All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, introducing Barrett Brown from Project PM, I guess I should say, and also from Twitter.
He's Barrett B, that's two R's and two T's on Barrett, and we first made his acquaintance on this show back a decade ago when he was serving as a semi-official spokesman for Anonymous in their heyday, and partisan of WikiLeaks during the Manning leak and all of that great stuff.
And, man, he's been a federal president back and was a Russiagate truther there for a while, and has had all kinds of adventures we need to catch up on.
So welcome back to the show.
How are you doing there, Barrett?
Fantastic, fantastic.
I had a complicated 11 years, but it's nice to be able to update you on that.
Yeah.
Well, so, you know, I covered your story on the show from time to time while you were in prison and made a habit of reading all your articles that you wrote for, was it D Magazine and for The Intercept and different things while you're in there.
So it's been a little while, but yeah, I'm somewhat familiar with what's going on.
And in fact, maybe that's a good place to start.
Can you take us back to the HB Gary leak and the, all the stuff that got you in trouble with the feds in the first place and how you went to prison and all that?
Absolutely.
So I was brought into Anonymous in late 2010 in order to help with the Tunisian revolution, which had just begun in which a number of individuals in and out of the country were helping with the Tunisian nationals, Tunisian exiles, a number of others, others among us.
And about a month after that, we discovered that a former Air Force, no, sorry, Navy intelligence officer named Aaron Barr, who ran HB Gary, he was the CEO of HB Gary Federal, a contracting intelligence contracting firm, had infiltrated the internet relay chat server that from which a lot of this anonymous stuff happened, a lot of it was organized, the Tunisian, Tunisian revolution, Arab spring aid efforts, other things.
And upon that, at that point, much, several of the hackers that I was acquainted with, they went in and took all of Aaron Barr's files, all the company's files and that of their parent company, HB Gary.
And over the next couple of weeks, several things were discovered, some by us, some by other journalists, some by, you know, in the course of crowdsource research going forth on Twitter and so forth.
The main thing was Team Themis.
This was a consortium of intelligence contracting firms, including Palantir, which is now better known, and a few others that were put together with the help of the DOJ and Hutton & Williams, a lobbying firm in DC, to serve as a sort of a black ops strike team for clients like Bank of America and U.S. Chamber of Commerce, both of which had sought out assistance in going after things like WikiLeaks, going after those who supported WikiLeaks, journalists like Glenn Greenwald, a number of others, going after Anonymous, since they identified us as a key sort of support vector for these kind of things, and also going at unrelated groups like Stop the Chamber, Code Pink, groups that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had separately been opposed to.
So Congress started to investigate this, and then the DOJ, the chairman of the committee in question, Judiciary Committee, Republican of Texas, whose name escapes me right now, said that the DOJ should be the one to decide if a crime had been committed.
Now, of course, the DOJ was heavily involved in this, as has been reported already, so they were not in a hurry to determine if any crimes had been committed, and in fact, instead, they came after us.
And so around that time, first sealed ran jury search warrants started being filed on me and those around me, listing the fact that I had called Palantir, this firm, called HP, in-game systems, to ask them why they'd been doing these things.
And so I kept running for the Guardian, putting out some of the stuff we came across, and over the next year or so, these things escalated, and we knew we were being investigated, and so forth.
And finally, in March 2012, I was raided by the FBI, FBI also raided my mom's home.
And the next day, DOJ tells me that my mom is also now under investigation for the same thing Hillary was supposed to be under investigation for, with the term obstruction of justice.
And so that made me upset, but I kept my mouth shut for a few months at her request.
Then upon determining, upon receiving a number of materials showing the full extent, or the partial extent, of how the FBI had pursued all this and what they had allowed their compensated informants and cooperators to do to us and to family members and to people, children of women, you know, I was dating and that kind of thing, I could have lost, having lost any hope of getting the press at this point to take these things seriously, and having lost, and having known that my family was now on the chopping block, I made several videos laying out this case as best I could at the time, and, you know, saying that if the FBI screwed with my mom again, if they, if they came back at this point, you know, I was going to defend myself.
And so I was hit by a SWAT team the next day, that was recorded on live stream, since I did a lot of live streams at that time, with my volunteers and so forth, and I ended up being charged a hundred and five years worth of offenses, mostly for copying and pasting a link from, it was posted in one of the anon, same anon server, anonymous server, to information materials taken from Stratfor, another intelligence contracting firm that is heavily involved in a lot of the stuff that would go on, would happen in the years to come, copying and pasting a link to that, the materials had been hacked from that firm, and sharing it with my research group, Project PM, and also interference with the search warrant, obstruction of justice for hiding laptops from the FBI before they had a warrant, and, you know, conspiracy to, to put out public, identifying information about federal officials, FBI agents, and so forth, and threatening an FBI agent.
