All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest on the show is Barrett Brown.
He's a contributor to Vanity Fair, The Huffington Post, Skeptic, Truth Slant, and The Onion.
His work has appeared in dozens of other publications and outlets.
He serves as director of communications for Enlighten the Vote, a political action committee dedicated to the advancement of the Establishment Clause.
He is the author of Flock of Dodos, Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design, and The Easter Bunny, and the upcoming book, Hot, Fat, and Clouded, The Amazing and Amusing Failures of America's Chattering Class.
Hey, that's a good title.
Hey, welcome to the show.
How's it going, Barrett?
Going very well, thank you.
Very good to have you back here.
Now, I got to attempt to find this article I had out here in a minute.
It was called How Barrett Brown Helped Overthrow Tunisia's Government, is what it's called.
It's at dmagazine.com.
Barrett Brown is anonymous.
You're anonymous?
Well, that title right there is a little much.
I mean, you know, I participated in operations to assist Tunisians in building their own government.
You know, I came out as anonymous a couple months ago, right when Tunisia started.
I'd been involved in the culture and observed the culture for a number of years before that, and was in communication with other people within the culture, and ran some, was involved in some sort of prankish activities back in the day.
But yeah, for the past couple of months, I've been much more actively involved, and, you know, I think we've accomplished a good amount.
I think that, you know, had we not done it, no one would have done these things, you know, to a certain degree.
I mean, in terms of going after these companies that are associated with H.P. Gary and Booz Allen Hamilton, the companies that are engaged in persona management software, deploying that for possibly malicious ends, I mean, that's something that's very important that sort of came out of a lot of this in the past couple months, and which I'm very glad we're pursuing.
Okay, so, yeah, tell us a little bit about the background of anonymous.
I guess, I don't want you to give away your friends, anything that would help the bad guys get at you or anything, but if you could give me maybe, you know, ballpark of numbers and, you know, how it is that you came to be sort of the spokesman for the group?
Well, it's hard to say who's anonymous and who isn't.
There's different definitions.
If you go by the definition of anyone who participates in anonymous actions, you still have to define what anonymous actions really constitute, and that's kind of a toughie.
I mean, obviously, you can say that anonymous did H.P. Gary and Tunisia and Egypt and, you know, Operation Payback and all those things.
So, I mean, in terms of people who have showed up for protests as a function of channelogy, you have hundreds of thousands.
In terms of people who identify with the culture, millions.
In terms of people who are actively, you know, regularly involved in our activity, that's hard to say.
I mean, you might say thousands, but it's hard to pin down.
And I've sort of...
Well, it's sort of like a couple of chat rooms, a couple of websites where everybody kind of congregates, maybe.
Yeah, you've got some infrastructure.
You've got some IRC chat.
You've got some websites.
You've got some informal networks of people who either know each other or know each other online.
And that's really an ebb and flow of relationships, what anonymous is, I think.
I think it's defined by the relationships that exist within it at any given point, in terms of its functioning.
You know, there's obviously no official...
You know, there's no top-down official organization to it.
It's sort of a procedural thing.
It's a process rather than a system.
Right.
Well, you know, it seems to me like most of this technology that we have these days is so integral to most of our lives, at least at the outset, was really pushed by the government, subsidized by the government, because they wanted to be able to keep tabs on us all better.
And of course, you know, the Pentagon wants to be able to keep tabs on the whole world better.
And so it seems to me that having groups like Anonymous, having, you know, blogs and podcasts and all these type things are, you know, basically amount to an attempt to swing that double-edged sword back at power that would push this technology in order to control us and to fight back in ways that, you know, can be effective with, you know, their tools, really.
The extent to which the government did get involved early on, obviously they created DARPANet, but I mean, the extent to which even afterwards in the programming industry, the extent to which they recruited and facilitated and intervened is, I mean, that's known, not secret or anything like that.
It's just not very well known.
I mean, what we're finding out right now as we pursue Operation Metal Gear, which we're working on for about a week now, a little over a week, is that you have dozens of companies which are used to produce one part of a larger whole in terms of persona management, in terms of gathering information, collecting all data points and organizing it in a way that's useful for whoever.
We also know that they are allowed to use, you know, they're generally allowed to use this stuff for themselves, and we also know, obviously, from the H.P. Gary thing, that they will use these techniques, you know, primitive versions of these techniques against their enemies for profit or for whatever.
So that's, I think, something that needs to be considered a little bit more than it has.
The H.P. Gary thing kind of played out like a soap opera.
It was very amusing, but there's really a lot of issues here that need to be explored more by the media, and obviously we're trying to make that happen, but it's an uphill battle.
