Barrett Brown

Barrett Lancaster Brown (born August 14, 1981) is an American anarchist, hacktivist, writer, and associate of Anonymous. He is mainly known for his role alongside Anonymous during the early 2010s, including during the Stratfor email leak. Born in a wealthy family, Brown grew up opposed to authority, before becoming a freelance writer for various media outlets. In 2009, he founded Project PM, a crowdfunded investigation wiki. Around that time, he also started working with Anonymous and being one of their associates, helping them during some of their actions, such as during the Tunisian revolution or against the Australian government. In 2011–2012, he was involved in the Stratfor email leak, during which hacktivists managed to obtain and publish thousands of intelligence documents related to the, among others, American military-industrial complex. In 2012, the FBI executed search warrants at his home and later arrested him, also targeting his mother. Three years later, in January 2015, Brown was ultimately sentenced to more than 5 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to accessory after the fact, obstruction of justice, and threatening a federal officer stemming from the FBI's investigation into the 2012 Stratfor email leak. After his release, he would later be involved in Pursuance, a platform trying to link activists together, before moving to the United Kingdom. Brown has written for Vanity Fair, The Guardian, the Huffington Post, The Onion and other outlets. In 2016, he won a National Magazine Award for a series of jailhouse memoirs published in D Magazine and The Intercept. He published a memoir, My Glorious Defeats, in 2024.