Early life Brown was born and grew up in
Dallas County. His father Robert was a wealthy real estate investor until the FBI investigated him for fraud and he lost the family's money. Robert Brown was charged in a real-estate-fraud scheme, but the charges were eventually dropped. His parents divorced when he was 7. His young life would have been marked by the example of his father and resistance to authority.
Rolling Stone stated "part of his appeal was the act of his drily affected pseudo-aristocratic-asshole persona, which he exaggerated during media appearances" In May 2011, Brown announced he was stepping away from Anonymous to focus on Project PM citing the lack of quality control and some of their actions, such as
Operation Sony, did not align with his aims. In early October 2011 Anonymous launched OpCartel against the
Zetas drug cartel and Mexican government then later claimed an Anonymous member was kidnapped by the cartel. In November, Brown said that 25,000 emails from the Mexican government containing the names of 75 members of the Zetas and associates would be released if a member of Anonymous kidnapped by the cartel was not set free. Anonymous later said the member released and called a truce.
The New York Times raised doubts about the operation and kidnapping claim. Brown stated he would continue the work to expose drug cartels and their associates and that he working with CNN on a story about a
district attorney who was working with drug cartels.
Project PM In 2009, Brown began work on his
crowdsourced investigation wiki, Project PM. who communicated through an IRC chat room and published their findings on the Project PM wiki. The group dug through huge amounts of hacked files and emails from intelligence contractors, hoping to expose companies like
HBGary and Stratfor, After Project PM was shut down by his 2012 arrest and incarceration, he restarted it in late 2020 while seeking asylum in the UK. Brown suggested that Anonymous tell
Stratfor they would "consider making any reasonable redactions to e-mails that might endanger, say, activists living under dictatorships" before emailing Stratfor CEO
George Friedman directly. Brown didn't participate in the hack or know how to code but he did post a link in a chat which linked to documents already released online that contained email addresses and credit card information.
Arrest and sentencing On March 6, 2012, the FBI executed search warrants at Brown's apartment and his mother's house. During the search, agents took possession of his laptop computers. The seized laptops included thousands of pages of chat logs from March 2011 to February 2012. These chats were produced as evidence in the trial against
Jeremy Hammond and in Brown's trial. At his sentencing he stated he was going through "sudden withdrawal from
paxil and
suboxone" on the day he made the video. A magistrate denied
bail because he was judged "a danger to the safety of the community and a risk of flight." On October 3, 2012, a federal
grand jury indictment was returned against Brown on charges of threats, conspiracy and retaliation against a federal law enforcement officer. Various tweets, YouTube uploads and comments made by Brown before his arrest were cited as support within the indictment. In December 2012, Brown was indicted on an additional 12 federal charges related to the December 25, 2011
hack of Austin-based
private intelligence company Stratfor. A trove of millions of
Stratfor emails from the hack, including authentication information for thousands of credit card, was shared by the hacker collective
LulzSec with
WikiLeaks. Brown faced up to 45 years in federal prison for allegedly sharing a
link to the data as part of Project PM. On 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 of his and his mother's homes. Brown's mother was sentenced on November 8, 2013, to six months of
probation and a $1,000 fine for a
misdemeanor charge of obstructing the execution of a search warrant. In September 2013, Brown was under a federal court-issued
gag order. The targeting of Brown's mother is cited by Taylor Owen as an example illustrating how state repression also affects the families of anarchist activists. In February 2014, he
self-published the book ''Keep Rootin' for Putin: Establishment Pundits and the Twilight of American Competence''. In March 2014, most charges against Brown were dropped. In April 2014, Brown agreed to a
plea bargain and plead guilty to accessory after the fact in the unauthorized access to a protected computer, threatening an FBI agent and obstructing the execution of a search warrant. At sentencing, the government introduced additional chat logs seized from Brown's laptop. D Magazine wrote that the logs "painted Barrett as a leader of Anonymous, someone who knowingly stole and distributed credit card information, a wreaker of real and serious damage" in an attempt to secure a lengthy prison sentence. This caused further delays, as the defense was not given prior access. Journalist Janus Kopfstein accused the government of making false statements about Brown before his sentencing. Much of Brown's December sentencing hearing was spent in drawn-out arguments over the definitions of Project PM and Brown himself.
Prison During his incarceration, Brown published a series of jailhouse memoirs in
D Magazine and
The Intercept, for which he won a
National Magazine Award in 2016. He publicly burned the award three years later in protest of
The Intercept closing their
Snowden archives. Brown was released from prison on November 29, 2016, and moved into a
halfway house close to downtown Dallas, Texas.
Continuation of activism, legal cases and conflict with Assange In 2017, Brown launched the Pursuance Project, which aimed to unite transparency activists, investigative journalists, FOIA specialists and
hacktivists in a fully encrypted platform. Brown said that Pursuance would take
hacktivism into the future, letting anyone sort through troves of hacked documents and even recruit teams of hackers. In February 2017, lawyers for donors to Brown's legal fund filed suit against Assistant United States Attorney Candina Heath for filing a
subpoena against
WePay that resulted in divulgence of their identities. The lawyers argued that the irrelevance of donor information to the case against Brown and the provision of the information directly to the
Federal Bureau of Investigation rather than to the prosecutor or judge led to donors' belief that the information was intended to surveil and harass the donors for activity protected by the U.S. constitution, and filed for destruction of the data and monetary damages. On October 2, 2017, Judge Maria Elena James denied a motion to dismiss the case introduced by the Department of Justice. In June 2017, the Department of Justice subpoenaed
The Intercept for all communications and information on payments made to Brown. The Intercept's in-house counsel told the U.S. Attorney's Office that they would agree to turn over financial information but not communications between Brown and The Intercept. Brown suggested the subpoena related to restitution payments he was supposed to make, but commented that they should already have the information readily available. According to Brown, instead of using that information "they subpoenaed a media organization that they happen to have a great deal of interest in, The Intercept" which he called "an ill-thought-out fishing expedition". In November 2017, Brown criticized
Julian Assange for his secretive collaboration with the Trump campaign and then allegedly lying about it. Brown said Assange had acted "as a covert
political operative", thus betraying WikiLeaks' focus on exposing "corporate and government wrongdoing". He considered the latter to be "an appropriate thing to do", but that "working with an authoritarian would-be leader to deceive the public is indefensible and disgusting".
Move to the United Kingdom Brown told
The Sunday Times after briefly living in
Antigua, he moved to the United Kingdom in November 2020. In April 2021, images and videos spread online of him holding a protest banner which said: "Kill Cops" near where an officer had been killed.
Metropolitan Police tweeted they were trying to identify him and right-wing journalist
Andy Ngô tweeted an accusation that he was "
antifa-linked". Claims spread online that Brown was an
undercover police officer, under police protection, or an
agent provocateur. The Metropolitan Police told
Reuters and Brown wrote online that the claims were false. After Brown's
asylum claim was denied in February 2024, he decided to fire his lawyer and appeal with another firm. His memoir,
My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous, was published by
Farrar, Straus and Giroux in July 2024. == Personal life ==