Book Review: Gonzo journalist Barrett Brown’s memoir a piquant take on hacktivism’s rise

His talents in full flower and basking in public admiration, gonzo journalist and inveterate anti-establishment troublemaker Barrett Brown is jailed in his native Texas on various federal felony charges.

It is 2013 and Brown’s adventures have included helping Anonymous hacktivists publicly expose private U.S. intelligence contractors engaged in deep-state power abuses at a time of rising concerns over Big Brother surveillance.

Brown has done this in swashbuckling style – often in a drug-altered state, chatting with executives whose hacked emails have been dumped online while on opiate maintenance medication. Brown was in withdrawal from antidepressants and opioids, he would later testify, when he threatened an FBI agent in a video posted to YouTube.

“I wanted to become famous for overthrowing things,” Brown writes in his much-awaited memoir, “My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous.”

Mainstream press coverage at the time of Brown’s prosecution was uneven and sometimes just plain inaccurate. Beyond seeking to set the record straight, the book snapshots a pivotal moment in online activism, and pulls no punches.

Although not a hacker, Brown was a well-known actor/provocateur in the rise of hacktivism, a powerful skein of political activism pioneered by the likes of WikiLeaks that tapped the internet to expose wrongdoing and spur change. That includes supporting Tunisia’s 2011 popular uprising.

Those shenanigans preceded Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations of wholesale unauthorized National Security Agency surveillance of the U.S. public, which would erase doubts about their righteousness.

Brown is a showman, a gifted writer in the tradition of William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson. He also has a knack for self-sabotage and has struggled with heroin...