Barrett Brown

Barrett Lancaster Brown (born August 14, 1981) is an American anarchist, hacktivist, writer, and associate of Anonymous. He is mainly known for his role alongside Anonymous during the early 2010s, including during the Stratfor email leak.

Born in a wealthy family, Brown grew up opposed to authority, before becoming a freelance writer for various media outlets. In 2009, he founded Project PM, a crowdfunded investigation wiki. Around that time, he also started working with Anonymous and being one of their associates, helping them during some of their actions, such as during the Tunisian revolution or against the Australian government. In 2011–2012, he was involved in the Stratfor email leak, during which hacktivists managed to obtain and publish thousands of intelligence documents related to the, among others, American military-industrial complex. In 2012, the FBI executed search warrants at his home and later arrested him, also targetting his mother.

Three years later, in January 2015, Brown was ultimately sentenced to more than 5 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to accessory after the fact, obstruction of justice, and threatening a federal officer stemming from the FBI's investigation into the 2012 Stratfor email leak. After his release, he would later be involved in Pursuance, a platform trying to link activists together, before moving to the United Kingdom.

Brown has written for ''Vanity Fair'', ''The Guardian'', the ''Huffington Post'', ''The Onion'' and other outlets. In 2016, he won a National Magazine Award for a series of jailhouse memoirs published in ''D Magazine'' and ''The Intercept''.

His memoir, ''My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous'', was published in July 2024. According to NRP, his life gave rise to the character of Eliott in the TV series ''Mr. Robot''. His life also influenced ''House of Cards,'' where it was depicted. He is regarded as a seminal example of the hacktivist tendency aiming to organize hacktivist actions and focus on clearly defined objectives. Provided by Wikipedia