Re: Barrett here

Well, it would be difficult to give a brief overview on that, as this
actually goes back years to when she was involved in Chanology and got
into some massive dispute with other participants. I wasn't around
then, as I only got involved with Anonymous when OpTunisia began. I
first encountered her under her Twitter handle "FakeGreggHoush" -
Gregg Housh is one of the guys who helped to launch Chanology and was
outed by the Church afterwards, and she blames him for whatever went
down back then. I'm assuming you've talked to her, in which case she
will have probably told you that Housh is responsible for any number
of terrible things that happened to her back then. She will have also
told you a number of things about me. One of the things she'll
probably have told you is that I threatened her. This is true in a
sense; I threatened to "dox" her after she had spent the day
attempting to dox various Anonymous participants, all of whom she
terms "criminals" and occasionally "terrorists." She claims to have
given the message I left her to the FBI, which is probably true; she's
an FBI informant of some sort, or at any rate has been in perpetual
contact with a special agent to the FBI who has been looking into
matters relating to Anonymous for a while. Recently she claimed on her
Twitter account - which is now changed to "AsheraResearch" - that I
tried to hack her phone.

The thing about Emick is that she denied being "FakeGreggHoush" for
almost a year, and denied being the "Asherah" behind Backtrace
Security. Those of us who claimed that she was, and who pointed to her
personal disputes with a handful of others as the likely source of her
obsession with the movement, she constantly dismissed as "idiots."
When a profile was done on me and my early work with Anonymous on the
matters of Tunisia and HBGary, she again claimed not to be Emick and
cited some other person as her real identity. Later she publicly
threatened to "expose" the writer, Tim Rogers, to his editor for some
unspecified thing. Incidentally, that article just won the National
Magazine Award a few days ago. And, of course, she spoke at Defcon
last year, thereby confirming that she was in fact Jennifer Emick. Her
explanation for having concealed her identity was that she was afraid
for her life, which probably wouldn't explain why she was nonetheless
willing to show up at a convention full of Anons. If you'd like to
know more about the ways in which she leveraged this untruth into a
means of libeling others, you might want to speak to "Laurelai," or
"Stuxnetsource" on Twitter, who was one of the people she convinced of
this.

The other person I would suggest you speak to is her former "partner"
in Backtrace Security, who went by "Hubris" and spoke with her at
Defcon and other conferences. They had a sort of splitting up
recently, and apparently she's threatening to sue him over the company
name. She'll tell you that he's recently suffered a nervous breakdown.
I see no evidence of his; having had to deal with him when he's come
into some of the collaborative documents we were using for
investigations last year, he doesn't seem to be acting any differently
now then he did back then. He's backtracesec on Twitter, and not long
ago he published e-mail correspondence between the two of them that
will give you a sense of their activities together.

I really would have preferred not to be involved in all of this, but I
was very upset at the very haphazard way in which she was going after
people who involved themselves in the Anon movement. One of them was a
woman with whom I had a sort of relationship and who was very
enthusiastic about the Arab Spring operations; one of Emick's partners
threatened to dox her and her 16-year-old daughter last year, and of
course Emick - who was still denying that she was Emick - defended
this as reasonable since the woman was allegedly "consorting with
criminals." Here is a link to conversations I had with Emick, under
her name "Asherah," around that time, as well as with one of her
partners, Zud: http://pastebin.com/yPvN5TFL

She actually posted the entirety of this conversation herself from her
Twitter for "context," so its authenticity is not disputed. If you ask
her about the incident, she will now claim that my girlfriend is 24
years old, and thus it's impossible for her to have a child that old -
something she said a few weeks ago on her Twitter feed. She is
thinking of an entirely different girlfriend, who is referenced in an
article about me, and who I'm not longer dating. That's one of the
problems with her approach to "investigating" people - she will not
admit to mistakes. See the conversation linked to above for a better
sense of that.

Finally, I will note, and her estranged partner will confirm (as he
has done on Twitter recently), that Emick collaborated with executives
at HBGary - Greg Hoglund and Jim Butterworth - against Anonymous after
the episode in which HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr wrongly announced
that he had discovered Anon's leadership, and HBGary was hacked, with
the e-mails revealing a series of conspiracies whereby Barr and others
were planning to set up activist groups for fraud. Apparently she was
never paid for her work despite turning in an invoice, but I can't
confirm that. All of this was suspected for a while, but only
confirmed recently after the UGNazi group hacked her e-mails and
released portions of them. Likely she will tell you that some of them
are real but some of them are fake; HBGary made the same claim when
their own e-mails were released a year ago. Apparently she signed an
NDA with them, which is understandable; Aaron Barr, with whom she
appears to have been in contact as well, is also restricted from
talking about what he did at the company, although a great deal of
that is of course known by the e-mails, and what the e-mails show is a
pattern of extraordinary dishonesty and a willingness to set up
activists using techniques that are still relatively unknown, and thus
impossible to defend against. Here are the FBI/Emick e-mails that the
hacker group released: http://ugnazi.com/dumps/pics/FBI/

The reason I have to keep up with all of this is that I was raided by
the FBI last March, and there's some sort of sealed affidavit as well.
I have no way of knowing how much of Emick's "work" for the agency
contributes to whatever they might think I did - as you'll see in the
conversation, she was in the habit of gloating about how I would be
imprisoned - but my concern is that she has been quite wrong about a
number of matters, has nothing to lose by being wrong, and clearly has
a very strong psychological need to feel a degree of triumph over
those associated with Anonymous, regardless of whether or not the
means of that triumph are ethical or truthful. And of course the FBI
didn't seem to have any problem using someone as a "witness" or
whatever she was to them who was also harassing many of the very same
people, lying about them, and all the rest.

If you any specific questions about any of this, please feel free to
ask. As you can probably tell, this is a complex story, and to the
extent that you look into it, you're going to find a lot of bizarre
little departures. I don't doubt that Emick has been the victim of
some terrible behavior, and I'm sure she's upset about the ways in
which the internet can be cruel, but she's very clearly taking out her
frustrations on a large number of people who got involved with
Anonymous for positive reasons, who have nothing to do with whatever
disputes she had years ago, and who aren't used to having to contend
with someone who has so much time on her hands and so little concern
for those who might be unfairly targeted by her own network of people,
some of whom are very cruel indeed.

On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 2:39 PM, Sam Biddle <sbiddle@gizmodo.com> wrote

Thanks for the quick reply. I'm actually just wondering if you can provide
me with a quick overview of your relationship with Jennifer Emick, and how
she's become such a target within the community.

thanks,
sam


On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 2:51 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:


Give me a call on my cell, below.

--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
940-735-9748





--
Sam Biddle
Staff Writer, Gizmodo
Twitter: @samfbiddle




-- 
Regards,

Barrett Brown
940-735-9748