Barrett Brown

Barrett Lancaster Brown (born August 14, 1981) is an American journalist, essayist, activist and former associate of Anonymous.

In 2000 he enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin and spent two semesters taking writing courses before leaving school to pursue a full-time career as a freelance writer.

In 2007 Brown and a group of old friends moved to Brooklyn, where their apartment was used as a daytime base of operations by a group of marijuana dealers from Puerto Rico and Honduras.

During this time, he became a griefer in Second Life and began socializing with other griefers on 4chan, forming the beginning of what later become Anonymous.

In the documentary We Are Legion, Brown called his griefer period "the most fun time I ever had in my life".

Brown had some paid writing gigs, but mostly published on unpaid, self-edited websites like Daily Kos and The Huffington Post.

His work as an unpaid spokesman for the Godless Americans PAC led to his first TV appearance on the Fox News morning show Fox & Friends.

In 2010, he founded Project PM, a group that used a wiki to analyze leaks concerning the military-industrial complex.

It was classified a "criminal organization" by the Department of Justice.

In 2010, Brown began work on his crowdsourced investigation wiki, Project PM, which was labeled a "criminal organization" by the Department of Justice.

By Brown's count, Project PM had 75 members at its peak who communicated through an IRC chat room and published their findings on the Project PM wiki.

The group dug through huge amounts of hacked files and emails from intelligence contractors, hoping to expose companies like HBGary and Stratfor, earning the trust of the hacktivist community.

According to The New York Times and Rolling Stone, Brown called his research subjects at home and harassed them, which some Project PM members considered pranks and joined.

In June 2011, he and Project PM released an exclusive report about a surveillance contract called "Romas/COIN" which was discovered in e-mails hacked from HBGary by Anonymous.

It consisted of sophisticated data-mining techniques leveraging mobile software and aimed at Arab countries.

After Project PM was shutdown by his 2012 arrest and incarceration, he restarted it in late 2020 while seeking asylum in the UK.

From September 2012, during his incarceration, Brown wrote a series of columns for D Magazine titled "The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Jail".

In 2014 he self-published the book Keep Rootin' for Putin: Establishment Pundits and the Twilight of American Competence.

In January 2015, Brown was sentenced to 63 months in federal prison for the crimes of accessory after the fact, obstruction of justice, and threatening a federal officer stemming from the FBI's investigation into the 2012 Stratfor email leak.

As part of his sentence, Brown was also required to pay almost $900,000 to Stratfor in restitution.

In late 2020, Brown restarted Project PM.

In November 2020, Brown claimed asylum in the UK on the basis that he had been persecuted in the US for his journalism.

Brown's asylum claim was denied in February 2024.

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.

He was convicted of causing intentional harassment, alarm or distress.

Brown has been praised for his columns and writing, and bringing people together in activism.

He has also been criticised as a paranoid junkie riding political persecution and old glories.

Some have said Brown's behavior is "a result of addiction, paranoia, PTSD and not enough postprison support".

Brown was born and grew up in an affluent part of Dallas County.

His father Robert was a wealthy real estate investor until the FBI investigated him for fraud and he lost the family's money.

Robert Brown was charged in a real-estate-fraud scheme, but the charges were eventually dropped.

His parents divorced when he was 7.

After the divorce he lived with his New Age mother Karen Lancaster, who called him "an indigo child with an alien soul".

According to New York Magazine, Brown's "young life was defined by an almost pathological resistance to authority and by the roguish example of his father".

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.

He went on to contribute to his school newspapers, and interned at several weekly newspapers during his teenage years.

While in middle school, he began exploring the possibilities of online networks and reading Ayn Rand and Hunter S. Thompson.

He 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.

Brown spent his would-be junior year in Tanzania with his father who was residing there on business.

While in Africa, Brown completed high school online through a Texas Tech University program, earning college credits as well as his high school diploma.