Barrett Dylan Brown

(January 1980 - March 2019) Born to Theodore W. Brown and Patricia E. Tufts in San Francisco, California, Barrett was raised on Telegraph Hill in the North Beach section of San Francisco. His father was a world-renowned Architect, Interior Designer, and Real Estate Investor. His mother worked as a flight attendant for Pan Am for many years until she became an award winning author of Multicultural Children's Books, when she took up teaching until her retirement. Everyone who ever met Barrett knew that he had something very special in him and everyone who loved him should be glad to know that he was found to have died peacefully in his sleep, while camping in the woods near Savannah Georgia. As there were no signs of foul play, Chattam County declared him dead of natural causes without any autopsy performed. All very close friends of Barrett will remember that his feelings about his life were very conflicted, and those who loved him should rest secure that he has finally found the Peace which he sought for so long. He is remembered as a celibate Widow after the death of his wife, a writer for 2600 Magazine, accomplished Academic of Cultural Anthropology, Author of several unpublished books (available through The Library of Congress), a Poet, a Magician, a Shaman, a Freemason, and a Devout Roman Catholic. Barrett was cremated along with others who had no one to claim them. [This Memorial Page is a Work in Progress] Anyone with more information about Barrett or who wants more information is encouraged to email his Memorial Account barrett@sdf.org The Hacker Perspective ---------------------- by Barrett D. Brown I am a hacker. I am not famous, infamous, or even well known. But I have always been a hacker. For over a decade, I've vainly sought attention and recognition from the supposed "elite" hackers, trying to get them to admit me to some secret club I imagined they had. I tried chatting on IRC, going to 2600 meetings, trading "secrets," hanging out with already famous hackers, and many various other exploits and pranks done with the intent to impress - trying to become a "hacker." None of that made me a hacker, though I wouldn't realize that until the end. Let me start at the beginning.... I was in third grade when I first came across the book Cyberpunk by Katie Hafner and John Markoff in a used bookstore. It was there that I learned about Kevin Mitnick and that member of the Chaos Computer Club who was working for the KGB. I got my first vague impression about what it meant to be a "hacker." From that moment on, I was obsessed and wanted more than anything to be one. I was already into computers, having grown up with a succession of Apples. First the Apple IIe, then the Apple IIGS, then the first Macintosh, etc. I was lucky to be in an upper middle class family that could afford to keep replacing computers every year or two, when the newest one came out. But Cyberpunk made me realize that computers could connect and, when they did, very amazing things could happen. It was all up to the user. This revelation led me to the Anarchist Cookbook and many other individualists' classics. My mother got me a 300 baud modem and I connected to the Internet by finding " Netcom," one of the very few ISPs that existed in the Yellow Pages. The Internet was command line only, with Gopher, Archie, and the amazingly powerful Finger. But perhaps most importantly it gave me access to BBSes and finding the right ones could lead to all sorts of information from credit card numbers to pirated games to lists of war-dialed numbers. The list of things one could access was virtually infinite. It was all up to the user. It was all up to me. Eventually, the World Wide Web came along and with it my parents subscribed to a brand new service called "America Online," which had chat rooms where you could talk to all types of people. I quickly learned that there was a "User Profile" where you could enter information about yourself that others could see, rather like the Finger command. I made an account where I was a 30-year-old lawyer and part time television actor. At 12 years old, I would sometimes stay up all night chatting on AOL with adult women who thought I was a 30-year-old actor! I would find teachers online and get them to write my school papers for me (cut and paste!) just by asking them questions. Oh, the fun that could be had on AOL, if only one knew how to find the loopholes, how to explore. I soon found any free game I wanted to download and lists with phone numbers for "pirate" and "hacker" BBSes. Most of them would be busy when I tried or wouldn't give me an account. My budding as a hacker did not go easily. I just didn't seem to fit in. Let me say here that computer, phone, and program hacking did not and still does not come naturally to me. I have met computer whizzes to whom binary was like a natural second language, but I was not a fast learner, could not learn programming, and was usually