The media has had a hard time labeling Barrett Brown. "Anonymous spokesman" doesn't fit because Anonymous is too anarchic and loosely organized to have a spokesman. For the same reason, he's not the collective's "self-proclaimed" spokesman, though he did have more than his share of media appearances. The best option seems to be simply to call Brown a "hacktivist" -- this conveys the idea that he agitates for a cause (Internet freedom) and that he uses quasi-legal means to do so -- and move on.

But now that Brown faces a century in prison on a raft of federal criminal charges, his supporters have settled on a different term to describe Brown: journalist.

Brown's legal defense fund dispatched a press release yesterday calling his arrest and prosecution "a prime example of government persecution of journalists who challenge the status quo."

Brown, his supporters say, was being targeted for his work with ProjectPM, the crowd-sourced research effort he helped establish to comb through leaked documents about government security and intelligence contractors. He was also working on a book for Amazon tentatively called Anonymous: Tales From Inside The Accidental Cyberwar.

See also:
Three Weeks After FBI Raid, Feds Indict Barrett Brown
Is Barrett Brown the Threatening One, or Is it the Guys Who Locked Him Up?

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When Cody Wilson, a libertarian-minded University of Texas law student, first announced plans to fabricate a gun using a 3-D printer in hopes of radically democratizing access to firearms, it seemed a bit like tilting at windmills, especially after the printer he was using was seized.

But Wilson forged ahead, getting help from a San Antonio defense firm, freaking out the New York Times and eventually creating The Cuomo, a 30-round AR-15 magazine.

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Coming soon to Dallas. Possibly.

The Wire, David Simon's epic examination of power, corruption and narcotics in a major American city, was not set in Texas. It couldn't have been. Not because cities here don't have those things (they do) but because local police departments aren't allowed to go around wiretapping drug dealers.

Under current law, that responsibility falls to the Texas Department of Public Safety. Whenever a judge approves a wiretap, prosecutors have to go through DPS to set it up. But this rarely happens. State district judges (the feds have their own system) ordered only two wiretaps in 2011. The previous year the number was one. The year before that, zero.

Nevertheless, twin measures would let Harris County and the state's six largest police departments perform their own wiretaps are sailing through the Legislature. The Senate approved its bill last month, and the issue got a favorable hearing this week in the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee.

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On Monday afternoon, two homeowners in the Lower Greenville West Neighborhood Association grew alarmed when they spotted a team of a half dozen or so guys who were snapping pictures and trespassing on private property. The homeowners were suspicious and called 911. Later, they sent out an email blast to neighbors, urging them to keep an eye out for the men.

They claimed to be from Google, produced one tattered business card that did not reach a business line, and claimed they were on public property. In fact, we caught them redhanded in [a resident's] back yard, inside the fence ... all over his yard. We kept them there asking questions and getting information in order to allow the DPD element time to arrive. By this time, two of them had gotten nervous and bolted.

They told the DPD officers a somewhat different story after the officers arrived.

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IP Nav doesn't say what patents Neiman Marcus is allegedly infringing on, but our money's on the driveable cupcakes.

In the decade since it was founded in Dallas, IP Nav has established itself as a global leader in the increasingly lucrative business of "patent assertion," offering clients the ability to "maximize the value of their IP assets." Put more bluntly, it's a patent troll, shaking down companies by threatening them with lawsuits over patents that they or their clients are squatting on. They are a big problem in the tech world, and IP Nav is a big part of it. Rackspace, the San Antonio-based cloud computing firm, recently called the company "one of the most notorious patent trolls in America."

So when Neiman Marcus received a communique from IP Nav in April, the retailer knew the score. Headlined "proposal to negotiate patent license," the letter explains that an analysis reveals that some Neiman Marcus products appear to use patents held by an anonymous client, described only as the owner of "valuable patents in the field of automation of application programs.

"We would very much welcome the opportunity to enter into constructive discussions with your company to determine whether we can agree to a mutually acceptable patent license agreement or that you are not using our client's patents," the letter continues. "We are focused on addressing these issues without the need for costly and protracted litigation."

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Arlington PD, aviating.

Last year, the Arlington Police Department bought a pair of teeny tiny adorable drones, which the FAA gave them the go-ahead to fly back in March. The APD was stoked, dubbing their new toys their "Aviation Unit" and issuing an FAQ about how the drones would never be used for "routine patrols and surveillance" or to pursue suspects. (Although a toy helicopter hovering above your head as you ran from the cops would have a certain level of menace. A very low level, but still.) Instead, the APD said, the drones would be used for things like "clearing major traffic accidents more quickly," assessing the damage from natural disasters, and taking photos of complex crime scenes.

But as the Texas Tribune's Emily Ramshaw reports today, this puts the APD on a potential collision course with state Representative Lance Gooden, who filed a bill this session to prevent drones from surveilling stuff indiscriminately. (The bill was co-authored by Arlington's own Bill Zedler, in a rare display of non-crazy.)

The Arlington Police are pretty sure they shouldn't be subject to that law, though, should it become a law.

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Someday, technology will become so pervasive, such an ingrained part of existence, that it will erase the markers that once distinguished individual human beings and merge them into a single consciousness floating somewhere in the cloud. It's inevitable, really. Just a matter of when.

Working to usher in that era as soon as possible is Roozbeh Jafari, an electrical engineering professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. As the MIT Technology Review reports, he's teamed up with Samsung to develop the next generation of smartphone technology: mind control.

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Image via.

Not a congressman.

The first tweet hurt Steve Stockman's feelings a little. It read, in full: "YOU ARE A STUPID FAT FUCK."

"I haven't actually put on any weight lately," Stockman writes in an email. "And though I'm not thin, I think 'fat' would be an overstatement."

The next few tweets, all similarly furious, were also rather upsetting until, his ego bruised and his @-replies blowing up, the L.A.-based writer, director and producer realized that he was getting tweets meant for Texas congressman, Ted Nugent BFF and masterful Twitter troll who happens to share his name.

"I get a lot of invitations to prayer breakfasts that I probably wouldn't have before," L.A. Stockman writes. That, he says, and dozens of tweets calling him some iteration of "fat bastard." "Come to think of it, there may be a connection there ..."

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As they try to carve out a permanent niche in the ultra-competitive American car market, Tesla and billionaire founder Elon Musk have had to position themselves as sprightly Davids disrupting the lumbering Goliaths of Detroit and Japan.

They have no other choice. They can't afford the untold billions legacy automakers pour into engineering, R&D, manufacturing, marketing and distribution, and they don't have the scale to churn out millions of cars. To gain so much as a foothold, they have to fundamentally rethink the car business.

Musk was in Austin on Tuesday, where he testified in favor of proposed legislation that would help Tesla do that. Right now, Texas law requires that automakers sell their cars through licensed dealerships. HB 3351 and its companion, SB 1659, would let U.S.-based electric car makers sell directly to consumers.

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panoramio

Stealing Apple products in bulk is always a dicey proposition. Short of brazen daylight raids on the Knox Street Apple Store, which actually seem to be fairly effective, products made by the world's leading producer of consumer electronics tend to be closely monitored by retailers.

But here's a tip for would-be iThieves: just tell police you were testing the store's security.

That seems to have worked fairly well for an employee at the Micro Center on Central in Far North Dallas who was spotted by a passerby yesterday afternoon shoving boxes from a trash can in back of the store into his car. "This individual found it suspicious because the boxes did not appear to be empty," a police report says.

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