Barrett Brown
American journalist
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July 9 2024 | Brown published his book 'My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous' and announced he was sober and planning to start a twelve-step program. |
February 2024 | Barrett Brown's asylum claim was denied, prompting him to fire his lawyer and decide to appeal with another legal firm. |
February 2024 | Asylum claim in the UK was denied. |
2022 | Brown accused friends of working to put him in prison and attempted suicide, which he later attributed to Complex post-traumatic stress disorder. |
2021 | Brown claims to have overheard officers discussing sealed US charges against him during his arrest in London for alleged visa overstay and incitement offenses. He is convicted of causing intentional harassment, alarm or distress. |
2021 | Appeared in the documentary 'The Face of Anonymous', further exploring his connection to the Anonymous collective. |
2021 | Brown was convicted in the United Kingdom of one charge of causing intentional harassment, alarm, or distress. |
June 2021 | After the death of his friend Kevin Gallagher from fentanyl and meth, Brown's life and relationships began to disintegrate. |
May 2021 | Arrested on Sylvia Mann's canal boat in east London for overstaying his visa and two incitement offenses related to the protest banner. Initially charged under an incorrect code and later released on bail after being fined £1,200. |
April 2021 | Spread of images and videos online showing Barrett Brown holding a protest banner saying 'Kill Cops' near a location where an officer had been killed, leading to online accusations and police investigation. |
2020 | Brown went to rehab for his drug addiction. |
2020 | Featured in the documentary 'Sensational', continuing to share his experiences in digital activism. |
2020 | Brown threatened to kill a local taxi driver whom he believed was attempting to scam him. |
2020 | Barrett Brown moved to Antigua to live in a house rented by a wealthy patron. |
2020 | Restarted Project PM and claimed asylum in the United Kingdom, citing persecution in the US for his journalism. |
December 2020 | Discussed starting methamphetamine use about a year and a half earlier and going to drug rehabilitation, which impacted the Pursuance Project's development. |
November 2020 | After encountering a local police captain at his sponsor's house, Brown decided to leave Antigua and travel to the United Kingdom. |
February 2020 | Shut down the Pursuance Project, stating it would resume later that year. |
2019 | Barrett Brown's Twitter account @BarrettBrown_ was permanently banned four times, with the first three bans being overturned. The fourth and final ban occurred after he tweeted a controversial statement about Julian Assange, suggesting he would 'deserve to die by other, cleaner hands' if he knew of Erik Prince's alleged ties to Roger Stone. |
2019 | The Twitter account for Brown's Pursuance Project was banned for alleged ban evasion and platform manipulation, a claim Brown and The Daily Dot dispute as false. |
2019 | Publicly burned his National Magazine Award in protest of The Intercept closing their Snowden archives. |
2018 | Three trustees of the Courage Foundation removed Barrett Brown from their beneficiary list due to his critical remarks about Julian Assange, leading to Courage Foundation Director Naomi Colvin's resignation in protest. |
2018 | Raised over $50,000 for the Pursuance Project on Kickstarter. The Pursuance software was last updated in October. |
2017 | Launched the Pursuance Project, a platform aimed at uniting transparency activists, investigative journalists, FOIA specialists, and hacktivists in an encrypted environment. |
November 2017 | Barrett Brown publicly criticized Julian Assange for secretive collaboration with the Trump campaign, specifically highlighting WikiLeaks' correspondence with Donald Trump Jr. during the 2016 presidential election. |
April 27 2017 | Brown was arrested and held on unknown charges for four days. |
2016 | Appeared in the short documentary 'Relatively Free' by Alex Winter, which documented his release from prison and journey to a halfway house. |
2016 | Brown was released from prison and won a National Magazine Award for his jailhouse memoirs published in D Magazine and The Intercept. |
November 29 2016 | Brown was released from prison and moved into a halfway house in Dallas, Texas, with an order to pay at least $200 of his restitution monthly. |
January 2015 | Sentenced to 63 months in federal prison for accessory after the fact, obstruction of justice, and threatening a federal officer. Required to pay nearly $900,000 in restitution to Stratfor. |
2014 | Featured in the documentary 'The Hacker Wars', further highlighting his role in digital activism and hacking culture. |
2014 | Brown self-published the book 'Keep Rootin' for Putin: Establishment Pundits and the Twilight of American Competence'. |
April 2014 | Brown agreed to a plea bargain and pleaded guilty to accessory after the fact, unauthorized computer access, threatening an FBI agent, and obstructing a search warrant. |
January 23 2013 | A third indictment was filed against Brown on two counts of obstruction for concealing evidence during the March 6, 2012 FBI raid. |
2012 | Brown continued struggling with heroin withdrawal and experienced a deteriorating mental state. |
2012 | Appeared in the documentary 'We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists', discussing his involvement with Anonymous and digital activism. |
2012 | Involved in the Stratfor email leak, which led to an FBI investigation. |
December 4 2012 | Brown was indicted on 12 additional federal charges related to the Stratfor email hack, facing up to 45 years in federal prison for allegedly sharing a link to the hacked data. |
October 3 2012 | A federal grand jury returned an indictment against Brown on charges of threats, conspiracy, and retaliation against a federal law enforcement officer. |
September 12 2012 | Brown was arrested in Dallas County, Texas for threatening an FBI agent in a YouTube video, with the arrest occurring as he left a Tinychat computer stream. |
March 6 2012 | FBI executed search warrants at Brown's apartment and his mother's house, seizing laptop computers containing thousands of pages of chat logs from March 2011 to February 2012. |
2011 | Brown made a notable statement about his heroin addiction, claiming that 'a lot of the rules don't apply to me'. |
June 2011 | Brown and Project PM released an exclusive report about the 'Romas/COIN' surveillance contract, which was discovered in hacked HBGary emails and targeted Arab countries. |
2010 | Brown first began outpatient treatment for heroin addiction. |
2010 | Barrett Brown began work on Project PM, a crowdsourced investigation wiki with around 75 members who investigated intelligence contractors and hacked files. |
This contents of the box above is based on material from the Wikipedia article Barrett Brown, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.