And so I fought that case for two and a half years, they were, they were trying very hard to get me to plead to just one of the 11 counts of linking, which would have been a very dangerous precedent, would have endangered journalist researchers all over, to the extent that DOJ wanted to go after them, which of course is, you know, that's, that's, they tend to do that when you're doing something that is considered dangerous to the establishment, and was able to hold out, and finally they had to drop all those, most of those charges, and I pled to some lesser charges that didn't really endanger anyone, the chief one being calling up Stratfor, after the hack of Stratfor, and offering to help ensure that any materials that these hackers were about to release, one of the hackers was actually an FBI cooperator it turns out, offering to redact anything in those materials that they were saying they were going to dump, if those materials could get someone killed, one of their contacts killed, like in other words, foreign country, whatever, you know, anything that should legitimately not be put out.
And so for making that phone call, I was, I was tagged with accessory after the fact, and then there was also the threatening a FBI agent charge, which was also quite questionable in terms of the search warrant, did four years in prison, two years of probation afterwards, and have since then probably been allowed to leave the country, so I went to Antigua late last year, and then from there came to the UK, where I was arrested again in May.
So I hope that covers the basics.
Yeah, and I know you're seeking asylum in the UK right now, is that right?
Yes.
Which I guess getting arrested there has complicated that.
Yeah, in fact, yeah, I've been openly talking about getting, moving to another country, preferably Germany, for years now, mostly because I was re-arrested again after my release from prison for giving an interview to Vice without the permission of a Bureau of Prisons official who had no right to, you know, give prior restraints or enforce prior restraint on journalists talking to me.
I was obviously allowed to do interviews with journalists, I did some from prison.
Anyway, so I was re-arrested without any paperwork, a warrant or anything by the U.S. Marshal Service, got out a few days later when one of my publishers hired a major law firm to threaten them.
And so that was enough to tell me that I needed to get out of the U.S. eventually if I wanted to pursue- That was last year?
That happened in 2017, that arrest.
And there were other incidents since, including this bomb threat that was made to a magazine I wrote for, D Magazine actually, one of the ones I did the column for, after I had done some work on exposing some elements of the murder of Botham Jean, a black man in Dallas, by a white police officer, Amber Geiger.
And the police were covering that up, lying about it in several recordings and emails to my city councilman.
All these things, anyway, just went on and on.
And so ultimately I decided, probably what I should have realized years ago, which is that the U.S. is not somewhere where I can continue to operate if I want to keep my materials, if I want to stay out of prison, ensure that my loved ones are safe from both official and unofficial persecution to try to get to me.
And so, yes, upon being arrested here in the U.K. for holding up part of someone else's banner at a protest against expanded police powers, upon being arrested, after two days, I was moved to an immigration, immigrant removal center near the Gatwick Airport here in London.
And then I declared asylum from there, with a different branch of the home office than the one that had falsified paperwork to get me put in that institution.
That's one of the things that one can do in these situations.
Whenever there's a plot, and you know about it and you can document it, but whatever, it's very unusual for the authorities in question, whatever faction is involved, to tell every single branch, like, hey, we're plotting against Barry Brown here, or Assange, like, you know, beware.
So obviously if you go around them to some other division that doesn't know everything, doesn't know this is an unusual situation, doesn't know that you've already kind of, you're already de facto have no rights, then you can complicate things for them.
So I had been intending to do an asylum claim, either in the UK or preferably Germany for a while.
Obviously the UK was not my first choice.
But by doing that, I forced them to release me from that center, rather than deport me back to the US, where apparently the FBI has sealed warrants for me that we know about from recordings provided to me since then by an FBI source, who was also one of our people for a while, so on and so forth.
Do you know anymore charges?
We don't.
We don't.
I mean, one of the things, you know, it's hard to figure out exactly what the DOJ is going to charge you with.
I mean, that was definitely my experience back in 2011 when they were talking about, you know, fraud.
And obviously I couldn't quite figure out what I would have done to fraud anybody.
And of course the DOJ hadn't determined that yet either, and their charges ended up having to be dropped.
But in this case, I mean, there's a number of clues, one of which is a superseding indictment that came out against WikiLeaks last year that references my old website for Project PM, Echelon 2, without actually naming it or naming me.
But they do point out in the superseding indictment, one of the central facts of the case is that Assange, or was it Sabu, Hector Monsegur, who was the FBI, the guy the FBI turned, who was one of the anonymous hackers involved in that Strapper hack I went down for the first time, they've been using that Strapper hack for years to try to get Assange.
They used it successfully to get Jeremy Hammond, another of our hackers, and to get me.
In the superseding indictment, they point to Hector Monsegur having approached Assange and asked for targets, you know, intelligence contractors.
Assange sends him a link to, you know, what the DOJ refers to as a website that lists some of these firms, and that was our website.
The fact that they don't mention that website is important for several reasons.
It does show that they know where they're vulnerable.
They don't want to go into some of these issues, the DOJ, that's where I hope to hit them back on.
And it also, of course, does show that they would prefer not to have me at large, given the things that they know I have on all this.
So that may or may not be exactly what they'll charge me with, something involving that.
Obviously, they prefer to use pretexts that confuse the issue.
For instance, this arrest in May for holding part of a banner, you know, I was the only one of the people who made the banner and so forth that actually got arrested for it.
So it's hard to say.
