Should I call you?
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Dan Conaway
Literary Agent
Writers House
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From: Daniel Conaway
Sent: Tuesday, February 07, 2012 11:16 PM
To: Barrett Brown
Cc: Gregg Housh
Subject: RE: Julia letter
Well, in my usual fashion I found my head spinning a little when you were explaining it on the phone--it did sound exciting and dramatic, but I always find it hard to keep up, and usually miss about half the references anyway...
Look: if you can do Chapter 1 in a way that's concise, and exciting, and Gregg-centric, then do it. You both believe it can be done, right? And one of the best strategies for conveying a three-ring circus, it seems to me, is to allow Gregg himself to admit to how so much activity makes even HIS head spin (that way we don't feel so bad that OURS is spinning); there's so much going on at once that it's like [insert your favorite Cirque du Soleil stunt reference here], and that if it feels, Dear Reader, like the world's about to spin clear off its axis, well, that's cuz that's exactly what's happening! The world itself is in revolution, and somehow, here's Gregg at the center of it all, dancing for his life...So show him juggling six plates with one hand while swallowing a sword and dealing a deck of cards with another, all while being shot out of a cannon--and then pause just as the cannon's about to fire, a freeze-frame that allows him to say, Hey, don't freak out, this will all make sense by the end of the story, I swear it will!
Does that help, at all?
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Dan Conaway
Literary Agent
Writers House
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From: Barrett Brown [barriticus@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 07, 2012 11:00 PM
To: Daniel Conaway
Cc: Gregg Housh
Subject: Re: Julia letter
I'm sorry, I can see what you mean about the e-mail itself. I'll take a look at your notes here in a moment. But did you understand what I mean with this via the phone call we had, at least? I didn't convey it in the e-mail very well, partly because I start feeling desperate when writing anything intended for Julia. Here in particular, it's hard for me to convey to her that the proliferation of all of these references to various issues is not meant as something the reader is supposed to understand or follow closely (and this itself will be made clear to the reader, who will of course be less freaked out about what the reader is supposed to know or think than Julia is), but rather to give a sense of what's at stake here, why we're following Gregg, why he's important by virtue of the importance of Anonymous and the countless issues that are involved. It's difficult for me to show, simply by summary, that I'll be able to pull this off based on the specifics of what goes in and the manner in which they are presented and the commentary that surrounds them.
Anyway, I'll look at the notes and get back to you in a minute.
On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 9:47 PM, Daniel Conaway <dconaway@writershouse.com<mailto:dconaway@writershouse.com>> wrote:
Barrett and Gregg,
I'm sorry, but I think this is going to make her crazy--you're introducing a hundred things that are important to you and Anon, but don't feel personal in terms of Gregg, and which are confusing as hell to anybody but people burrowed down as D E E P in the culture as you guys are. I'm attaching some notes / comments to point at a few examples of what I'm talking about, but really, really, this needs to be a lot clearer and discursive if this is going to work, either as a chapter in fact, or as a strategy here by which we win Julia over to this new approach. The way you present it here--OK, I get that it shows a ton of Anon activity, but I have no idea what the centerpiece is, or what the relevance is, what the connective tissue is among all these things. Syria? Boston PD? Puckett & Faraj? Statfor? Allen West? This doesn't sound like a chapter, it sounds like a crazy quilt of 9000 disparate details that would require 81,000 footnotes for anybody but the two of you to follow.
So now a whole week has passed since I pressed you guys for this new table of contents, whose purpose was to demonstrate CLARITY to Julia, to show how on top of everything we are. Instead you've reorganized on the fly, and--while I appreciate your taking the time to write this letter, well, it's just not accomplishing what it needs to. To the contrary, I'm really afraid that it's proving Julia's point--that by being SO focused on the up-to-the-instant political agendae of the movement, you've sight of the fact that this can only work AS STORY if it's centered in Gregg. For us to be this far along, counting down toward a final manuscript, and now be presenting something that feels so scattered and unformed, this is a recipe for disaster....Based on what you're showing me here, this new opening feels like a terrible idea--and I'm the guy who's trying like hell to be on your side here, OK? Execution's everything, I know, but this just feels like a mishmash, and all we've got of Gregg is this image of him reviewing 8 bijillion emails and ruminating on 2 years' worth of activity.
Barrett, here's what you MUST do: write a really clean, really clear table of contents. Go ahead and put, for your new Chapter 1, that it's a snapshot of an absolutely remarkable weekend of activity [and then you need to be able to distill down, in five or six sentences, why it feels like everything's come to a head]; we'll work on selling her on the IDEA of the new chapter 1 separately. But both of you guys, you need to disconnect from the outside world, stop doing interviews and and and, and just focus on STORY. And--in the short term? -- you have GOT to provide a cogent table of contents for Julia. Or we're going to wind up with a disaster on our hands that could, in the end, result in the cancellation of this contract.
