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uh, actual intelligence.”
There was another long pause as Wansley took in what he was hearing, then a loud roar in Houston as a plane few over Brown’s house.
“Uh, basically for instance I’m looking at an e-mail right now,” Brown continued, shouting to be heard over the plane. “Says you had a
meeting at the offices of Booz Allen, ten thirty on, let’s see, somewhere in late January with Aaron Barr. Aaron Barr of course as you know
was researching Anonymous, he attempted to dig up our leadership. He was going to sell a list with my name on it to the FBI, with the names
of a lot of people who aren’t actually IN Anonymous. His methodology was a bit off, you might say…Um, and I’m assuming at this point
you’re probably not working—”
“I’m—I’m familiar with the organization,” Wansley said, sounding weary. “First of all we don’t comment on our client work at all, to
protect the confidentiality of all our clients.”
“Right.”
“I can tell you we have no business dealings with HBGary anymore.”
Brown paused.
“So you weren’t in business dealings with them, you were just discussing the topic?” he asked.
“I can’t comment on what someone else asked me to do, but we had no business dealings at all with HBGary.”
“But you did have business dealings with them previously, right?’ Brown tried again.
“Never.”
“But you met with him not for social matters, but to discuss Anonymous.”
“I have no relationship and I can’t make any comment.”
“You have no relationship with Aaron Barr?” Brown knew the conversation was coming to an end, and he was floundering.
“Please call my public affairs office and they’d be happy to talk to you.”
“Thanks,” Brown said.
“Thank you. Bye.”
Click.
Brown hung up, then laughed out loud without smiling. “Tee hee hee!” He quickly wrote up a blog post titled “Booz Allen Hamilton VP
Caught Lying” in which he explained: “He said he had no relationship with HBGary, which is odd insomuch as that this e-mail would seem
to indicate otherwise.” Brown added a link to one of Barr’s e-mails, saying, “I had a meeting with Bill Wansley over at Booz yesterday.”
Over the next few days, Brown kept sending messages to Topiary about HBGary. Topiary soon got the hint that Brown was serious and
he invited him into a private Skype group with Gregg Housh and a few others to focus on researching the e-mails more deeply. Topiary kept
the Skype group open at all times and found for the next two weeks that he was increasingly being pulled into its conversations, spending at
least seven hours a day on the investigation into what Barr had really been working on. Brown gave it a name: Operation Metal Gear, after
an old Nintendo game, and its goal, in a nutshell, was to find out how the intelligence community was infiltrating the Internet and social
media sites like Facebook and Twitter to spy on American citizens. Cyber security buzzwords like sockpuppets, persona management
software, data monitoring, and cognitive infiltration frequently cropped up, every lead branching out from the work and research of HBGary
Federal and Barr. Whenever Topiary stumbled upon an e-mail from Barr’s cache that could lead to new information on these issues, he’d
send the link to Brown and let him know.
The project was intense, largely because of Brown himself, who seemed to never sleep. Topiary would wake up in the morning in his part
of the world to find the Texan had been up all night reading through the HBGary e-mail trove. Brown would then spend the next two hours
explaining what he had discovered overnight, often speaking at a hundred miles a minute. One particularly long conference call with him
lasted thirteen hours, and another six hours, with Brown often using overly formal phrases like pursuant to our investigation. Topiary found
this irritating at first, but he couldn’t help admiring Brown’s work ethic and passion for his activism. It seemed a level above even the most
die-hard moralfags in Anonymous.
The son of a wealthy real estate investor, Brown had a penchant for pin-striped shirts and cowboy boots, as well as a knack for keeping
Topiary’s interest piqued. “We’re about to unravel something big,” he’d say.
“To begin with I felt sorry for him,” Topiary later remembered. “He was putting in a lot of hard work, but just came across the wrong way
to Anon.” It didn’t help that his IRC nickname was BarrettBrown. “Everyone hated him. There were all kinds of anti-Barrett discussions in
private channels, often mocking his methods and drug addiction.” Brown was widely known in the Anon community to take hard drugs. One
journalist who interviewed him over lunch recalled Brown starting off by smoking a joint, drinking alcohol, and shunning food throughout
the meal, then taking a dose of a synthetic form of heroin—all the while speaking with extraordinary lucidity. Topiary dropped hints when he
could that Brown wasn’t so bad if they overlooked a few things, but Brown’s rambling YouTube videos and conspiracies “just made things
worse.”
Chanology and Operation Payback had shown that if they were manipulated in the right way, Anons in their hundreds would suddenly
want to collaborate on a raid or project. But key to that was making a raid fun and exciting. Topiary, who was becoming Brown’s liaison
with AnonOps, noticed that while Brown’s campaign to uncover corruption had sounded sexy to the Anons at first, the fact that he had to
struggle to maintain their interest demonstrated how difficult it was to harness the spontaneous, unpredictable power of Anonymous. Brown
wanted Anonymous to help him carry out long-term research, but it was tough getting people in a community rooted in lulz to stick to a
project for weeks, even months on end. It got even harder when Brown tried to get Anonymous on the evening news.
Between January and March of 2011, Brown’s name got passed around among journalists who covered Anonymous, as he was among the
rare few in the community who would consent to be on the end of a phone line, not a confusing IRC network. Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and
CNN all wanted to talk to him. Then, on March 8, NBC Nightly News broadcast an “exclusive,” a television report by Michael Isikoff, who
described Brown as “an underground commander in a new kind of warfare.” The interview took place in Brown’s apartment and had shots
of him typing into his white Sony netbook, his desk strewn with cigarette packets and other paraphernalia. Toward the end, Brown was seen
leaning back in his green plastic chair and pontificating to an almost awestruck Isikoff as the Texan dangled a cigarette from his fingers.
“It’s cyber warfare,” he said in a southern baritone, looking relaxed. “Pure and simple.” Brown was actually racked with pain throughout
the interview, having stopped injecting himself with Suboxone four days prior. His bones ached in a way most people would never
experience. (He would relapse in April on a trip to New York, where he would take heroin, and then get back on Suboxone when he