I've done a number of things that have countered the FBI's operations in the U.S. in the last couple years.
For instance, helping to—helping other groups, organizations, particularly black activists who have been pursued by the FBI or intimidated by them or an agent stops by their house, leaves a card, tries to get a younger member to—tries to intimidate them into cooperating.
And I've intervened at their request on a couple of occasions similar to that.
So that could be it, too.
There's no way of telling.
It goes back—it all tracks back to my first grand jury sealed search warrants from early 2011 after H.P. Gary that cite me simply calling in-game systems repellents.
That kind of shows you what it is that they can start an investigation based on, which is almost like anything at all.
I mean, in a few ways, it sounds like they're trying to break the back of the First Amendment's protection of freedom of the press and using you as the excuse to do it, in a sense, right?
Like they prosecuted you for posting a link.
That was unprecedented, right?
Absolutely.
It was.
And luckily, it's a good thing they did that because by doing that and preventing Stratfor and all that, going into those things, they really made it easy for us—I mean, not easy, but viable for us to point to the press.
I mean, even New York Times, Time Magazine, U.S. News—all these mainstream outlets eventually got the point.
It took a lot of work on our part to show them, but they did get the point that this was about the things we had revealed and continued to investigate for the last year that they had done, that the DOJ had done, FBI had done, their firms had come free from us.
And you mentioned in Assange's superseding indictment there where they're trying to claim that him encouraging Manning to break into military computers and get secrets amounts to not journalism, but a co-conspirator relationship with a hacker, trying to essentially redefine Assange as a leaker rather than a leaky, when that's all he is, is he's a publisher.
But they're trying to twist it and make it where he's a co-conspirator in the hack here.
And then it sounds like you're saying that in that same indictment, they refer to him telling the FBI informant, Assange telling an FBI informant to go look at your website for an example of the names of firms that he might want to target, and saying that that amounts to conspiring with or attempting to criminally conspire with this FBI informant to help him somehow break the law, hack a thing, whatever.
But if you just change the names out and it's James Risen or it's Charlie Savage or some scumbag like that, then this would be what you would consider their job, right?
Telling their sources, hey, you should go and get me some data, man, and I'm going to publish it in the Times.
It's the exact same thing.
And those examples you just cited.
So we have much, much worse examples of that kind of thing being done or things that go well beyond that being done without any, much of even a pretext of journalistic necessity being done by other journalists for mainstream outlets, not just in general, but with these same people.
So to give you an example of one of the most egregious incidents that has not yet been reported on anywhere, I've been trying to put it out for years, my Twitter accounts keep getting banned.
It'll go in my memoirs, which will come out next year, but not a lot of outlets are going to be happy to, going to be happy to promote that book.
But Adrian Chen, who wrote for, worked for Gawker back in the day, back in the time when I was mostly active, him and John Cook, who later became the first editor of The Intercept, which is odd, they did a number of things that we have access to because they were in Jeremy Hammond's criminal discovery, for instance, as if their interactions with Sabu, Hector Monscou, the exact same person.
I'm sorry, let me, let me stop you for just one second there.
I want to clarify for people, there's a great libertarian activist named Jeremy R. Hammond who wrote the book Obstacle to Peace about America's role in the Israel-Palestine conflict and all that.
Totally different Jeremy Hammond.
That's why he uses the R, I'm pretty sure, so that we know the difference.
But you're talking about Jeremy Hammond, the hacker, who was, I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but was busted by this rat, Sabu, right?
He was entrapped, essentially.
I mean, the Stratfor hack was under the control of the FBI before it was passed on to Hammond.
That's documented.
It's just one of those things that just doesn't matter these days.
But anyway, so, and so Sabu, Hector Monscou, that same snitch, was also in talks over the, you know, over the course of a year, off and on, with, you know, with Adrian Chen and others at Gawker and other journalists as well.
And we have transcripts showing Adrian Chen asking Sabu to give them stolen materials that supposedly they'd hacked from a UK outlet that they actually didn't have.
Of course, Adrian Chen did not realize that he was talking to someone using an FBI laptop at that point, and so was willing to say, like, you know, things like, we'll give you Sabu at Gawker.com, we'll give you server space.
We'll make a donation to Mustafa Abbasam's, which is better known as TFLOW, to his legal defense in exchange for this.
We have Adrian Chen doing a number of things.
Oh, and also encouraging me earlier in Gchats, that are also part of my discovery, encouraging me to dox Pentagon officials, to dox those at Quantico who were guarding Chelsea Manning at the time, when we were simply at that point, our operation was just to call them and ask them why you're doing this.
I mean, so we have people who have gone on to work for the New York Times, New Yorker, all kinds of outlets, who attacked WikiLeaks and Anonymous and me, like, for instance, and Jeremy Hammond, went to fundraisers for us and wrote articles for Gawker, like making fun of the fundraiser while I was under a gag order in prison, claiming over and over again, or this sort of shifting claim that I had made up a kidnapping in Mexico, which Adrian Chen started this claim, it was later repeated by the New York Times and the Atlantic and so forth.
