Barrett Brown’s Project PM “echelon2″ Wiki page provides a look inside e-mails “gleaned” from the HBGary “hack.” Recently, a page about Endgame Systems, a business with connections to HBGary, was removed from the top spot on Google. A paranoid and apopleptic Barrett Brown insists that this is a part of a massive government cover up with political motivations. However, there is probably a more logical solution.
The page in question, which has been stricken from Google, contains a link to this document. Be forewarned: This link contains the names, addresses, and home phone numbers of people who have done nothing more than be born into the same family as a person who works for Endgame Systems. As a footnote to a highly charged political rant, lacking all semblance of journalistic or academic standards, the context is clearly malicious. While it’s not illegal to publish publicly available records, using the information as part of an implied threat is highly questionable.
It would be one thing if this was an isolated incident, but Brown has a long record of employing these same scare tactics, even personally making threatening phone calls to his enemies. Brown’s called me a “moralfag” for my criticism of him and Anonymous, an insult which is as equally homophobic as it is misanthropic. Superior ethics and morals are what give activists their foothold in public discourse, and Brown can’t seem to understand this.
Sadly, Brown can’t even take what he dishes out: <BarrettBrown> diversity of tactics that include libeling, harassing the guy who provides free lawyers to arrested Anons is hard to take seriously, too
He doesn’t pay a cent for the lawyers, but he holds this up as a holy talisman to ward off us evil mocking demons. Ain’t workin’.
Usually it all starts with a sickly transparent appeal for the acceptance and affection of a group by a complete outsider. Often the fawning stage is baldly disguised as self-deprecation, but more often it begins as a contrived yet frank attempt to become part of a group. The endorphin rush of acceptance accompanies the act of fawning rather than the acceptance itself.
Denial
Suffering from the contradictory feelings of total rejection and overwhelming delusional acceptance, the rejected outsider’s ego snaps and he or she inevitably posts jocular comments under many different names, always usurping the identities of those who refuse to validate his or her fawning. This is a sad attempt at “play” from an outsider in complete denial of the obvious rejection. I have seen this stage last for months, and the number of handles used by the same individual, “Geo,” reached a record of 63 different “identities.” This list is incomplete, however, and dates from July of 2011. Since then, “Geo” has repeatedly continued through this cycle and added countless nicks to his trophy case of shame.
Aggression
Having finally reconciled the rejection, the subject goes on the attack. The most common statement is something like, “I used to like your group, but you’ve gone way downhill recently.” This stage may also last for months, and often the use of transparent alternate identities will persist, even though the repetitive and absurd comments follow an all-too-easily recognized pattern.
Ragequit
The famously obvious Ragequit is often extremely dramatic, but always entirely meaningless. Sometimes it’s really just a part of the aggression stage and it doesn’t necessarily signify a reset in the cycle. Often saying absurd things like “I’m quitting the Internet” or “I’m never visiting this website again,” the rejected person might even try to portray their rage as a quiet and sad admission to the failure of their fawning, only to revert back to the fawning stage within a few days. (Or a single day in THIS case)
I recently posted a very long work to the secretive and prickly SubGenius newsgroup at the suggestion of a SubGenius friend. Many supporters and detractors of Anonymous found this work a valuable analysis of the stagnant discourse plaguing the nascent Anarchic movement, and much of it was obviously inspired or borrowed from the Book of the SubGenius. Some SubGenii, however, immediately identified this as an act of fawning, and set to the same kind of public shaming I’ve dealt out to “Geo” for the past year. My ironic wit immediately engaged in a rapid-fire parody of the vicious cycle of rejection, but this “Satire and Parody fan club” seemed to have succumbed to dementia and failed to recognize the sarcasm. Sadly, I am now trapped in this cycle and any move will be interpreted as one of the four stages of Internet rejection.
“Keep telling yourself that, pinkboy.” ~ Rev. Ivan Stang
People can’t really do anything meaningful without the media labeling it. People can’t have a loud enough voice without being labeled a “spokesperson.” (see: Bob Dylan of the 1960s)
Identifying every single thing that happens with a keyword destroys any value it might have accrued on an Internet flooded with “news” blogs whose sole purpose is to sell advertising space. We should know. Look to the right –>
Alex Jones stole this to use at disinfo.org
You can’t find an informative, well-written article about something anymore because it has been totally buried by ignorance, or worse – pure disinformation – contained in forty five thousand pages “optimized” for search engines.
The spread of information doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong. A poisonous ideology will often spread faster than a useful one. For example, the idea that Anonymous, by its very “nature,” can’t be corrupted was so absurd, we just had to report on it. Remember Sabu? Arrested June 7th: Check ‘em.
“It’s become an awful disease.”
