RE-RELEASE Barrett Brown: POST - "PANAMA PAPERS": 15 YEARS COMMUNICATIONS OF LONDON FIRM'S TAX DODGES, PLUNDERS, HIDDEN ASSETS @ Discomfit Magazine

A memorable quote is worthy of mention concerning the background of the writer.

Barrett Brown
"Trials and Tribulations of a Dead Press"Counterpunch
Oct. 15, 2019

TRIALS
and
TRIBULATIONS
with the
DEAD PRESS

EXCERPT

" ... On the other hand, the DOJ never got around to alleging any such improbable act of mass deceit over the course of the extended and highly public prosecution in which I was facing a hundred and five years worth of charges to which I couldn’t even plea without subjecting countless others to a dangerous precedent. 

Whether this occurred to Chen is hard to say given that it would have no impact on what he told his readers. But shortly after I was placed under a gag order over an article I’d written for The Guardian that the prosecution denounced in open court as “critical of the government”, Adrian Chen attended a legal fundraiser for Jeremy Hammond and myself, commemorating the affair in a piece entitled “Stand by Your Troll: Rallying For Barrett Brown Over Wine and Cheese”. 

After an obligatory reference to my status as a “fameball” – which would certainly explain why I’ve gotten sole notice on the marquis, with Hammond barely receiving mention – Chen begins working the crowd, quickly running into Gregg Housh, who served in the same ambiguous role of de facto press liaison for individual Anonymous operations that I would eventually be asked to serve in as well. 

As Chen puts it:

I’d last seen Housh in 2011 at a South-by-Southwest party hosted by Silicon Valley Bank where venture capitalists had urged him to write a guidebook for key influencers based on the lessons he’s learned from Anonymous. Housh actually did land a big book deal that year, along with Brown, for an account of their time with Anonymous. The project should be even more interesting now if Brown, who faces up to 105 years in prison, is freed this century, and if the feds return the laptop containing large chunks of the manuscript.

The press has always interested me, which is why I worked for so many unproductive years as a journalist before finally giving up and joining the digital insurgency from which I was able to accomplish so much more – though not nearly as much as could have been accomplished had we not found ourselves routinely sabotaged in ways that cannot be forgiven, whether on my own behalf or that of the populations that suffered as a result of the rot. And how deep does that rot go? For now, suffice to say that it’s so bad that this isn’t even an article about Adrian Chen, which would require some 30 pages – or at least that’s how much it came to in my upcoming memoirs, after cuts for length. And there is much more to say regarding my hometown paper, some of which has already been noted at this outlet. ... " 

[End of Excerpt]

Read more at the Counterpunch.