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

July 17, 2024Frank Articles, Blog anonymous, barrett brown, Edward Snowden, FBI, hacktivism, political persecution, surveillance, WikiLeaks

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.

Book Review: ‘Means of Control’ charts disturbing rise of secretive US surveillance regime

March 8, 2024Frank Articles, Blog cell phone surveillance, surveillance, surveillance capitalism, Total Information Awareness

By Frank Bajak

March 4, 2024

In the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, former national security advisor John Poindexter launched Total Information Awareness, intent on preventing future assaults on the homeland by amassing extensive databases on people and their movements.

The Pentagon program had a creepy eye-surveilling-the-globe-from-a-pyramid logo and was roundly rejected by civil libertarians as Orwellian overkill. Adm. Poindexter, an Iran-Contra conspirator, was skewered by late-night talk show hosts and Congressional resistance moved to defund it.

Except TIA wasn’t DOA. Not by a longshot.

The data collection that Poindexter envisioned instead went underground, with code names such as “Basketball” and classified budgets. How private Beltway contractors grew what has become a secretive surveillance regime is exposed in disturbing detail by journalist Byron Tau in his first book, “Means of Control.” In the absence of a federal privacy law, the U.S. national security establishment has used commercially available data to craft a creeping panopticon.

As a Wall Street Journal reporter, Tau broke important stories on how the shadowy U.S. data collection and brokering industry has been indirectly — and legally, it seems — eavesdropping on tens of millions of Americans and foreigners in the service of U.S. military, intelligence and homeland security.

High-risk Colombians say GPS devices only add to dangers

September 9, 2022Frank Articles Activists under threat, Claudia Julieta Duque, Colombia, GPS tracking, surveillance

By FRANK BAJAK

August 1, 2022

The bulletproof vehicles that Colombia’s government assigns to hundreds of high-risk individuals are supposed to make them safer. But when an investigative reporter discovered they all had GPS trackers, she only felt more vulnerable — and outraged.

No one had informed Claudia Julieta Duque — or apparently any of the 3,700-plus journalists, rights activists and labor and indigenous leaders who use the vehicles — that the devices were keeping constant tabs on their whereabouts. In Duque’s case, it happened as often as every 30 seconds. The system could also remotely cut off the SUV’s engine.

Colombia is among the world’s most dangerous countries for human rights defenders — with more than 500 killed since 2016. It is also a country where right-wing extremists have a track record of infiltrating national security bodies. For Duque, the GPS revelation was chilling: Movements of people already at risk of political assassination were being tracked with technology that bad actors could weaponize against them.

“It’s something super invasive,” said Duque, who has been a persistent target of rogue security agents. “And the state doesn’t seem to care.”

The government agency responsible has said the trackers were installed to help prevent theft, to track the bodyguards who often drive the vehicles and to help respond to dangerous situations.

For a decade, Colombia had been installing trackers in the armored vehicles of at-risk individuals as well as VIPs, including presidents, government ministers and senators. The agency’s director made that disclosure after Duque learned last year through a public records request that the system was recording her SUV’s location an average of five times an hour.

The director dismissed privacy concerns and called the practice “fundamental” to guaranteeing security.

Considering the tracker a danger to her and her sources, Duque pressed for details on its exact features. But the National Protection Unit, known as UNP in Spanish, offered little. She then demanded the agency remove the device. It refused. So in February, Duque returned the vehicle, left the country and filed a legal challenge.

Now back in Bogotá, she is hoping for satisfaction when Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first leftist president, takes office Aug. 7.