All right, well, so now tell me about Tunisia, because I think it's, you know, perhaps in some circles beginning to be kind of fabled that WikiLeaks and or Anonymous had anything to do with the revolution there, but I don't know if there's, if people are really familiar with the actual facts.
Can you fill us in?
Well, Tunisia themselves revolted.
I mean, that started, obviously, the proximate cause was that fruit vendor who was hassled by the corrupt police force, and he set himself on fire in protest.
And then, obviously, there was a wellspring of anger from Ben Ali's regime, and that manifested itself.
And then so early on, you know, Anonymous has participants who are Tunisian, whether they live in the country or elsewhere, you know, around the region, and they sort of, you know, let us know, hey, this is going on.
And then some people within Anonymous hacked or took down via DDoS several non-essential government websites and replaced at least one with the message to the Tunisian people saying, if you revolt, you know, if this goes where we think it's headed, you know, we'll support you.
We'll provide you with tools.
We'll try to get the media on this, et cetera, et cetera.
And we went, we went, but what about that?
We worked with Tunisians directly in our IRC rooms and other venues.
We were in contact with a lot of people who were either just citizens who were just revolting all of a sudden or people who were a little bit more organized in terms of revolting.
And we did our part, I think.
I mean, we helped a lot, I think, Tunisia and elsewhere.
I think we, I think it helps to show the extent to which people from around the world can actually intervene and get involved and do something important for another population.
So, I mean, so that's what happened.
I mean, and again, the credit goes to the people, the populations involved.
I mean, we did do what we could to help.
I hope it was significant, and I hope that this is a harbinger of things to come.
Because it can be.
Yeah, yeah, me too.
I'll tell you, I mean, I think it certainly started out looking like 1989 over there in the Middle East, and it's certainly not over yet.
There's still a massive protest movement, and in some cases revolutions raging across the region.
And, you know, yeah, certainly from what I read about it, you know, the people of Tunisia had spent basically two months from since November talking about the WikiLeaks and the corruption of their government described in the WikiLeaks.
And that was sort of the background to the whole thing flaming up when the guy set himself on fire and everybody kind of flipped out.
This is what everybody had been talking about for two months leading up to that event.
Yeah, I mean, the WikiLeaks release, I mean, we'll never know to what extent that contributed, but I think it did contribute.
I think that's easy to show.
So, in a more broad sense, this was an internet-filled revolution.
And there have been a lot of people, such as Evgeny Morozov, contributing editor of Foreign Policy, who's been arguing for quite a while now that the internet is actually more helpful to dictators than it is to the subject population.
I think the fact that Mubarak turned off the internet in Egypt, I think helps to kind of show that's not how they see it.
I think also the fact that people were, I mean, a lot of people don't realize what happened and how it happened because they weren't in those IRC channels watching 16-year-old Tunisian girls help translate medical pamphlets.
Or people, you know, I mean, you had to see it to understand what happened.
And hopefully that, you know, we really haven't had time to, you know, to provide a lot of details because we really didn't do the H.P. Garriott thing.
But, I mean, at some point I think people will realize that, yeah, the internet was the common factor here.
The internet really is showing itself to have a lot of potential for the cause of human liberty.
And for potential otherwise, of course, as we're staying with this Metal Gear stuff, some of these companies and governments obviously have the potential to be a surveillance tool, a tool of entrapment for humanity.
But it also has these great positives we have to take advantage of.
Well, now, I read a little bit.
I've got to tell you, I'm no kind of computer genius.
I keep them around me as much as I can because I need you guys.
But I'm really not very well-versed in this kind of thing.
Oh, I'm not either.
I'm not a hacker.
I can't even code, really.
Oh, okay.
There you go.
Well, I can make Windows 7 go more or less, you know.
But I've got to restart it pretty often.
Anyway.
But the thing is, I'm sure you know more about this than me.
When Mubarak shut off the internet in Egypt, he really tried to do that.
But then I read a little bit saying that Anonymous figured out ways to kind of set up, bypass, proxy this, that, and the other thing that allowed people to get back online.
Can you elaborate on that a bit?
A number of parties, including Telecomics and some other networks of people and some more established entities, were doing this as well.
I mean, people, what we were doing was using ham radios.
Some people were providing dial-up connections just to get you back on the internet by the phone and free services in that regard.
And then Anonymous did the same thing and also provided some encryption tools and just some other nice little toys that any population should have.
So, I mean, it was a massive effort.
It was a massive, decentralized, undirected effort on the part of a number of parties, including Anonymous.
