Subject: Fwd: Anonymous and Tunisia
From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>
Date: 1/18/11, 00:13
To: Clark Robinson <robinsonchicago@gmail.com>

Going to do this and then will get back to Guardian with one of those ideas, thanks.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Naz Khan <nyk284@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 10:39 PM
Subject: Re: Anonymous and Tunisia
To: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>


Barrett,

In short, yes it does interest me a lot! Go for it.

Naz
On Jan 18, 2011, at 2:57 AM, Barrett Brown wrote:

> Nasir-
>
> This is Barrett Brown; I've been speaking to your correspondent Yasmine on behalf of the faction of Anonymous she's been writing about due to its involvement in Wikileaks and the Tunisia revolt, and she mentioned that you might be interested in an op-ed. I don't know how much background you have already, but to sum up, Anonymous took down the websites for Mastercard and Paypal after they and other firms gave in to U.S. pressure to deny payments to Wikileaks and have also been running scattered information campaigns in an effort to promote the major stories that the U.S. media have ignored, such as Shell's infiltration of Nigeria. More recently, after Wikileaks released a specific account of corruption on the part of their government and Tunisians began protests, we took down all non-essential government websites (those not providing a service to citizens) by a DDOS attack and replaced one with a message of support to the Tunisian people. After Ben-Ali departed we shifted focus to a informational campaign intended to provide Tunisians with the latest communicational tools and otherwise assist them in building secure, network-based civic organizations capable of organizing educated members of the population and ensuring that they will be able to collectively act in such a way as to counter the corruption of their nation's leaders and establish a freer government. To this end, we've been distributing guides written by Anonymous and veterans of people's revolutions that I've brought in for the purpose, and we distribute these through our Tunisian contacts and various media. Incidentally, we do not consider this an ambitious goal in the context of the last ten years, which we believe to be only the beginning of a new dynamic whereby the new communication environment will foster successful people's movements across the globe. I myself have been covering Wikileaks and Anonymous for several years now and participating in the latter, and my predictions regarding their significance on the world scene have always turned out to be conservative.
>
> I'd like to write an op-ed explaining what has been going on over the past couple of weeks and why it represents an extraordinarily important dynamic that is nonetheless largely unacknowledged by the media and the public at large. As for me, I'm a former journalist and freelancer for Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Huffington Post, New York Press, Skeptical Inquirer, The Onion, and dozens of other outlets, the author of two books, and occasionally advise candidates in national races on media and communications issues. Let me know if this idea interests you.
>
>
> --
> Regards,
>
> Barrett Brown
> 512-560-2302




--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
512-560-2302