Five years ago, when Anonymous hacked Stratfor, a geopolitical intelligence firm, and dumped five million of its emails, the crime resulted in arrests of many Anonymous hacktivists. One of them was Barrett Brown, who was later sentenced to five years in prison.
Recently Brown walked out of Texas’s Three Rivers Federal Correctional Institute and vowed to resume his work as a journalist and radical information agitator. The ex-convict wants to start an open-source, end-to-end-encrypted collaboration platform where journalists, activists or anyone with an idea can work in a safe and protected environment.
“When things deteriorate, when the system destroys itself as it’s doing right now and does so in such an obvious and disgusting way, my ideas seem less crazy.”
This piece of software is called Pursuant, and it is going to be a bit like business chatting software such as HipChat and Slack. The Wired reports the software would also include a kind of org-chart function to define different users’ roles, the ability to host and search large collections of documents, and a Wiki feature that would allow collaborators to share and edit their findings from those documents.
The software is not only going to allow users to chat, it is also going to allow them to investigate or research crowd-sourced material. Unlike Anonymous, the software and its features are going to let users create an effective rank system wherein anyone can submit a file or a document without the need to join the group.
“People can just show up and begin working. It is a Protestant versus a Catholic system of activism. We want a direct line to civic participation.”
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