And, again, I think it's one of those things that I've seen that has just further convinced me of the extent to which the internet is not yet being used for its potential.
There's a lag between the advent of the technology and the point at which people realize what it can be used for.
And I think that lag period is over in a lot of respects.
All right, everybody.
It's Barrett Brown, contributor to Vanity Fair, The Huffington Post, Skeptic, True Slant, and The Onion, lots of other things.
And like I was saying, there's this article about him at dmagazine.com.
Barrett Brown is anonymous, it says.
As he said, that's a bit overstated.
But still, you've kind of found yourself in the role of the one guy from Anonymous that people can get a hold of and get a comment from, basically.
There's a couple people that talk regularly to the press.
I'm not the first.
I've just been very active lately.
Probably got some overexposure.
Are you worried about the FBI trying to figure out a way to round you all up and call it the RICO statute or something?
I mean, yep.
They're going to come at us.
We've pissed off a lot of people.
We've pissed off the OSD and SA, Booz Allen Hamilton, CIA, FBI, etc.
They were rounding up people a few months ago, and they're probably going to be hitting back at us at some point.
Is it possible now for the more advanced members of this group to hide behind enough proxies or whatever that they're safe?
That's something that you would think so, yeah.
And to some extent, it's true.
But you have to realize that we really are facing a sophisticated adversary in terms of people who can collect information.
I mean, there's obviously a very active effort, and has been for a number of years, to root out someone who's hiding behind anonymity.
And they're very successful in that.
We've seen them develop these tools.
We've seen the patents.
We've seen the discussions.
And to varying levels, these agencies are good at that kind of thing.
One thing that happened, unfortunately, was that our little conflict with Quantico got overblown last week.
Some people conflated some statements I'd made at an NBC interview, like a week before, with some other statements, and assumed we were declaring civil war in the Pentagon.
All I was saying was we were going to, you know, bother a couple people, like a Pentagon spokesman, and a certain brigadier, and another brigadier.
I mean, that was it.
We weren't going to go up to claim war in the Pentagon.
We declared war on Booz Allen Hamilton.
Or I did, anyway.
Well, was there a particular problem with them that you were targeting them about?
Yeah, well, Operation Metal Gear began when we finally got around to looking into the meeting that Aaron Barr had with Booz Allen Hamilton's VPs in late January.
They were discussing Anonymous and WikiLeaks, and discussing the general concept a little bit, I mean, just vaguely, of persona management.
It was very clear what the meeting was about.
You know, they thought Aaron Barr was going in the right direction in terms of data collection, that kind of thing.
And some sort of gray methodologies that he was using.
So, we were going after him at first.
At first, I assumed that Booz Allen Hamilton must be the ones that are behind all these persona management software being developed for the Air Force, blah, blah.
It turns out that it's much, much wider than that.
Booz Allen Hamilton bid on it.
We don't know to what extent they've been involved in persona management software actively.
I still don't like them, and I didn't need to call up a lot of their VPs and hassle them a little bit, and ask them questions, and record it, and make fun of them.
But, I mean, I think I'm allowed to do that.
I don't want to live in a country where I can't call up a former NSA director at home and leave a message for him.
Yeah, a bag full of dog turns, right?
No, no, no.
I'm just calling people up and asking questions.
But, hey, you want to talk about these crazy things you're doing, which are dangerous.
Can we discuss this?
And sometimes they'll wake him up early, and they'll talk to me for about two minutes and say some stuff they probably shouldn't say.
You know, deny involvement with H.P. Gary, like William Wendley did when I called him up on Sunday before last.
But, I mean, for the most part, they just don't take my calls now.
Well, you need to get a proxy phone number so they don't catch you on the caller ID there.
I'm going to do that.
But, yeah, so, I mean, this is the thing.
It seems like with Wikileaks and with Facebook and with Anonymous, I mean, this really is sort of the dawn of a new era here.
Where, you know, I think especially with Anonymous, where, you know, Big Brother can clamp down and just with a word, they can, for example, get these financial institutions to cut off Wikileaks.
And yet, then Little Brother can strike right back and make them pay for their bad decisions going along with the police state like that.
And cost them however much money.
And then as we saw with this H.P. Gary scandal, you know, these guys, I guess this one guy, the head of the company, tried to pick a fight with Anonymous, bragged to the Financial Times, oh, yeah, Anonymous, I got all their names and phone numbers and whatever.
And so this group said, oh, really, we'll see who's got who.
And slapped him down.
I mean, this guy's out of a job now.
And it caused this major scandal.
Yeah, I mean, it was actually lucky that it happened.