And then also doing things that would be absolutely considered statute violations, had any of us done them.
And I've been looking into this for a couple of years and asking about it, asking his editors, asking John Cook.
I mean, of course, John Cook was editor at the Intercept, which I won a National Magazine Award for.
So you would think I would be able to answer a question.
And it's become very clear that they have been, from that and other things, including some of the articles they've done, that they did back then, where they dealt with FBI cooperators and cited them as credible sources on things, they have been working in tandem with the FBI against this movement for years.
And because this implicates and is embarrassing for a number of outlets who publish their stuff, who have published other things that they wrote that were demonstrably false, this is something that has been very difficult to bring into the public consciousness.
And unfortunately, because of a lot of the conflicts that have played out in the last several years within the transparency movement, it's been difficult for me to convince those who have more pull than I do, more of a voice, since I've been, again, I've been pretty well silenced effectively the last few years, to run with this.
And so it's been difficult.
And the Adrian Chin example I'm citing, this is one of many that are documented.
They're documented by the DOJ, like transcripts from the DOJ that no one involved in this has been willing to explain and that everyone involved has cut their mouth shut about.
Some of this stuff came out in 2013, 2014.
Del Cameron then wrote a great article about Adrian Chin and his connotations with Sabu and his attempts to basically buy stolen materials from underage Britons, stolen materials supposedly taken from a press outlet.
And you can look at that article and then look at the articles that Adrian Chin continued to write for The Nation and for New Yorker and so forth and stuff he put out, and you can see there's something very, very wrong here.
So that's the best—that's another element of this that I've been trying for years to get it—to make this clear that this is one of the major narrative points of all this that need to be shown, that the mainstream media outlets, and particularly reporters who are friendly with the intelligence community and FBI, can do whatever they want whatsoever in opposition to journalism, like engaging in disinformation, engaging in libel, engaging in espionage for the U.S., whatever.
And on the contrary, in the very same cases with the very same people involved, those of us who are dissidents, who are regarded as enemies of the DOJ and FBI and so forth, or Palantir, Bank of America, whoever has more pull, we can obviously—they will cast about for things to charge us with and then lie about them if they can't find anything.
And this is all the more worrisome because something very much like the Stratford deal and something very similar to the things that played out back then is going on right now as we speak, and we have a four-hour recording of an FBI meeting in Los Angeles late last year that I made public a few days ago in entirety, plus other documents including FBI correspondence with some of their assets, assets corresponding with each other, that demonstrate part of what we've come across here, which is that there is an ongoing FBI operation that's very dangerous and rather insidious and has been—that we now have enough about, we now know enough about and can document enough about to really move forward with it and start explaining what people need to look out for and what comes next.
And so I hope to be able, to the extent possible, summarize a little bit more of that in a moment.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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Now, is that the Project Schwartz?
So Project Schwartz, just like Project Hastings, both of them named for dead colleagues of mine.
Project Schwartz incidentally was involved with Project PM a little bit.
He helped us investigate persona management back in 2011.
That's Aaron Schwartz, the guy that invented RSS feeds and was hounded to death by federal officials and killed himself.
He's a vastly prolific activist.
Like me, he was trying to ring the alarms about Stratfor, about Trapwire, only to be drowned out by other individuals like Adrian Chen and Noah Shackman, who's now the editor of Daily Beast.
Yeah, he was very heavily involved in a lot of things, on the right side of things, and yes, was hounded for that reason and others, ultimately killed himself.
If you haven't seen it, you have to see the documentary, The Internet's Own Boy.
And if you're not an anti-government extremist on the end of that, you got no soul.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that's another thing that some of these issues are very saddening.
It wears on one, and it's taken a toll on me to have to spend the last few years investigating all these nuances because very few people come out looking good.
Hastings was a friend of mine too, as I think you know.
Yes.
And on that subject, I have not been a truther on his death just because his brother did this interview with a reporter explaining that he really believed that it was a suicide, and that he was even in LA to help Michael at the time because he was having some kind of crisis.
And I thought, well, who could argue with that?
But obviously, and it's in his book, there's no question about it, the SAS officer embedded with Stanley McChrystal's team there, outright, not joking around, threatened to murder Hastings if he published the stuff that he did publish in Rolling Stone that got McChrystal fired.
So, that's not nothing.
And of course, a single car accident on its face is mysterious.
So, I wonder if you have an opinion about what happened to him.
Yeah, my chief concern with Hastings, who was a big major press critic, that's actually how we met back in 2010 or 2009, I think 2010.
My concern with Hastings' situation there is that the FBI was asked, you know, by FOIA requests and so forth, like, you know, right after Hastings died, you know, did you have files on him, blah, blah.
They lied several times.
They claimed they had no documents.
Then a few months later, okay, we have a couple.
And at the same time, like at my gag order hearing, which is, the transcript is public now, they mentioned Michael Hastings in that gag order hearing as one of the people I had spoken to on the phone and, you know, in the weeks prior and admitted, the FBI agent Robert Smith admitted that he had documents, notes compiled from that conversation and the recording of the conversation.
