraq War and said, “When you first opposed the Iraq War, it seemed too extreme. But now I realize you were right.” It appears that the eventual failure of the Vietnam war REDEEMED Ali, but oddly enough, the eventual failure of the American invasion into Iraq did not redeem the Dixie Chicks/Donahue.

THIS SOUND OF SILENCE

“And in the naked light, I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

"Fools", said I, "You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you"
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed
In the wells of silence”

          -Simon & Garfunkel, “The Sound of Silence” (1968)

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us so that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future.  When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago  (1973-1978)    

“Truth is treason in an empire of lies.”

-George Orwell   

"It has been the one song of those who thirst after absolute power that the interest of the state requires that its affairs should be conducted in secret... But the more such arguments disguise themselves under the mask of public welfare, the more oppressive is the slavery to which they will lead... Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace."  

             -Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (1926)

”The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it."

-The Matrix, 1999

Nick Dyer-Witheford (Professor of Information and Media Studies at University of Western Ontario) talks about two disparate paths of two very different social types of hackers—one who wants “information to be free,” and the other who wants to see information unrelentingly commodified:   

“If one hacker section, fascinated and empowered by the technical potential of computers, firmly believed ‘information wants to be free’, another, implicated in and sharing the ambitions of corporate capital, wanted just as deeply to see it commodified. This split found its exemplary expression in the young Bill Gates’ 1976 ‘Open Letter to Hobbyists’, in which he repudiated the free ethic of early computer tinkering in favour of the rights of information property (Levy 1984: 229). From this point two paths diverge. One, broad and upward trending, led to Gates’ own corporate empire, and also those of Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Sergei Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg. Another, more twisty and subterranean, was followed by figures such as Richard Stallman (inventor of ‘copyleft’ protection for Free and Open Source Software), Aaron Swartz (the hacktivist whose breaches of state and commercial systems led to his prosecution and eventual suicide), and Julian Assange (Wikileaks founder).” (16)

-Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex, Nick Dyer-Witheford (2015)

The first camp—those who want to obscenely monetize information and intellectual property—have little friction with the wider society and were on track to become supra-oligarchs (in Gates’ case, with the thin veneer of pseudo-philanthropy). Indeed, society rewarded their greed and utter lack of political consciousness with a peaceful, prosperous, lauded and well-respected life trajectory. The second camp, who wants information to be free, had an inconceivably cruel karma visited upon them, with Julian Assange’s reputation smeared (fraudulent rape allegations) and his resilience, wholeness of mind, and physical health deliberately destroyed to the point where after 7 years in the Ecuadorian Embassy and almost 2 years in Belmarsh prison, he is found by United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer (Human Rights Chair at Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law/Human Rights) to have undergone psychological torture and is considered too frail even to extradite.  Suicide, death (Swartz), imprisonment (Hammond, Brown, Weev, Assange), harassment (Brown), destruction of wholeness of mind, exile—these were some of the brutal fates that awaited “the best minds of a generation”, the hacker generation. In a cruel and unthinkable twist of fate, these ethical hackers were in a sense punished for having integrity.   

That is why we should be grateful that Barrett Brown is back on his feet and is re-launching Pursuance. We should be grateful he is not dead, has not been driven to suicide, is not still in prison, and having been to prison seems in no way to have been destroyed by prison. We should also be grateful that he hasn’t “sold out” and has not opted for some easy, lucrative, “Front Row Student” conformist path. We should be grateful that his brain has not yet been turned to mush, or that he has not yet turned into some type of robot or the vegetable-like, submissive Jack Nicholson character in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest after being electro-shocked (which is sometimes the fate of those destroyed by Department of Justice persecution). (Who knows, maybe in the end it was Brown’s goofiness that saved him from the more grim, irreversible fates of Assange and Swartz. Maybe it was Brown’s Dada-like back row student playful sardonicism that allowed him to deflect the humiliations and dehumanizing experiences of DOJ persecution and still survive, whereas for another person who was more brittle and more “earnest” [Swartz], it would be enough to destroy them).  Most of all, we should be grateful that Brown’s harrowing experiences have not in any way caused him to doubt or annihilate his own moral radar (i.e. that he has not been brainwashed to “renounce” his previous work with Anonymous). And that’s why we should support him.

Footnotes:

(1)   “Glenn Greenwald on Barret Brown, Press Freedom, and the Failings of Corporate Media,” Democracy Now, May 12, 2017. Available at: https://www.democracynow.org/2017/5/12/glenn_greenwald_on_barrett_brown_press

(2)   Peter Ludlow: “The Strange Case of Barrett Brown.” The Nation. June 8, 2013. Available at: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/strange-case-barrett-brown/

(3)   Meredith Clark: “The New Political Prisoners: Leakers, Hackers, and Activists.” Rolling Stone Magazine.  March 1, 2013. Available at: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-lists/the-new-political-prisoners-leakers-hackers-and-activists-144593/jeremy-hammond-167084/

(4)   “Barrett Brown Onstage Interview.” Hackers on Planet Earth Conference. July 21, 2018,  Available at:

(5)   Ibid.

(6)   The Accidental Warrior: The Life and Times of Barrett Brown, 2017.Available at: https://www.dmagazine.com/frontburner/2017/11/new-documentary-on-barrett-brown-accidental-warrior/

(7)   Barrett Brown: “Anonymous, Australia, and the Inevitable Fall of the Nation-State.” Huffington Post. April 13, 2010. Available at: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/anonymous-australia-and-t_b_457776?guccounter=1

(8)   The Gregg Housh Show Live—Episode #4—Barrett Brown Talks Pursuance. November 17, 2020. Available at:

(9)    “Barrett Brown Onstage Interview.” Hackers on Planet Earth Conference. July 21, 2018,  Available at:

(10)The Hacker Wars, 2014 (director: Vivien Lesnik Weisman). Available at:

(11) Andrew Auernheimer: “iPad Hack Statement of Responsibility.” TechCrunch. January 21, 2013. Available at: https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/21/ipad-hack-statement-of-responsibility/

(12) The Hacker Wars, 2014 (director: Vivien Lesnik Weisman). Available at:

(13) Mike Masnick: “Brown Sentenced to 63 years in Jail for Daring to do Journalism on Hacked Info.” TechDirt.  January 22, 2015. Available at: techdirt.com/articles/20150122/12112129780/barrett-brown-sentenced-to-63-months-jail-daring-to-do-journalism-hacked-info.shtml#comments

(14) Larissa MacFarquhar: “The Darker Side of Aaron Swartz.”  The New Yorker. March 13, 2013. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/11/requiem-for-a-dream

(15) David Gilmour: “Why Barrett Brown Burned his National Magazine Award—and What He’s Planning Next”. April 22, 2019. Available at: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/barrett-brown-burns-national-magazine-award/

(16) Nick Dyer-Witheford: Cyber Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex, Chicago 2015, p. 102.

About Author: Andrea Liu https://parsejournal.com/authors/andrea-liu/

(graphics/cartoons by Andrea Liu)

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