Because if it hadn't happened, we wouldn't have gotten this inside view of how these companies and various government agencies interact.
How they cooperate when their goals are the same.
And how they sort of stroke a line and engage in unethical behavior and possibly criminal behavior.
You know, and get away with it.
When you don't see the FBI coming down on, you know, H.P. Gary.
Congress is finally looking into them, and that'll be nice.
You know, hopefully they'll look into Palantir and look at the whole network of companies like Endgame Systems, the one that wants to remain secret.
You know, that'll happen.
But, you know, I mean, again, this is what we found coincidentally.
Or sort of almost coincidentally.
Just imagine what the hell else is going on with these companies, with the data collection, with In-Q-Tel, these CIA venture capital firms that put money into Facebook early on.
You know, there's really a problem here.
There really is, you know, a number of people who are in a position to do very malicious things.
At the very least, invading the privacy.
You know, and from what we've seen, they are taking that option.
And that should concern people.
And the fact that it doesn't concern more people, you know, it's a shame.
Yeah, now, see, welcome to my world, where shining all the sunshine in the world on the most important truth still doesn't amount to nothing, because nobody cares.
That's what we have to do, because, you know, when I was a journalist, all you could do was say, hey, look, this guy's doing something wrong.
I didn't know him by his name.
So I thought it would be more productive to go sort of evolve journalism to a more interactive level, I guess.
Yeah, a more direct way of going about it.
I guess you could go.
I didn't want to be a journalist anyway, you know, so.
All right, now, I read a headline, but I didn't even get a chance to read the article, I don't think.
But I just saw a little something about Anonymous declares war on Ben Bernanke.
Is that right?
Please tell me that's right.
That's not.
Well, I mean, that's an organization, sort of an entity within Anonymous that considers itself to be anonymous.
And that's not something that is really going on at the venues from which I operate, like a non-op CIRC.
There's a lot of people who I think will go for that.
I think it's probably not tactically smart.
I think we've got enough on our plates right now without trying to take on the Fed as well.
I mean, that's, you know, that's a tall order.
I'm not sure how desirable it is at this point either.
Well, like you said with the Pentagon, you know, you target the commanders in charge at Quantico without targeting the Pentagon itself and, you know, getting yourselves nuked off the planet or taken off to Bagram to be tortured or something.
Yeah, that was my fault.
So maybe hacking Ben Bernanke is one thing and the Fed is something else.
I don't know.
I guess I just like the idea of him having a bad day for whatever reason, that's all.
Well, I wouldn't want to have his job either, you know, or else I don't want him to have it.
But, yeah, I mean, I can't really comment on that particular operation.
I'm the exact opposite of an economist, man.
Like, I'm just, you know, I don't understand the Fed.
I don't want to understand it.
I've got to get enough on my plate already with all these damn companies and their persona management software and all that stuff.
You know, I have to already do enough research on this crap, you know.
Right.
Yeah, fair enough.
Yeah, fair enough.
Yeah, fair enough.
Well, there's a presidential campaign coming up where I think you're going to learn quite a bit.
You won't be able to help but to about that particular subject.
But, yeah, so I don't know.
Tell me some more stuff.
I mean, I'm not sure even, you know, I don't know enough about Anonymous to know what all I'm missing and not asking you here, Barrett.
Well, myself and a few others and people who are active on a particular venue have been pursuing this Metal Gear thing for the last week.
We sort of announced it on Russia Today last Monday night.
And, you know, this is a time we thought Booz Allen Hamilton was the big villain here.
We investigated Booz Allen Hamilton.
We got pointed in some directions, and we pursued those.
Did some more research.
It takes time to sort of process all the information you're getting and come to an assessment.
And that process has been sort of ongoing.
And in the wake of that, some journalists have jumped on and have started looking into companies like Intrepid out in California.
We called up the CEOs there the other day.
And looking into Cubic and this network of firms that are involved in a very, you know, sort of dangerous area.
And that's really what I've been concentrating on for the past week or so, that and trying to make up with the Pentagon.
So, I mean, and that's been productive.
It's been fruitful.
We're getting a better picture of what's happening in terms of privacy, in terms of clandestine operations by contractors and governments.
And I think that by the time we're done, most people are going to be really surprised at what the full picture is.
Well, you know, one thing that came out in the HBGary emails was just how normal all of that seemed.
Where I think Glenn Greenwald remarked that, wow, they'll just, you know, outright say, hey, guys, let's criminally conspire to extort this, that, and the other journalist.
You want to?
And CC everybody on it.
And basically, that's how they do business every day.