So, right there is another example of something they have not, that they failed to provide the FOIA requests.
The fact that Mueller himself, according to a FBI press person in the LA office, you know, their communications about this FOIA request were later made public as well.
The fact that Mueller was, by their account, calling over there to ask about this and so forth, gives some, I think, some weight to how important it is that this actually be gotten right.
And so, Hastings and the public, the public that he served, ultimately was not well served by the way in which the press kind of initially accepted, like, oh, the FBI says they weren't investigating him, so he must be silly and crazy to have thought that.
Beyond that, Hastings was a partner of mine in a lot of things, including in OpTunisia.
He was, he was all of my emails, which were all from discovery, you know, in my discovery and so forth, surveilled, taken by the FBI.
He was, you know, he mentioned about to be, about to do an article on me, one of his last tweets.
The idea that, that everyone who donated to my legal defense fund was, was ID'd by the FBI in this, in this weird subpoena that they later got sued for, and that Michael Hastings was not under, you know, being looked at, despite being named in a Vanity Fair article I wrote, as someone involved in Project PM, is ludicrous.
And again, but more to the point, we can already prove that they lied.
So that, that's, that's the main thing.
You know, it's, it's really not my job, as I see it, to anticipate what is plausible and what's not and all that, and to speculate about...
That's, that's totally fair.
But, but, but it is very important.
It's absolutely important that, that we find, find out why the FBI lied, and what that, you know, because that's, they're lying about a dead journalist, who, who we know they had documents on, and that's a, that should be a big deal.
And that's, and I'm concerned that a lot of the press doesn't realize that.
Anyway, so, but anyway, so Project Schwartz, it was, the intent of it, yes, there was two things that I was concerned about, looking back the last 10 years.
The two things that made it impossible for us to make good use of the sacrifices that people like Schwartz, Hastings, and all my volunteers, and people, other people who were doing these investigations, two things that make it impossible for us to make use of these sacrifices, of these materials, for the good of the public.
And those things were press malfeasance, and the ongoing, and that's what Project Hastings is intended to turn documents and push back on, and the very, very little understood, but, but well-documented tendency of the FBI to deploy different sorts of assets, some who know their assets and have correspondence with their FBI handlers and all that, some of whom are compensated against transparency activists and, and, you know, black activists and whoever the FBI traditionally goes after, in ways that are just vastly illegal, indefensible, and which ultimately make it impossible to be an effective activist without finding yourself sort of drowning in a sea of misinformation, targeting, harassment, and so forth.
And so Project Schwartz is intended to document the ones we know about, because a lot of, a lot of these assets are unstable, and they, they, you know, not that I'm not, but they're stable in a different way.
And they do tend to get in fights with their handlers, with each other, and they leak out their own communications.
And so we have 105 megabytes, if people go to my PINS tweet on my Twitter page there at Barrett B, you can download it right there, communications between people who are still actively involved in some of these things, who are still actively involved in what is supposedly anonymous right now, like Neil Reithauser, talking to their FBI handlers about those of us they targeted 10 years ago.
So that leads into this, this ongoing issue, which is the best way I can summarize it is as such.
Recently, there was a hack done of Epic, which is a server, you know, a company that, you know, serves as a server for a lot of far-right groups, and neo-Nazi groups, and so forth, and many other things.
Besides that, it is inarguable that the hack occurred.
But the, the, the way that many press outlets, including some who have been told otherwise, and shown otherwise, have presented this, and the way that some of those involved have presented it, is not at all what actually happened.
This hack was, was ongoing, it was done by someone, an individual, who's known to us, I'll just put it that way.
It was passed on, as these things often are, to another person named Aubrey Cottle, who goes by the name Kurt Tanner, who has been promoted in recent weeks by Vice, and by a weird UK outlet called Tech Monitor, as the founder of Anonymous, who was, who was motivated by his support for Black Lives Matter, and so forth.
And this hack, and that we need not, you know, worry about what happened with this hack, what may have been obfuscated, so forth, because, you know, he goes way back, blah, blah.
In reality, this person, Aubrey Cottle, is an admitted, longtime FBI cooperator, cooperated with Interpol, and cooperated with the Canadian police and intelligence community, again, by his own admission, over the last 10 years.
Some people have been tracking him for a while, documenting these, taking screenshots, so forth.
He is also someone who has hosted child pornography, by his own admission.
He claims it was for a, for Interpol, you know, to, to, to entrap pedophiles, and so forth.
That's another issue, you know.
The Atlantic article that came out last year, that was written by Dale Barron, who was, actually did a pretty good job in general of writing about these things in Anonymous, and who did document, you know, Aubrey Cottle's known relationship with the authorities.
That was the first article that kind of helped to present this, this sudden new claim, that this guy is a founder of Anonymous, or is an activist, or anything.
And so, working with Aubrey Cottle on this, it's not just that Aubrey Cottle has, in the past, admitted over and over again to, and changes stories on these things a number of times, it is that he is openly working with Neil Rawhouser, who is the individual, the FBI cooperator, and former Infra Guard member, Infra Guard is the FBI private sector partnership, who targeted me and others, and who helped to get me denied bond 10 years ago, over swatting attacks that he had done, that I had nothing to do with.