Kilgore Trout, legendary inventor of Anon Porn, now known as “Sexy Fawkes”
From a cramped cgi apartment littered with nothing but Ayn Rand, Barrett Brown orchestrates the downfall of oppressive regimes with Project PM, short for Persona Management. Using a highly sophisticated array of thousands of fake online identities, Brown’s project destabilizes government and foments rebellion across the Middle East.
While closely working with Aaron Barr, Brown was able to remove all the good stuff from the HBGary leak, which explains the lack of evidence about rampant corruption. The government is the only entity with pockets deep enough to pull off such an elaborate plot, and it follows that Brown is ultimately under their pay.
Brown’s close association with Sabu immediately raised questions among his supporters within Anonymous. Thousands of Twitter accounts unfollowed him out of pure suspicion. @Anonymously27 said, “There’s no reason to ever trust Barrett Brown ever again. If he’s not been turned, everyone around him has.”
Experts agree, Barrett Brown was actually never turned by the FBI. He’s always worked for them.
In a highly charged article by Frank Mason, executive editor for the Internet Chronicle, questions were raised about an Anonymous “moralfag” known as MotorMouth, who runs the MotorMouthNews twitter feed. MotorMouth might be described as one of many leaders within Anonymous, but he considers himself more of an educator. His self-styled role in Anonymous is purportedly to keep new members in line with the principles of freedom of press, freedom of religion, and freedom of information.
In Frank Mason’s article, MotorMouth is depicted as a “bounty hunter.” While MotorMouth has confirmed that the pastebin referenced in Mason’s article was legitimate, he says the statements were taken out of context. “I said I was a bounty hunter as a part of an experiment to see how [Jamie Corne] would react. And she took the bait,” MotorMouth stated.
This disinformation campaign against MotorMouth allegedly started over MotorMouth’s refusal to support the Stratfor hack. MotorMouth suggests that the smear campaign against him might have even been Sabu’s idea.
While this is all very interesting, this cyberwar bullshit must be taken with a grain of salt. In the heavily edited words of Frank Mason: ”So remember anons, if you see this man[/woman/ANYONE WHO CLAIMS TO BE FROM ANONYMOUS], do not divulge information to him[/her]. He[/she] could be a bounty hunter hooking up crooked cops, so better safe than sorry. Like we used to say back in the World War II days: ‘Loose Lips Sink Ships!’”
You know I don’t give a fuck about your free market economy failfest.
I don’t give a fuck about your friends.
I don’t fucking like you.
I don’t fucking like this job.
I don’t like your debt palaces or your shit eating faces grinning back at me like I’m your next victim. Eat shit, and DIE.
I hate myself. I hate this website. I hate the readers. I hate Akon, Lil Wayne, black people, white people, Arabs, the Arab Spring oilfest. I hate every crumbling idea you thought was your own that actually belonged to some dickhead in a casual suit on a yacht.
I hate it all.
I hope 2012 December 21 really is the end. I pray to every God in the book that some crackpot conspiracy theorist would become the next Messiah on that day and summon Planet X Himself via SMS right into the face of this foul, miserable planet of humanity.
I pray to Christ himself, sometimes, because he’s the one who is MOST real by Western definitions, I mean delusions, of superstition and whatever the fuck else you want to think about – whatever makes you feel better about serving the capital gods, sucking the dick of credit. The recession! Oh lord! I pray to sweet baby Jesus in the womb of the Virgin fucking Mary to end this miserable bitch like the dinosaurs so we can all go together and for once be on the same page about something. Sameness, communism, capitalism, we’re all getting fucking by an overlord and we act like we’re free! Weeeeee so free! All this freedom on my green grass in my big cars and my free freeness of freedomosity, baby Jesus, thank you for America which served the WHITE RACE so well! Thank you little baby Jesus thank you!!
Thank you for all these THINGS that I HAVE so now I can relish the danger of LOSING it! Holy poopsex, blessed art thou in Heaven whose name I dare not speak, Satan himself, President Barack Hussein Obama the PulitzerNobel Peace Prize Stealing Fascist of the Fifth Reich, the Dark Knight of Neoliberalism, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Come! TAKE IT ALL AND LEAVE ME NOTHING.
Separate me from my family, imprison my terrorist friends and rape my communist lover. And leave me only with this: my soul. Because I don’t fucking need it. I just wanna watch TV.
When Julian Assange revealed the collateral murder video in Washington DC, I was so incredibly glad that someone had finally brought light to the horrors of war. After learning the effect that such reporting could have from the Vietnam war, the US government has essentially taken complete control of war reporting. I was less impressed with Cablegate, which raised a lot of questions for me. Was the publishing of this information simply a manifestation of Assange’s anti-American bent? Was it possible to even view these cables in the proper context? At this point in time, I still sided with Assange and felt that Bradley Manning’s good intentions and idealistic desire for transparency would make for a better world.
