Breaking: Barrett Brown Sentenced to 63 Months for Linking to Hacked Material

[charrob]

Breaking: Barrett Brown Sentenced to 63 Months for Linking to Hacked Material (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/22/barrett-brown-trial-warns-dangerous-precedent-hacking-sentencing)

In a rebuke to a legion of online supporters and what the journalist and one-time member of Anonymous called a “dangerous precedent”, Barrett Brown was sentenced to 63 months in prison by a federal judge in Dallas on Thursday.

Brown’s backers from across the web had hoped he would be able to walk free with his 31 months of time served for what they insist was “merely linking to hacked material”. But the 33-year-old, who was once considered something of a spokesman for the Anonymous movement, will face more than twice that sentence. The judge also ordered him to pay more than $890,000 in restitution and fines.




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctcMV1gkWuo

[KCIndy]

Given that a lot of people who are convicted of attempted murder get sentenced to less time, I can only assume the judge (or much more likely, someone way up the food chain above the judge) wanted to make an example of the poor guy. Damn! :( :( :(

[luctor-et-emergo]

I don't know about the case specifics but based on this short statement here it does look like a dangerous precedent.

[charrob]

Here's more on Barrett Brown:




Barrett Brown Sentenced to 5 Years in Prison After Reporting on Hacked Private Intelligence Firms (http://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/23/barrett_brown_sentenced_to_five_years)


A journalist and activist accused of working with Anonymous has been given a five-year prison term and ordered to pay nearly $900,000 in restitution and fines. Barrett Brown was sentenced on Thursday after pleading guilty last year to charges of transmitting threats [talking back to the FBI], accessory to a cyber-attack [sharing a link], and obstruction of justice [hiding laptop in kitchen cabinet]. Supporters say Brown has been unfairly targeted for investigating the highly secretive world of private intelligence and military contractors. After his sentencing on Thursday, Brown released a satirical statement that read in part: "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." We discuss Brown’s case with Kevin Gallagher, a writer, activist and systems administrator who heads the Free Barrett Brown support network. He says that the public should not believe what the government says about Brown.



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JUAN GONZÁLEZ: A journalist accused of working with the hacking group Anonymous has been sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to pay nearly $900,000 in restitution and fines. Barrett Brown, held in custody since September 2012, pleaded guilty to charges of transmitting threats [talking back to the FBI], accessory to a cyber-attack [sharing a link], and obstruction of justice [hiding his laptop in kitchen cabinet], for interfering with the execution of a search warrant. After his sentencing on Thursday, Brown released a satirical statement, saying, quote, "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."

AMY GOODMAN: Before Barrett Brown’s path crossed with the FBI, he frequently contributed to Vanity Fair, The Huffington Post, The Guardian and other news outlets. In 2009, Barrett Brown created Project PM, which was, quote, " dedicated to investigating private government contractors working in the secretive fields of cybersecurity, intelligence and surveillance. " He was particularly interested in the documents leaked by WikiLeaks and Anonymous. In the documentary ‘We are Legion’, Barrett Brown explains the importance of information obtained by hackers.


BARRETT BROWN: Some of the most important things that have been—have had the most far-reaching influence and have been the most important in terms of what’s been discovered, not just by Anonymous, but by the media in the aftermath, is the result of hacking. That information can’t be obtained by institutional journalistic process, or it can’t be obtained or won’t be obtained by a congressional committee or a federal oversight committee. For the most part, that information has to be, you know, obtained by hackers.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: In 2011, the group Anonymous hacked into the computer system of the private security firm HB-Gary Federal and disclosed thousands of internal emails. Barrett Brown has not been accused of being involved in the hack itself, but he did read and analyze the documents, eventually crowd-sourcing the effort through the Project PM. One of the first things he discovered was a plan to tarnish the reputations of WikiLeaks and sympathetic journalist Glenn Greenwald, then with The Guardian. Brown similarly analyzed and wrote about the millions of internal company emails from Stratfor Global Intelligence that were leaked on Christmas Eve 2011. Shortly thereafter, the FBI acquired a warrant for his laptop and the authority to seize any information from his communications—or, in journalism parlance, his sources. In September 2012, armed agents barged into Brown’s apartment in Dallas, Texas, handcuffed him face down on the floor. He has been in prison ever since.