That guy is his handler, or one of his handlers, and they have not even hid this very well, or much at all, in fact.
And you demonstrate all of this on your Twitter feed, or what?
Yes, I already, I already, yeah, so the, so the, all the raw materials, all these things I'm telling you right now, are all, they're all things that others involved, like Laurie Love, other individuals who've been involved in this movement, other journalists, Gabriella Coleman, who has documented all of us for a long time.
These are all things that they're aware of, have been made aware of in the last few weeks, and the things we put out, we've shown the materials on.
So, so, yeah, so I'm, when I go after someone, or when I, on the very rare occasion, I call someone an FBI co-operator, or accuse someone who's supposedly an activist, or something else, it's not, it's not until I've done several months of pretty intensive research with dozens of other people, and this is, this is one of those rare cases.
Well, now, do you have a full article about it of your own?
Because the Twitter thread is wandering.
There's a couple of articles that one of my associates, who goes by Karma61, has written, has put up on some posts that go into, that document Aubrey Cottle's, his tweets in the past, screenshots of his, of his racist, anti-Semitic posts over the last 10 years, including just a year ago, and his FBI stuff, and so forth.
So that's, that is, that's available on there.
It's linked to in some of these threads.
And I'll, you know, when this interview goes up, I will, when I post this link, I will below that post the most useful links to the best compiled documents on this.
But this stuff, a lot of this stuff has been circulating for more than a year, in some cases.
And some of it, I just became aware of the situation more recently, and I've only had a few months to investigate this, and there's other individuals involved.
But in that time, we've been able to compile what's already out there, and then, and then interview people close to them, people who were taken in, you know, by Cottle and these other people, and then review this FBI recording that kind of helps to fill in some of the gaps.
And so we, we have, we don't know everything, obviously.
We don't know the level of other individuals' complicity in some of these things.
But we do know, like, I do know from talking to other people who've been my colleagues for 10 years, like Greg Housh, who I used to trust, you know, with my life, we have determined that some of these individuals are not talking, not answering questions about this, and know perfectly well what's happening.
And so this is, again, this is something that, this has been a major, unprecedented situation, very difficult for everybody involved.
But it is something that is, is vastly well compiled and documented, which is one of the reasons why a number of the things that have been happening last week or so have happened.
It's a strong case, it's just something that we, and yes, we do have some articles.
And some of the things I'm mentioning, again, we're in the Atlantic article that J.R. Barron wrote last year, you can, I mean, he goes into Aubrey Cottle's early relationship with the authorities in Canada.
I don't think he has, you know, he was obviously given a partial version of that, definitely incomplete version, and relied, you know, by necessity on things he was told by Cottle and a few others.
But, and he's also, Dale Barron has also been good enough to kind of take back some of his, the impression he gave, which is that Aubrey Cottle was the founder of Anonymous in some of his tweets regarding that article.
But so what I'm saying is that these are, everything I'm saying here is, has already been, is already available to anyone who wants to verify them.
It's just not very well compiled.
That's one of my reasons of coming on here, actually to come on today, is because there needs to be a comprehensive sort of overview of this.
And there are some other articles forthcoming.
But right now, unfortunately, we're at this early stage where a lot of individuals involved are embarrassed or, or whatever, perhaps have acted wrongly, have not, you know, not properly looked at warnings that some of us have given them.
And other, some of the media outlets involved are understandably, as usual, reluctant to, to go into this, given how embarrassing this, this is to a journalist to, you know, present someone as the founder of Anonymous, blah, blah.
So there's a couple of places on your Twitter feed where people are saying, how dare you call me a fed, I'm not a fed, screw you.
And then you say, but I didn't say you were fed.
I just said that your friend was, this kind of thing.
This is very common.
This is a very common, and some of it just is pretty typical, like people's reactions to any kind of accusation, which is to kind of unconsciously or consciously obfuscate it to claim, you know, if I say, oh, look, you're, you've been used by an FBI cooperator.
Like, I'm not the head of the FBI.
How dare you?
I mean, this, unfortunately, that works among a certain demographic.
It doesn't really convince, it doesn't really convince anyone who looks very hard at the situation.
But it does help to create the illusion to people just sort of passing by, looking at this, well, briefly, that this is drama or everybody's accusing everyone of everything.
And so it's a circular firing squad.
And that is very much why people like Neil Rawhouser, who's one of the key elements of this, and Elizabeth Shaw, goes by Libby in Philly on Twitter, and is his other handler.
That's why they do this.
They have a, Libby Shaw, at the very least, is trained, well-trained.
That's the assessment of a lot of people who have documented her professionally for the last few years.
Neil Rawhouser, less so.
But both of them have a number of strategies, tactics that they use.
And one of them is to make counter accusations, sometimes before they do something, so that anyone coming to look at it is like, oh, this is all, it's all in the weeds, you know.
And of course, it's in the weeds where these things happen.
