My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous: A Memoir

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 [journalist] 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. (July)