=Dan
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Dan Conaway
Literary Agent
Writers House
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From: Barrett Brown [barriticus@gmail.com<mailto:barriticus@gmail.com>]
Sent: Tuesday, February 07, 2012 5:55 PM
To: Daniel Conaway
Subject: Julia letter
Julia-
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you on this; I'm assuming Dan has given you a sense of what's going on, but Gregg and I wanted to make sure things played out as we expected before talking to you about this.
We just had a huge weekend that we feel will be perfect for the first chapter - which was originally going to be the January 28th FBI raids and aftermath and then changed to the evening they watch the first Scientology protests unfold live via video (the latter is what's discussed in the most recent TOC/overview you have). By Saturday, though, it started to look like this last weekend would work far better as a first chapter, such that the Scientology evening should be moved back up towards the middle of the book.
So here's what we're thinking now. First chapter starts with Gregg waking up at home; it's over two years since he somehow found himself somewhere towards the center of all this crazy Anon stuff. He's got more press inquiries in his e-mail box this morning than usual - a lot more. Turns out that a couple of Anon's hackers had managed to sit in on a conference call between the FBI and Scotland Yard in which they discuss their ongoing investigation of Anonymous. That recording has been leaked this morning, and the press is all over it, law enforcement is embarrassed, even a couple of their cases are now compromised. Gregg knows he's going to have to go on TV at least once today and, yep, there's the request to appear on The Situation Room right there.
He keeps going over his e-mail; by this time, he's also checking in with the internet relay chat networks where Anon does a lot of its business, and he's getting info from his contacts on what else is happening - and what may be about to happen. Turns out that Puckett & Faraj, the major military law firm that defended the Marine who admitted involvement in the Haditha massacre, has been entirely hacked by a couple of hackers with whom Gregg has an ambiguous working relationship - website defaced, all e-mails downloaded and about to be leaked to the public. The implications of this gradually unfold throughout the chapter.
As Gregg works behind the scenes to ensure that things go as smoothly as possible while also juggling additional live TV appearances, more goes down. On Friday alone, the Boston PD and several law enforcement bodies in Texas and West Virginia have their sites taken down and their info leaked; one Anon team publishes names, phone numbers, and e-mail accounts and passwords for every local police branch in West Virginia. The Syrian regime is hacked as well, with another Anon team revealing internal communications by Assad's people in which they discuss their public relations strategy vis a vis western news outlets (this comes a few days after the massacre of hundreds of anti-Assad protesters). This itself brings to mind the work Anonymous has done in the Middle East since January 2011, when Tunisian Anons called on the rest of the movement to help bring attention to local protests that would in turn lead to unrest and reform in a dozen other countries across the region. It also reminds Gregg of the Stratfor hack two months previously, in which 5.2 million e-mails were obtained; Stratfor had previously been downplaying the propensity of the Assad regime to engage in massacres.
By the end of the weekend, several more national and local government bodies have been hit in various ways. Even just the initial research into the Haditha law firm e-mails has revealed that former Congressman and 2008 GOP presidential candidate Duncan Hunter and current Congressman Allen West worked behind the scenes with the law firm to try to make the case disappear entirely with help from the second in command at the USMC; the documents in question are provided to inquiring journalists at NYT, Rolling Stone, and Atlantic. This might not have come to light were it not for the fact that hackers in this case retained access to the firm's e-mail server even after defacing the website and downloading existing e-mails; thus it is that when the firm's principals e-mail Allen West to warn him that their past communications are compromised, this becomes instantly know to those of Gregg's associates who pulled off the hack, and thus shortly thereafter to Gregg, who orders a further investigation and begins privately briefing reporters on the issue. Meanwhile, he realizes that his weekend is shot; he's going to have to speak to other contacts in government and various NGOs as well; some of them will come to him with concerns, others with requests for specific information.
To the reader, he notes that, although the last two years have been full of activity, this didn't use to be a typical weekend for him, or for Anonymous; things are accelerating, it seems. And how things got to this point... well, let's take a step back, to childhood. The next chapter, which you already have in the form of a draft, comes next.
This first chapter - which will be short compared to the others - accomplishes several things. It gives the reader a sense of what Anonymous has become, even if the reader still doesn't know exactly what it is and how it got to be that way. It gives the reader a sense of what it's like to be Gregg. It conveys to the reader that Anonymous has been involved in countless incidents with countless enemies - although there is a pattern to this, and the overall struggle may indeed be understood. The reader is inundated with all of these connections, with quick references to complicated conflicts, in order to best convey why it is that Anonymous is among the most important dynamics in play right now by virtue of its own actions and, moreso, by virtue of what it means for the near future at large. Past this first chapter, the book constructs all this, more or less from the beginning, and in such a way as to initiate the reader into something that is otherwise incomprehensible not just from the outside, but often from the inside as well.
Incidentally, the rest of the chapters are in the same order as previously noted. Now that Gregg and I have had a few more discussions and I've had a chance to integrate the entirety of the interviews I did with him into the other chapters, I can provide that TOC for you. Please let me know if Dan's idea on format still works and I'll finish it up for you today.
--
Regards,
Barrett Brown
512-560-2302<tel:512-560-2302>
--
Regards,
Barrett Brown
512-560-2302