And that's one of the big difficulties of the last 10 years in documenting and warning about these threats, because they, the intelligence community and private contractors, and those who do this for ideological reasons or whatever, or because they're being used by someone else, you know, they don't need to maintain a audience or a support network of people who really want facts and are very careful.
That's not who the people that they tend to cultivate, nor could they.
And so it makes sense for them to do what, you know, Libby and Neil Rawhouser and Curt have done in the last few months in particular, which is to claim over and over again that me and my associates have threatened to murder them, or hired a, or did a murder for hire plot, or that I was just being set up this murder for hire plot by somebody else.
I mean, just on and on and on.
Because it does ultimately make it harder for us, those of us who are involved in this on my end, to do our job, which is to bring clarity to the situation.
And it works just to an extent.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, I mean, famously, there's the COINTELPRO, counterintelligence program, unleashed mostly on the left, but not entirely.
Also against the Klan and all other different groups, I guess, across the country back in the days of J. Edgar Hoover.
And there's been, you know, the most powerful kind of, you know, remnant of that sort of thing has been the frame up jobs against Muslims in America over the last 20 years, which, you know, speaking of the intercept, it's good old, oh man, it's on the tip of my tongue.
Aaron, what's his name?
The good guy that wrote the terror factory.
Trevor Aronson.
That's what it is.
Trevor Aronson wrote the terror factory about the FBI.
And I think it's, we're up to like 350, you know, innocent idiots entrapped into saying they love Osama or some kind of hitting a button on a fake bomb or this kind of thing.
But now, so the kind of deal you're talking about here, it's a different sector being targeted, but it's the same targeters.
And I get questions a lot from people, including at an event I did last weekend.
You know, how do you, Chuck D said, you know, you cannot run and hide, but it shouldn't be suicide to try to be an activist.
Right.
So how do people, you know, engage in especially alternative politics outside of the two major parties, for example, and protect themselves from being entrapped or being, you know, framed up or having their new best friend, get them in trouble on, you know, some FBI thing, because it can be pretty intimidating when like, let's face it.
These are the Waco killers and the FBI, the department of justice are some of the most ruthless people on the planet.
And as you can testify firsthand, but we've seen the damage that they can do.
So what's the average guy to do if he wants to become an activist, but protect himself from getting hit by the feds like this?
It's vast.
First of all, the first thing to do is to acknowledge that this is vastly difficult.
And to acknowledge that contrary to the assumptions of a lot of Americans in the last 20 years, not everyone is going to be able to assess a complex situation as quickly as they might like to.
And not everyone is clever enough to be immune to tactics that are used to confuse.
And they've been cultivated and developed partially openly and partially in secret by intelligence communities and police groups for a hundred years, starting with the, with the, under the czar.
You know, that's the first thing.
And once someone acknowledges that, then they're ready to listen, listen and, and, and read and start assessing who is and who is not a credible source in the situation.
So to toot my own horn, like I would cite myself as someone who did, you know, face 105 years in prison.
I've been a journalist for a long time.
I have, I will answer any question about any of these things.
There's never a point in which I'm going to like to, to refuse to answer for my actions.
That is in contrast to like, you know, some of the individuals, you know, involved who have been defending for defending these people on the other side.
So that doesn't help everyone.
Obviously you can't just come to Barrett Brown and be like, Hey, tell me, you know, your God, King Barrett Brown, tell us what, what to believe.
You know, that's, that's not a viable strategy.
What, what the real solution is beyond that is to start documenting as this is what Project Schwartz was intended to do.
And we've been disrupted a bit while we pursue this to document and present the, the backstory, the, the doc, you know, the materials that we have on individual cooperators and how they, how they do these things.
And that way, when someone else and what their, you know, what their fake, you know, what their puppet accounts are and so forth, what their names they use and make that just like we did Project Piana, make that the first search result, you know, that people are going to find when they encounter these people.
So Neil Rauhauser, for instance, has worked, has successfully infiltrated like groups of, of, of, you know, working groups of reporters who, you know, get together on Signal or whatever, and they kind of hash things out and investigate, you know, things that need to be investigated because Rauhauser and so forth are very good at concealing their background and obfuscating things.
You know, no, no one was the wiser.
Now, had there been somewhere where they could Google Neil Rauhauser, and they find a page that we have showing his FBI correspondence that he himself actually leaks to me a couple years ago, incidentally, this is a great example of how we get these things, because he was hoping I would help him go after his former handler.
But of course, in fact, what I'm actually gonna do is go after everybody.
You know, if they had found those, you know, a summary, like, here's Rauhauser, here's his admissions to not me claiming it, not someone anonymous on the internet claiming it, here is his admissions and bragging about his FBI cooperating stuff.
And here's him, you know, putting out some information, here's a seven contradictory versions of the same events, blah, blah.
That would make it a lot easier for a journalist or for an activist to know this is the person I'm dealing with.
And that would help to immunize people who are at risk, or who might actually become, as often happens, a vector for disinformation, or for, you know, harassment of actual activists and actual journalists.
It'd help them to assess who this person is, and who are the people that they're telling me to go after.
