Barrett Brown, who occasionally posted in our LGF Pages section a few years ago, was sentenced today to 63 months in prison for transmitting threats, being an accessory to hacking charges, and interfering with a search warrant.

There’s already an outcry against this from the libertarian “hacktivist” community, who are trying to paint Brown as a hero of free speech, unfairly imprisoned by the government.

I knew Barrett Brown through phone conversations and email before he got involved with the hacking of Stratfor, and for a while I thought of him as a friend — but man, was I ever wrong.

Long story short, some of the things he posted at LGF were criticized by our commenters and Barrett went absolutely nuts about it, in a classic ultra-narcissist reaction. He blamed me for the criticism (ironically, one of the comments he was most upset about said he was risking getting in trouble with the FBI), and began a secret campaign to hack Little Green Footballs (causing a DDoS attack at one point) and poison my reputation by revealing private emails between him and me to none other than far right anti-Islam blogger Pamela Geller.

For the record, the emails he outed to Pamela Geller were asking him for the IP address of a commenter at a site for which he wrote an article; that commenter is an obsessed right wing loon who’s been stalking me all over the Internet for many years. It wasn’t about some random person who just criticized me. And to make things even worse, Brown subsequently went to the website of this crazed stalker and revealed more of my emails to them. He basically went on a crusade to assassinate my reputation, and used some of the worst people on the Internet to do it.

Barrett Brown is no hero of free speech. He’s a vindictive, vengeful thug.

I don’t wish ill on Brown, despite the horrible shit he pulled on me. But it makes me sick to see him praised as a free speech icon, when he plotted to out my private information and hack my website. That’s the real Barrett Brown, not the glamorized image his followers are trying to push out there.

Below is a link to a leaked chat log from 2011 in which Barrett Brown discusses his plots against LGF and me personally, spews homophobic, racist and antisemitic slurs, and all kinds of other nastiness.