WikiLeaks was marginalized and then demonized in a way that shocked me deeply. I was inspired by the response from Anonymous, and quickly shocked by the pure extremism which climaxed with the FBI’s AntiSec sting operation. Likewise, the publishing of Stratfor’s internal e-mails, which were stolen simply out of opportunism and malice, was absolutely horrifying.
WikiLeaks has become a tabloid, cheerleading for Anonymous and publishing snippets of e-mails from Stratfor which are taken wildly out of context. One infamous quotation of George Friedman, CEO of Stratfor, has been misrepresented in a deeply crass and disgusting way. As is the rule for tabloids, outrageous headlines obscure the true story.
Oh, that must mean Stratfor is not to be trusted!
The link, of course, leads a tiny minority of readers to a silly e-mail about lunches being stolen from the fridge at Stratfor headquarters. The vast majority of people read the quote and go on to the next tweet, automatically assuming that Stratfor is a bunch of conniving liars. The notion that Stratfor is a “Shadow-CIA” has also spread to all corners of the Internet, although it is a gross misrepresentation at best. Really, Stratfor isn’t nearly as sinister as it might sound.
Supporters of WikiLeaks repeatedly state that Stratfor is a legitimate target for this campaign of forced transparency simply because its business overlaps with the military industrial complex. While I fully agree with the sentiment that the military industrial complex is basically an overgrown monster, is it okay to attack Campbell’s soup for feeding the troops? This simple bad guy/good guy paradigm is obviously not realistic, and the situation is much more complicated. Stratfor provides their services to many corporations, individuals, and government entities both in and outside the United States. Many of these subscribers have been targeted by Anonymous and literally robbed, seemingly for no reason at all. The suggestion that there are important confidential e-mails dripping with scandal and crime has so far proven totally false.
What the Stratfor leaks have revealed, essentially, is that there are a bunch of analysts doing their best to figure out world events and speculating about practically every major happening. Some of these analysts don’t really like Julian Assange, and some of them even make racist statements in private e-mails. On the surface, the Global Intelligence Files appear to be an astounding list of revelations which will keep conspiracy theorists abuzz and WikiLeaks in the public spotlight. At their heart, it’s a sad failure for truth where context has been cut out to push an obvious anti-American agenda.
Right now, you might be thinking, “Hey, but all these tabloids are trying to take down WikiLeaks and smear Assange,” and you’d be totally right. But Assange has fired back, making equally outrageous claims about his detractors. The reductio ad absurdum of Assange’s stance is summarized in the following tweet:
Of course the e-mails from Stratfor are legitimate.
I have considered Assange a genuine agent for positive change and much needed transparency in the past, but this is the tweet that made me realize what WikiLeaks has become: A stupid tabloid with a penchant for the absurd. Look at the web site around you. This is absolutely the Internet’s fastest growing tabloid, featuring intelligent and biting satire. I know what a tabloid does. WikiLeaks has become a tabloid.
I challenge Assange to officially recognize the importance of context. Assange should pony up the $50,000 because I pointed out where he literally destroyed veracity by placing a quotation wildly out of context. And what is truth, if the framework of meaning behind it has been omitted?
A tabloid we may be, but at least we aren’t perniciously cramming a single-minded agenda down your throat by twisting the context of stolen material. Well, I guess we are, but at least our agenda is just all about the laughs. Kinda.
You know all those exaggerated bullshit stories you read on Reddit, which trick you into believing it really happened to someone? 99% of the time, people embellish their stories dramatically and this is the only reason they get upvotes. Yet somehow, you want to believe it because it’s disguised as a sillyass cartoon that gives you chills of cult like love for your precious, sweet, loving redditors. Oh, you know about the trolls, though. They’re always downvoted and exposed because of Reddit’s precious direct democracy.
Well prepare to have your mind completely shattered, REDDIT.
I use hundreds of sockpuppet accounts to constantly push MISERABLE rage comics into Reddit – HELL, I INVENTED THE LIVEJOURNAL RAGE COMIC.
I did this by making sure the comics would play to all the fucktards who go “aww” and upvote something that isn’t funny.
WELL BY GOD, I’ve got something you’re going to HATE. This is designed for all the little trolls out there, who are now going to RUSH to f7u12 spamposting and spamvoting up horrific comics which will possibly ruin the seriousness which has taken over this CANCEROUS and HIDEOUS scar upon the internet and possibly the worst abscess in COMIC HISTORY.
YOU WILL RUE THE DAY, REDDIT!
Imagine the comments… Infiltrate Reddit…. Upvote…. Profit???
I LOOK EDGY AND FUN WHEN I MAKE TEH IMAGES TOO BIG
SHITPOSTS