The only thing remarkable here was that Anonymous got their hands on these emails and published them.
But this is something that apparently they don't worry about.
This is the kind of thing they talk about all the time.
People can get used to anything in that environment, any environment.
And it's a shame because that really facilitates a lot of wrongdoing.
The fact that you can go along if you get along.
You know, let's investigate Greenwald.
Let's look into his finances.
Let's look into that.
And then they go before the press out to work and say, hey, Anonymous is a bunch of criminals.
They're breaking into our file after we studied them and tried to sell a report to the FBI.
A bunch of names of people who aren't even anonymous.
You know, it's an unfortunate double standard.
If we were a government, maybe we should become a government.
We'd be able to do a lot more, deal with a lot more without being asked questions about it, you know.
We don't shoot people.
We don't invade countries.
We don't raid people.
We don't arrest people.
We make phone calls sometimes.
We make fun of people.
We research stuff.
We ask questions.
We go to the media.
And sometimes things get hacked, you know.
But that's, you know, it's the way of things.
Right.
Well, one of the most important things there is inspiring journalists to go ahead and investigate further on stories that you guys uncover.
You go and do something that a regular reporter won't do, break into the e-mail account of some corrupt corporation.
But then once you publish them, they can start writing articles about that.
And they can, if they want to, I guess they can go on TV and call you all the enemy and not journalism and whatever they want.
Or they can follow your lead and say, hey, this sounds like a pretty interesting series here.
Corrupt fix-it men law firms in America and the dirty tricks that they do for Republicans and Democrats, you know.
Yeah, we're happy with the process.
And, I mean, again, we don't do anything that the FBI doesn't do.
And we do far less than they do.
You know, we don't raid people.
But we will conduct investigations in the same way that NSA does or anybody else.
I mean, we'll cut some corners.
You know, and that's done by a very small number of people, except for the DDoS attacks, which are done by lots of people.
But, you know, I mean, there's no entity that doesn't commit crimes out there.
The Catholic Church is still around.
They haven't taken that out yet.
And they're absolutely a criminal organization.
Anonymous, occasionally, DDoS' website.
Owned by people who can afford to get DDoS'd.
And they usually deserve it.
And they were often involved in the government process.
You know, like the Vatican Garden Visa.
Lobby.
They provide campaign contributions to other participants in the state.
We consider that to be, I mean, I consider that to be, to make it a legitimate target.
We're not going after mom-and-pop operations.
We're going after companies that have managed to avoid being accountable for their actions.
Companies that have to spend tens of millions of dollars a year glossing over their actions in public relations and advertising.
And, again, I think it's a necessary process.
If society is going to be cleansed to some extent, if we're going to at least camp down on the corruption, and on some of those ridiculous things that happen to, that occur, even in what we call a society run by the rule of law, I mean, as long as the rule of law is going to be ignored by the powerful, we think it should be tweaked a little bit by the scrappier people who are out there trying to do something good.
It's a spare.
Right.
Well, and that's a very important thing, too, because, you know, eventually there's going to be a mistake at some point.
But as long as you're always shooting up at the most powerful people, then you're pretty much safe.
It's when, you know, some kind of bystander who has no power gets hurt.
That's when, you know, the media and the state are going to jump all over you guys.
So I think as long as you're aiming at D.C. and New York and the most, you know, corrupt influences there, the most powerful influences there, then you guys can stay on the side of the angels, you know.
And I think no matter what they say about you all now, eventually time will tell that, you know, along with WikiLeaks, that you guys are on the side of truth and justice.
And, you know, that's why you're doing what you're doing.
And, of course, they'll try to spin it the other way on TV.
But over the long run, I think that you guys are going to come out all right.
I sure hope so.
Well, being on the side of truth and justice, unfortunately, makes you a lot of enemies.
Yeah.
Well, certainly in this country and this era.
If people understand what we're doing and understand where we're coming from and what the process is and what the goals are and what our values are, I'm happy.
You know, I mean, obviously we're going to get hit in some direction at some point, you know.
But through it all, we will have done, I think, some things that were worth doing.
And that's what matters in the end.
Yeah, right on.
All right, everybody, that's Barrett Brown.
He somewhat speaks for some of the guys in the group Anonymous, Hacking Your Enemies.
He's contributed to Vanity Fair, The Huffington Post, Skeptic, True Slant, and The Onion.
He's written for dozens more publications than that and is the author of Flock of Dodos, Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design, and The Easter Bunny, and Hot, Fat, and Clouded, The Amazing and Amusing Failure of America's Chattering Class.
Thanks very much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
