Anonymous Publishes Information On Government Employees In Retaliation For Barrett Brown Arrest

A hacker claiming to be a part of the Anonymous collective published government employees' identities on the Internet Thursday in apparent retaliation for the arrest of former Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown.

Talking Points Memo reports that the text file (which you can find here) contains the authentic names, credit card data and other information about a random series of 13 government employees. Their duties range from military personnel to an employee at the Department of Justice, according to Talking Points Memo.

The employees, when alerted to the news, told the news site that they had no affiliation with Brown and were confused as to why they were chosen to be exposed.

Brown -- who was described in the document as Anonymous' "controversial hated/loved friend" -- was arrested Wednesday, hours after he posted a video to YouTube threatening an FBI agent who allegedly harassed Brown's mother. You can find the video, which is titled "Why I'm Going to Destroy FBI Agent Robert Smith Part Three: Revenge of the Lithe," by clicking here.

Brown's lawyer told Wired.com his client was being charged with threatening a federal agent. Brown was one of the few public faces of Anonymous, an organization known to intentionally avoid having a figurehead. He authored a Huffington Post column in 2010 that deemed Anonymous "among the most important and underreported social developments to have occurred in decades."

Brown was sitting in on an online chat when the FBI raided his home. The computer he was using picked up the sound of his screaming in the background as FBI agents yelled "You're going down! Get your hands down!"

Earlier this year Gawker reported that Brown's home in Texas had been raided by the FBI. Brown is also known to have been given a six-figure advance to write a book about his involvement with the hacker organization.

Anonymous is a loose collection of anarchist Internet activists that oppose any kind of Internet censorship or surveillance - legal or otherwise. The group rose to prominence when founders of the Swedish BitTorrent website the Pirate Bay were charged with and found guilty of copyright infringement.

Anonymous hacked Amazon.com last year after the company pushed Wikileaks off its server, according to the Daily Mail.