Today we dial into Dallas Texas to speak to Barrett Brown, a journalist, activist and satirist who has written for amongst others, the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, the Guardian, and the Intercept. Barrett is also a winner of the National Magazine Award.
Barrett is the founder of Pursuance Project, an open source software currently under development, that enables individuals to organise in the pursuit of shared goals.
In 2011 Barrett was loosely collaborating with people in the collective known as Anonymous, around about the same time he founded a crowdsourced investigation of the cyber-intelligence industrial complex called Project PM which analysed a lot of leaks that were happening at the time that were the result of hacks of intelligence contractors.
In 2012 Barrett Brown was arrested (on a livestream) and charged with a number of crimes, including the sharing with his journalistic colleagues in a private chat of a publicly available link, linking to a leak from a hack of a private intelligence contractor Stratfor.
In a complicated court case, Barrett was eventually sentenced, under different charges to 63 months in prison.
In this first of our interviews with Barrett Brown, Barrett discusses his arrest and trial, the chilling effects of his case, persona management, and the cyber-intelligence complex.
Check out the Pursuance Project at https://pursuanceproject.org.
This episode makes use of the track, "the Ballad of Barrett Brown" (author unknown) (available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7UrHNz6KI8)