Anonymous hacktivist Barrett Brown sentenced to 5 years behind bars

[TexasTowelie]

Barrett Brown was sentenced to 63 months behind bars, minus the 31 months he’s already served.

He also faces nearly $900,000 in restitution and fines and two years of supervised release.

After the sentence, Brown released the following statement:

“Good news!

“The U.S. government decided today that because I did such a good job investigating the cyber-industrial complex, they’re now going to send me to investigate the prison-industrial complex. For the next 35 months, I’ll be provided with free food, clothes, and housing as I seek to expose wrongdoing by Bureau of Prisons officials and staff and otherwise report on news and culture in the world’s greatest prison system. I want to thank the Department of Justice for having put so much time and energy into advocating on my behalf; rather than holding a grudge against me for the two years of work I put into in bringing attention to a DOJ-linked campaign to harass and discredit journalists like Glenn Greenwald, the agency instead labored tirelessly to ensure that I received this very prestigious assignment.

“Wish me luck!”

Read more: http://crimeblog.dallasnews.com/2015/01/anonymous-hacktivist-barrett-brown-to-be-sentence-today-in-federal-court-in-dallas.html/

[jakeXT]

1. lol /nt

[JaneyVee]

2. Is this the guy who was accused of stealing credit card #s?

[TexasTowelie]

3. No.

The article said that he pleaded guilty in April to accessory after the fact in the unauthorized access of a protected computer. He also admitted interfering with a search warrant and threatening the FBI agents who were investigating him.

[JaneyVee]

4. Oh, ok. Wrong person I guess.

[starroute]

6. They did try to accuse him of it

But since all he'd done was copy and paste a link from one chatroom to another -- without knowing there was credit card information among the documents he was interested in analyzing -- they didn't get very far with it.

The government hasn't given up trying to criminalize linking, though. And if they manage it, we're all in trouble.

[Maedhros]

5. Calling Brown a "hacktivist" is somewhat misleading.

He is a journalist, with no hacking skills. He simply had contacts at Anonymous. But, then again, the name of the game is character assassination so the media will call him a "hacktivist" to generate the perception among the citizenry that the Justice Department desires.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/21/barrett-brown-persecution-anonymous

But the pending federal prosecution of 31-year-old Barrett Brown poses all new troubling risks. That's because Brown - who has been imprisoned since September on a 17-count indictment that could result in many years in prison - is a serious journalist who has spent the last several years doggedly investigating the shadowy and highly secretive underworld of private intelligence and defense contractors, who work hand-in-hand with the agencies of the Surveillance and National Security State in all sorts of ways that remain completely unknown to the public. It is virtually impossible to conclude that the obscenely excessive prosecution he now faces is unrelated to that journalism and his related activism.

A brief understanding of Brown's intrepid journalism is vital to understanding the travesty of his prosecution. I first heard of Brown when he wrote a great 2010 essay in Vanity Fair defending the journalist Michael Hastings from attacks from fellow journalists over Hastings' profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone, which ended the general's career. Brown argued that establishment journalists hate Hastings because he has spent years challenging, rather than serving, political and military officials and the false conventional wisdom they spout.

In an excellent profile of Brown in the Guardian on Wednesday, Ryan Gallagher describes that "before he crossed paths with the FBI, Brown was a prolific writer who had contributed to publications including Vanity Fair, the Guardian, the Huffington Post and satirical news site the Onion." He also "had a short stint in politics as the director of communications for an atheist group called Enlighten the Vote, and he co-authored a well-received book mocking creationism, Flock of Dodos."

But the work central to his prosecution began in 2009, when Brown created Project PM, "dedicated to investigating private government contractors working in the secretive fields of cybersecurity, intelligence and surveillance." Brown was then moved by the 2010 disclosures by WikiLeaks and the oppressive treatment of Bradley Manning to devote himself to online activism and transparency projects, including working with the hacktivist collective Anonymous. He has no hacking skills, but used his media savvy to help promote and defend the group, and was often referred to (incorrectly, he insists) as the Anonymous spokesman. He was particularly interested in using what Anonymous leaked for his journalism. As Brown told me several days ago in a telephone interview from the Texan prison where he is being held pending trial, he devoted almost all of his waking hours over the last several years to using these documents to dig into the secret relationships and projects between these intelligence firms and federal agencies.

Brown was sentenced to 63 months in prison for providing a link to a publicly-available site that contained leaked StratFor documents.

The prosecutorial over-reach is similar to the case of Andrew Auernheimer:

Prosecutorial abuse is a drastically under-discussed problem in general, but it poses unique political dangers when used to punish and deter online activism. But it's becoming the preeminent weapon used by the US government to destroy such activism.

Just this week alone, a US federal judge sentenced hactivist Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer to 3 1/2 years in prison for exploiting a flaw in AT&T's security system that allowed him entrance without any hacking, an act about which Slate's Justin Peters wrote: "it's not clear that Auernheimer committed any actual crime", while Jeff Blagdon at the Verge added: "he cracked no codes, stole no passwords, or in any way 'broke into' AT&T's customer database - something company representatives confirmed during testimony." But he had a long record of disruptive and sometimes even quite ugly (though legal) online antagonism, so he had to be severely punished with years in prison. Also this week, the DOJ indicted the deputy social media editor at Reuters, Matthew Keys, on three felony counts which carry a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison for allegedly providing some user names and passwords that allowed Anonymous unauthorized access into the computer system of the Los Angeles Times, where they altered a few stories and caused very minimal damage. As Peters wrote about that case, "the charges under the CFAA seem outrageously severe" and, about Keys' federal prosecutors, observed: "apparently, they didn't take away any lessons from the Aaron Swartz case."

The Obama Administration's War on Investigative Journalism continues...