I'm not sure that schizophrenia is any better an explanation than straightforward arrogance. Assuming that the leaks of his work are reasonably accurate I'd be concerned if the government actually started using his research to arrest people though.
I'm not sure that Barrs interest in finding patterns in publicly available information in order to sell his intelligence is any different to advertising analysts doing the same thing. The attempt to socially engineer Anonymous via IRC is a bit more extreme, but I haven't seen any evidence that he intended harrassing them; the problem would have occurred if and when law enforcement bodies started harassing innocent people based on his dodgy intelligence. If you start making any investigative work or social network analysis carried out by private citizens online illegal on the basis of stalking laws then you risk censuring a lot of people actually doing good work.
True, and Barr's idea is not actually far off; Facebook and other social networking sites are intelligence goldmines, linking people to aliases, groups, networks, and a lot of other things. Think of how hard it may be for a fugitive to retreat to a trusted safehouse when he's published a list of everyone he's ever met on Facebook via the Friends list, and/or named the handful of people he hasn't friended in a status or note.
The CIA has shown interest in Facebook's database for a long time, because, besides the normal detective work a normal detective can do if he reads through a Facebook page, if you get a handful of real mathematicians working with that dataset, they can certainly rig something up that would at least return really interesting results.
I'm not sure that Barrs interest in finding patterns in publicly available information in order to sell his intelligence is any different to advertising analysts doing the same thing. The attempt to socially engineer Anonymous via IRC is a bit more extreme, but I haven't seen any evidence that he intended harrassing them; the problem would have occurred if and when law enforcement bodies started harassing innocent people based on his dodgy intelligence. If you start making any investigative work or social network analysis carried out by private citizens online illegal on the basis of stalking laws then you risk censuring a lot of people actually doing good work.