too scared to try anything patently illegal. Nevertheless, I wanted to be a hacker so badly that I made a motto for myself: "Whatever I lack in skill, I will make up for with persistence." This motto has served me well. I would bang my head against something over and over and over until I got it. Eventually, I always got it, even if it took years. Outside of the computer and phone world, I was known as an incredibly precocious teenager whom the majority of teachers could not stand. I could cheat my way through most classes and figure out how to pass tests through process of elimination and how the test was framed, I could social engineer my way into getting friends out of assignments and class with forged notes and phone calls from their "parents," and on and on. In high school, I was elected freshman class president, even though I was virtually unknown, by putting up posters that said "Vote For Me and I'll Give You a Piece of Cheese." When it came time to speak to the school, my opponents talked about changing policy and blah, blah, blah. I had a stack of Kraft singles which I handed out. I won by a landslide to the principal's dismay and learned a lot about politics that day. I found high school classes were so boring and basic to me that I would often skip class to sit in on lectures at the University of California at Berkeley; the lecture halls at that prestigious University were so packed nobody ever noticed me sitting in on advanced lectures about neurology, chemistry, and Egyptology. Meanwhile, my parents were getting understandably distressed. Not only were they getting a divorce, but they did not understand me at all. All they knew was that I was skipping class and staying out all night going to nightclubs with 20- and 30-somethings. (As a side note, I've hung out with older people for most of my life. As a teenager, I looked and acted older than my age and older people always seemed to understand me better. Not only that, but they were more experienced in life and didn't make all the mistakes other people my age did, so I learned a lot from just being around them.) How did I get into 18 plus nightclubs at 14 years of age? I made fake IDs, of course, but also social engineering. I remember being in line for a club in San Francisco called "Winters Gone By" and the guy three people ahead of me in line was chatting with the bouncer. He said "Hey Jackal, great set the other night at Phantom," and Jackal let him right in. When my time came, I said the same thing and voilà, no ID check. Anyway, I wasn't a bad kid, but my parents didn't understand me, so they sent me away to a disciplinary boarding school on the other side of the country. I was only there a month, but I do remember one of the older students was a "real" computer hacker (after several years you were allowed access to computers, but not until they had "reprogrammed" you). He told me to just go with the program and keep my real life secret, but I couldn't stand it, so I ran away from the school to live on the streets. I was 15 years old and my parents wanted me back, so they could send me away again. I was doing pretty well on the streets; I went to the local high school and hung out in the senior's lounge, meeting other kids who I could stay with. Without a GED, I would have to go back to high school and I didn't want to do that, so I went to Berkshire Community College. They said I could get in without a high school diploma, but I had to take some tests. No problem. A few tests later, I was in college and my parents were amazed. Throughout this time, I continued to study computers, telephones, hacking, hackers, and intelligence agencies, also learning how to use the new Microsoft Windows and DOS operating systems. After a year of community college and homelessness, I was getting a bit bored again and missed the excitement of the lectures at UC Berkeley. I told my father I wanted to go there and he just laughed saying, "If you can get into UC Berkeley, then I'll pay for it." I was 16 years old without a diploma; he thought I didn't have a chance. So, after hitchhiking across the U.S. to get back to California, I began to study the UC Berkeley admissions system, allegedly one of the hardest colleges to get into. What I found were two things. First, there was a particular path of admissions properly called "Special Admissions," for students who do not meet the regular qualifications for admission, but had some other skill (like football star or a physics genius). That was one way to go, but the second was called "Concurrent Enrollment," and all that took was some paperwork signed by the teacher of the class (and money of course). So, after a couple of piles of paperwork and the social engineering of a few teachers, I was taking classes at UC Berkeley at 16, with no high school diploma, and only a year of mediocre grades from a small community college. One of the classes was a graduate level course on the works of John Milton with