Category: News

Barrett Brown, a self-described journalist with no training whatsoever, has long played pied piper for Anonymous when not working as an intermediary for the media and hackers. Commander X, a long-time hactivist promoting the rights of the homeless, is another popular demagogue who boasts openly about how he is able to “control” the hive.

Command  delusions, drug addictions, and homophobia are not the only thing these fire-dogs have in common. In Barrett Brown’s nightly tinychat sessions, he discusses the issues of the day, and yesterday he spoke about the case of Amber Lyon.

Amber Lyon was allegedly fired from CNN for her overzealous coverage of Occupy and Arab Spring events. The ongoing flap between her and CNN is filled with conflicting and confusing nonsense, but I’m inclined to go with the sensible story on CNN International.

“By mid February 2011 CNN had already deployed several of its most well respected international correspondents to report on the unrest and the government’s violent response, including Nic Robertson, Arwa Damon, Rima Maktabi and CNN International Anchor Hala Gorani.  Damon, Maktabi and Gorani are all fluent Arabic speakers.”

Glenn Greenwald, a former trial lawyer with absolutely no training as a journalist, used his podium on the Guardian to push the narrative that Lyon’s documentary on Bahrain and other reports about Bahrain have been suppressed.

“After Lyon’s crew returned from Bahrain, CNN had no correspondents regularly reporting on the escalating violence.”

So, just how are Lyon’s chops? Is she a capable and competent seeker of truth, and is that why she was fired from CNN? Would she fall prey to a simple twitter hoax?

How about Barrett Brown? Is he also an easily-fooled demagogue who will believe anything confirming his preexisting prejudices?

I assumed the name ‘amber’, a social-engineering hacker character from a novel I’m working on, and Barrett Brown immediately assumed I was Amber Lyon. I requested the presence of Commander X, and he promptly appeared.

The conversation that followed was immensely painful. They begged me for information proving CNN International receives money from Bahrain, and I claimed I had some. I told them I was working on an article which would prove this point, but I only had one source and a professional journalist needs more than just that in order to corroborate fact. This, of course, was a reference to the supposed journalist, Barrett Brown, who did not corroborate the identity of Amber Lyon before reporting on her presence via Twitter. Commander X, the hacker who said he could control the hive, seemed ready to orchestrate a cyberattack at my whim, interpreting my plea for extra sources as a request for a hack. Oh, the bitter horrific irony. Would he have hacked a web site for a hoaxer? My God! Anonymous, is this your leader?

Demagogues are great for confirming everything you already believe and whipping up hysteria, but they’re not what they claim to be. As a proven prophet, I’m all too happy to pull rank on them and show that a lot of noise does not a leader make.

Assange has been embroiled in a sex scandal that many of his supporters claim is more about his position at WikiLeaks than it is about allegations brought by two Swedish women. The womens’ right to see Assange brought to trial is often dismissed cleverly by Assange with rhetoric that belies many complications that are far too boring for the general public to delve into. So, skipping past all this bullshit designed as an ‘out’ so we don’t infringe on the notion of justice for rape victims, let’s explore the possibility that Assange is in fact being set up with sex allegations to discredit him and his organization.

What is WikiLeaks? WikiLeaks is not transparent, so we don’t know exactly how they operate. If we are to take them at their word and ignore all evidence suggesting otherwise, as serves our technofetishist bias, they’re a cypherpunk dream come to life. Here is a service that provides would-be leakers with a safe crypto solution to ensure their anonymity. Never mind that there’s a complicated world outside the Internet where leakers get caught even when taking all prudent technological safeguards. WikiLeaks has provided a wealth of investigative scoops, and that’s good, right? Plus, Assange redacted them like any good professional journalist would.

But here’s what Bruce Sterling had to say back in December of 2010:

Now, in strict point of fact, Assange didn’t blandly pirate the massive hoard of cables from the US State Department. Instead, he was busily “redacting” and minutely obeying the proprieties of his political cover in the major surviving paper dailies. Kind of a nifty feat of social-engineering there; but he’s like a poacher who machine-gunned a herd of wise old elephants and then went to the temple to assume the robes of a kosher butcher. That is a world-class hoax.

Assange is no more a “journalist” than he is a crypto mathematician. He’s a darkside hacker who is a self-appointed, self-anointed, self-educated global dissident. He’s a one-man Polish Solidarity, waiting for the population to accrete around his stirring propaganda of the deed. And they are accreting; not all of ‘em, but, well, it doesn’t take all of them.

Oh, never mind all that. It’s written by a crazed maniac enemy of Assange who is just a cheerleader for the US Government and not a world-renowned award winning science fiction writer and expert on hacker culture.

Why would the governments of Sweden and the US collaborate to smear Assange? The answer is very simple. Assange is a threat, and dealing with him in any other way would reflect poorly on politicians who actually do have something to lose. It is a heresy of the highest order to suggest that Sweden doesn’t actually want Assange extradited to the US, but this is one point we don’t need a ton of expert legal opinions to prove. It’d be much better to make everyone think Assange is a rapist, give him a small fine, and let WikiLeaks the Rapist Hacker Group go on their way as a totally discredited source for stuff no one believes.

Assange is in a Chinese Finger Trap. By fleeing to Ecuador and taking his legal struggle for freedom of speech to the global arena, he’s trapped himself in the embassy of a country with a very poor record for freedom of press and human rights. Now all the dumb sheeple out there think he’s a rapist on the run, and many of his former supporters now think he was never interested in free press to begin with. As unthinkable as those two possibilities are to us who still believe in Assange, it’s clear that by struggling out of the trap set by the evil Swedish and US conspiracy he’s only brought it tighter around him.

Paul Ronge, a former public relations adviser for Assange, recommended Assange face prosecution by Swedish authorities. Doing so would have saved Assange supporters this endless abject speculation and verbal gymnastics that attempt to thread the needle between defending Assange and respecting the claims of his rape victims. The words of Henry David Thoreau in the landmark work Civil Disobedience ring especially true: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” So even accepting Assange’s conviction that extradition to Sweden would mean rendition to the US and possible execution, he’d be better off as a dead man than as a disingenuous coward hiding in the embassy of a country that represents everything he opposes.

There’s only one way out of a Chinese Finger Trap.

INTERNET–Antisec, a subgroup of Anonymous, the “hackers on steroids,” released a million out of twelve million Apple IDs allegedly obtained from an FBI laptop. Antisec’s former leader Sabu worked with the FBI just days after it was created, sending a string of young idealistic hacktivists to prison. The leak of information on Apple users appears to have been orchestrated by the FBI, as it is common knowledge the FBI has been in control of Antisec since its inception.

Barrett Brown, official spokesperson for Anonymous and CIA plant, stated in a tinychat that within 5-10 years America will be overthrown. “You think I’m insane?” The megalomaniac pariah in charge of ruining the image of Anonymous stated, “these people in government, they’re responsible for the deaths of millions of people, and you say I’m insane? You’re some fucking defense contractor, and when the revolution comes we’ll string you all up, no matter how many of you there are.”

Apple did not immediately comment, but Android developers have close ties to the FBI, according to a leaked Stratfor document from WikiLeaks GIFiles.

Commander X, leader of the People’s Liberation Front, another subgroup of Anonymous and DHS plant, stated that he doesn’t really like gays, and Apple is for gays and women. Representative Dan Gordon, America’s only Anonymous official, agreed that all women are “liars and sluts, except for Amber Lyon and Gabriella Coleman.”  Meanwhile, a network of sex workers led by a secretive activist closely allied with Chronicle.SU who prefers to stay anonymous, has been keeping an eye on these misogynist revolutionaries.