My Glorious Defeats

September 15, 2018

Having served four years in prison for his part in leaking intelligence documents and written a National Magazine Award-winning column while there, Brown returns to freedom with a memoir recounting his involvement with the hacktivist group Anonymous, his experiences in prison, and his recommendations for using today's tools of communication to promote the public good.

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June 10, 2024
National Magazine Award winner Brown recalls his war against the surveillance state in this often-brilliant if sometimes scattershot debut. He begins the account with his days doing “propaganda strategy” for the underground hacker collective Anonymous. In 2012, he was arrested and prosecuted on federal charges of being an accessory to the theft of five million emails from the strategic intelligence firm Stratfor, threatening an FBI agent, and obstructing a search. Much of the narrative follows Brown’s trial and four-year incarceration in Texas. Later chapters describe his feuds with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his prosecution in Britain for holding a “Kill Cops” sign at a protest. Brown’s captivating prose mixes comic grandiloquence (“Had I not filled teenage journals with inane yet consistent juvenilia to the effect that I would be Caesar or nothing?”) with Hunter S. Thompsonesque debauchery (“There are few things in life more hellish than having to explain the exact nature of your role in an anarchist cyberinsurgency to Michael Isikoff while in the opening phases of dope sickness”). Brown superbly depicts the injustices of his prison stint, but his labyrinthine rehash of his adventures in cyberanarchism can be difficult to follow. This works better as a polemic than a personal history. Agent: Daniel Conaway, Writers House.

Starred review from July 1, 2024
A computer hacker recounts his electronic misdeeds and their consequences. Brown's book opens in prison, "the brick metaphor for American decline," an environment that he came to know well thanks to his 63-month sentence. That's not so bad, he notes, considering that he'd racked up federal charges with a combined sentence of 105 years, all connected to his ability to break down electronic barriers. For example, he hacked the email of a prominent white nationalist who was also an FBI informant and dug into the records of the Church of Scientology, which he calls a "hypercommercial techno cult." Brown, a prize-winning journalist as well as one-time heroin addict ("It is a particularity of the opiate-withdrawal process that, in one's desperation, one becomes highly receptive to stray enthusiasms"), relates his story well, but the meat of the narrative lies inside the prison yard, a hellscape that he recounts with surprising good humor. He writes, for instance, of a "platonic prison husband," a small-time Texas hoodlum who'd converted to Islam but still hung with his fellow white prisoners rather than with the Black Muslims--as the author notes, "the first thing one learns upon being incarcerated in the United States is that race is central to prison life." There are exceptions, he notes, but overall, old distinctions such as whether one is a Crip or a Blood fall away in favor of unity against prisoners of other races. As he recounts, Brown took an affable approach that kept him largely out of trouble with all but the occasional martinet of a guard, but he allows that he's still plotting anarchist revolution online, now from the safety of London, given that his homeland is a place where "at least a third of its voters [are] actual fascists." A lively prison memoir from the cyber age.

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