Now, that also, you know, another example is there's FBI agents who they come up oftentimes, they're the ones who, you know, they show up as handlers of people who are investigating going after activist groups.
And so there's a number of people who approached me about different, you know, names, FBI agents who are some, some of them retired since the last 10 years, some of whom are very active.
And, you know, if they if they happen to know to come ask me or ask somebody else who follows these things, investigates them, then sure, we can point out, look, look, here's here's this, here's this modus operandi.
Here's what I'll probably try to tell you.
Here's, you know, here's here I'm telling the same person this like 10 years ago.
Here's, you know, what his co-operators have done.
And so here's how you can respond to here's some resources that will give you information, access to other other groups that can help you and blah, blah.
That would that would go a long way towards eradicating the FBI's ability to do what it's successfully done over and over again for the last 50 years, which it will do for forever if we let it, which is to disrupt any movement that opposes the whims of its individual members.
And that's what we're trying to do.
And unfortunately, because we've been trying to do that, because that was our aim, that Aubrey Cottle person, this FBI co-operator and his other people came into were brought into my groups late last year, around the time this FBI meeting in LA, and started talking about hacks.
And, you know, we were all kind of nervous about this.
And then in July, after I got out of the internment center here in the UK, and so forth, and got the FBI recording and so forth, in July, we caught this person's girlfriend, Aubrey Cottle's girlfriend, Libby Shaw, Elizabeth Shaw, claiming privately to people in my circles that we had been overseeing these hacks on Pertaner's server.
Whereas in fact, Pertaner has bragged about these decks to Vice magazine and so forth over and over again, and we don't engage in hacks.
And we're, you know, we're all journalists.
So this is a great example of because of that, because we were now being set up by someone who's working with Neil Rauhauser, and whose server was provided by Neil Rauhauser.
And Neil Rauhauser, having been someone who has successfully set up activists, including me before in ways that are very documented, we had no choice but to basically start shutting down our groups, go to our person at Yale Law, make them aware of these things, and start researching everything we could about this investigating.
And, and so that's an example of the great thing about Project Schwartz, the great thing about what I do is that we don't have to go out looking for FBI cooperators and FBI agents.
They come to us, and then it comes down to are we more clever than they are?
Are we luckier than they are?
And sometimes we are, in this case, we are.
And my hope is that us having been lucky enough to be able to prevent, say, members of black activist groups in the US or indigenous leaders in Canada who were in my signal channels, or were, us having been lucky enough to have determined Aubrey Cottle was logging these channels, and then bragged about giving to the FBI and bragged about those other things, that now that we can impress upon the public and elements of the press and the activist community that's still at risk, that this is serious stuff.
That's not drama.
And that everyone needs to start pushing back against the FBI and its cooperators, and that starts with knowing who they are, determining, you know, who can be trusted to tell you that, and basing that trust on what documents they can present you, what admissions by those involved they can give you, basically sorting out what makes sense, what's credible, and what isn't.
That's obviously, that's obviously a tall order.
That would be a great thing for the entire Western world at this point to start working on those issues.
You know, is the New York Times automatically credible?
Is this person I met on the internet automatically credible?
Is a, you know, is a talking head kind of like icon of the activist community automatically credible?
No, never.
Neither am I. Credibility only comes from a difficult and ongoing process of assessing who has been right, who maintains the same narrative over time, and who doesn't.
And so that's what people need to do.
All right, man, to wrap up here, I got projectpm.wiki, and where else should people be looking?
So for right now, there's several of us, you know, I'm kind of on the face of this effort because I'm used to taking fire.
So my Twitter account, Barabrias, is still mainly where a lot of these things are being compiled.
I'll be doing another interview with Counterpunch in the coming days, and there probably will be a couple articles and more mainstream outlets in the next week or two.
But so the Barrett B, I think, underscore, no, just Barrett B Twitter account is where people can now find, currently find material they need, and the material that we'll keep posting.
Summaries, also, you know, material put out by other researchers, and the individuals who will be coming forward now, now that we've kind of taken taken the wind out of the sails of the FBI and their cooperators, and who are now more willing to come forward.
You know, I should, I should just note that the things that are done to those of us who stumble upon these plots and expose them are pretty, pretty difficult to contend with.
They weigh on one.
They endanger one's immediate associates, so forth.
And so for that reason, a lot of people, totally understandably, who are on this, who are helping us to investigate, have been waiting to come forward.
That will start to change in the next few days, and you'll, and people will see more people, individuals they trust who have been prosecuted, who have refused to cooperate, refused to endanger others by setting precedent, letting the DOJ set precedents.
They will come forward more openly about this, and so those, as they do, all that will be, can be found on my Twitter account there.
Unfortunately, I don't have my Medium page anymore.
Metropolitan Police has my devices.
I can't post there.
I don't have the same ability to put out things as I used to, so that will have to do, that Twitter account, until it gets deleted like the others.
All right, so check it out, you guys.
That's Barrett Brown, Barrett B on Twitter, and that's two R's and two T's in Barrett.
Thanks again for your time.
Great to talk to you, Barrett.
Thank you very much for having me on.
The Scott Horton Show and Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
