Fear & Loathing in Texas

(Oops! my bad. Sorry, 'bout the vid. It was amazing.) Journalist, Barrett Brown was arrested according to reddit, for a second time. Barrett's interesting in a Hunter Thompson kind of way. Read about him connected to the Aaron Barr--Anonymous life-ruin. Scary stuff if it's your digital life that disappears. Not that Barr was an innocent. As I understand Brown revealed that some deals had been made with Barr's company to compromise privacy in general. Maybe with our government.

Watched the FBI take-down from September 12. It was recorded while Brown was online having fun with friends. Better than pay-TV. More relevant than the evening news. Less editing. Looked up Brown on the Internet. He's a writer for the Guardian in the UK, and Vanity Fair. He's a Hacktivist who unwisely commented on the Confederacy in an article titled "Neoconfederate Civil War Revisionism" around 2010.

Brown was arrested this time at his home in Texas. It had nothing to do with Texas, I'm sure, and everything to do with an FBI agent that he ranted about. Nevertheless, talk about poking a rattlesnake. Or worse, he might as well have dissed someone's mother rather than mess with the pedestal Texas sets the Confederacy on. The 2012 Republican platform contains this jewel: We call for restoration of plaques honoring the Confederate Widow’s Pension Fund contribution that were illegally removed from the Texas Supreme Court building. Whatever that means.

Barrett made points with me in his Neoconfederate story published in the Guardian, in his last paragraph. He explains that it's an American prerogative to allow the celebration of soldiers who died fighting for the preservation of slavery, however, nauseating it might be, and it's a freedom and right, to remember ancestors who served the South, among other principles they might have fought or died for; but as Brown says, it's also a right as well as a responsibility to point out the "degeneracy" of such a stand. I don't hear or read anyone else who has had the audacity to say that as bluntly as Barrett did in print, in front of God, Britain, and certainly, Texas.

I don't know the full story about Barrett Brown but he is a ballsy guy. Or maybe, the drugs have damaged key brain cells. When the FBI hauled his ass out of the chair he was video chatting in, he was ecstatic. He's probably more subdued today or maybe not. This ballsiness might be congenital and unchangeable. Something geneticists like to call oppositional conduct disorder--a born Hacktivist.

[We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of Lulzsec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency by Parmy Olson.]