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Book Review: Gonzo journalist Barrett Brown’s memoir a piquant take on hacktivism’s rise

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By FRANK BAJAK
July 10, 2024

His talents in full flower and basking in public admiration, gonzo journalist and inveterate anti-establishment troublemaker Barrett Brown is jailed in his native Texas on various federal felony charges.

It is 2013 and Brown’s adventures have included helping Anonymous hacktivists publicly expose private U.S. intelligence contractors engaged in deep-state power abuses at a time of rising concerns over Big Brother surveillance.

Brown has done this in swashbuckling style – often in a drug-altered state, chatting with executives whose hacked emails have been dumped online while on opiate maintenance medication. Brown was in withdrawal from antidepressants and opioids, he would later testify, when he threatened an FBI agent in a video posted to YouTube.

“I wanted to become famous for overthrowing things,” Brown writes in his much-awaited memoir, “My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous.”

Mainstream press coverage at the time of Brown’s prosecution was uneven and sometimes just plain inaccurate. Beyond seeking to set the record straight, the book snapshots a pivotal moment in online activism, and pulls no punches.

Although not a hacker, Brown was a well-known actor/provocateur in the rise of hacktivism, a powerful skein of political activism pioneered by the likes of WikiLeaks that tapped the internet to expose wrongdoing and spur change. That includes supporting Tunisia’s 2011 popular uprising.

Those shenanigans preceded Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations of wholesale unauthorized National Security Agency surveillance of the U.S. public, which would erase doubts about their righteousness.

Brown is a showman, a gifted writer in the tradition of William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson. He also has a knack for self-sabotage and has struggled with heroin addiction and depression. He is currently in Britain engaged in a legal struggle for political asylum.

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AP investigation finds Hacking Team tailor-made attackware for Ecuador’s spy agency

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Aug. 7, 2015

By FRANK BAJAK and RAPHAEL SATTER

Associated Press

LIMA, Peru (AP) — Ecuadorean opposition activist Dr. Carlos Figueroa was being pursued by the state when his email and Facebook accounts were hacked. Several dozen of his colleagues have similarly had their digital lives violated. All blamed President Rafael Correa’s government, but no one had proof.

The Associated Press has found compelling evidence that Figueroa was indeed hacked by Ecuador’s domestic intelligence agency, with software tailor-made by an Italy-based company called Hacking Team that outfits governments with digital break-in tools.

That would tag Figueroa as the first publicly identified target from a catalog of more than 1 million company emails stolen by an unknown hacker and leaked online last month.

AP’s finding also casts doubt both on Hacking Team’s claims that its intrusion tools, which intercept phone calls, collect emails and record keystrokes, are for use against serious criminals, not dissidents, and on assertions by Ecuadorean officials that they do not spy on domestic opponents.

The purloined Hacking Team emails have thrown back the curtain on state-sponsored hacking across the world, drawing outrage in South Korea — where a spy caught up in the scandal killed himself — and Cyprus, whose intelligence chief resigned following the disclosures.

They were gathered and made easily searchable online by WikiLeaks, the secret-spilling website whose founder Julian Assange has been holed up in Ecuador’s London embassy since 2012.

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US intelligence agencies’ embrace of generative AI is at once wary and urgent

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BY  FRANK BAJAK
May 23, 2024

ARLINGTON, Virginia (AP) — Long before generative AI’s boom, a Silicon Valley firm contracted to collect and analyze non-classified data on illicit Chinese fentanyl trafficking made a compelling case for its embrace by U.S. intelligence agencies.

The operation’s results far exceeded human-only analysis, finding twice as many companies and 400% more people engaged in illegal or suspicious commerce in the deadly opioid.

Excited U.S. intelligence officials touted the results publicly — the AI made connections based mostly on internet and dark-web data — and shared them with Beijing authorities, urging a crackdown.

One important aspect of the 2019 operation, called Sable Spear, that has not previously been reported: The firm used generative AI to provide U.S. agencies — three years ahead of the release of OpenAI’s groundbreaking ChatGPT product — with evidence summaries for potential criminal cases, saving countless work hours.

“You wouldn’t be able to do that without artificial intelligence,” said Brian Drake, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s then-director of AI and the project coordinator.

The contractor, Rhombus Power, would later use generative AI to predict Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine with 80% certainty four months in advance, for a different U.S. government client. Rhombus says it also alerts government customers, who it declines to name, to imminent North Korean missile launches and Chinese space operations.

U.S. intelligence agencies are scrambling to embrace the AI revolution, believing they’ll otherwise be smothered by exponential data growth as sensor-generated surveillance tech further blankets the planet.

But officials are acutely aware that the tech is young and brittle, and that generative AI — prediction models trained on vast datasets to generate on-demand text, images, video and human-like conversation — is anything but tailor-made for a dangerous trade steeped in deception.

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