AMY GOODMAN: For more on the sentencing of Barrett Brown, we go to Dallas, Texas, to speak with Kevin Gallagher, the director of the Free Barrett Brown support network. He attended Brown’s sentencing hearing on Thursday. Kevin Gallagher is a writer, activist, systems administrator currently working for Freedom of the Press Foundation. He recently wrote a piece for the New York Observer called "Don’t Believe What the Government Says About Barrett Brown."

Kevin Gallagher, welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about who Barrett Brown is, the sentencing yesterday, and what it means for freedom of the press. And talk about just what he did.

KEVIN GALLAGHER: Certainly. Well, thank you for having me on, Amy. So, as you provided in that very good background there, Barrett Brown is a journalist activist who became known through his work with Anonymous. And he landed on the radar of the FBI through his investigations of the private intelligence contracting industry. His case has gone on for over two years now, and his sentencing was delayed several times. Finally, yesterday, in the second half of the sentencing hearing, the judge imposed a sentence.

It was really quite extraordinary, because the judge essentially agreed with the government on most of the sentencing enhancements which they had proposed, overruling the defense’s objections. He did not seem to understand what the public impact of this case would be. He dismissed out of hand the mitigating factors of Brown’s mental state when he made the videos [when he talked back to the FBI]. In fact, he was more concerned about the chilling effects on FBI agents in conducting their investigations than any chilling effects on journalists who paste links. I think anybody, any journalist in the United States, should be concerned about the precedent that this sets for people who share information, people who report on hacking, or those who use hackers as sources or who do computer security research and things of that nature. But even just anyone who shares a link without knowing what exactly is in it, they’ve set an unreasonable expectation here that you should know that—for certain, that the link you’re sharing doesn’t contain stolen credit cards or things of that nature before doing so.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what is the importance of the information that he provided about Stratfor? Who is Stratfor Intelligence, and its role?

KEVIN GALLAGHER: Well, yeah, Stratfor is a private intelligence firm. They’re much like a private version of the CIA. They have global—they do global analysis and generate reports, which people subscribe to and receive these reports. As a result of the emails that were leaked to WikiLeaks, several things came out of there. They were conducting surveillance of Occupy Wall Street, going after activists in Bhopal, India [Dow Chemical/Union Carbide], and even targeting PETA at the behest of Coca-Cola. Brown actually did most of his work on the HB-Gary emails and looking at things like persona management and the Team Themis scandal, which you mentioned, more than he had a chance really to look into Stratfor.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to that issue of HB-Gary. By analyzing the information from the HB-Gary hack, Barrett Brown discovered the security firm’s plan to undermine journalist Glenn Greenwald’s defense of WikiLeaks. One slide read, "Without the support of people like Glenn wikileaks would fold." HB-Gary intended to spread disinformation to discredit both Glenn Greenwald and WikiLeaks. In the documentary ‘We are Legion’, the director spoke to former HB-Gary CEO Aaron Barr about these plans.


BRIAN KNAPPENBERGER: It seems like you’re trying to attack a journalist here.


AARON BARR: Yeah, and I—you know, I don’t want to talk too much more about Glenn Greenwald, but other than, you know, what I previously said. You know, there was never an intent to attack journalists, not on my part. You know, I guess I should say—I should generalize that and to say that, you know, I would never just outwardly attack a journalist, other than if I felt that there was a journalist, in my mind, that was acting unethically, that, you know, that is a—that’s a fair game for having a public discussion about.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s former HBGary CEO Aaron Barr in the documentary ‘We are Legion’. Of course, Glenn Greenwald would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize. Kevin Gallagher, the significance of what Barrett Brown did in relation to HBGary? And as we wrap up, what the sentencing says to people in this country?

KEVIN GALLAGHER: Well, it says that they should be very concerned about the state of press freedom in this country. The U.S. has dropped in their ranking on press freedom as told by Reporters Without Borders—in fact, due to this case specifically. As far as HBGary, one of the biggest things that Brown found in there was a program called Romas/COIN, which was this mobile phone application proposal to target the Arab world. And, you know, to me, this is on par with any report that you’ve seen from the Snowden documents, and this was discovered two years before Snowden even came forward.

AMY GOODMAN: And that sentencing, he will spend how long in jail?

KEVIN GALLAGHER: Well, he’s been sentenced to 63 months, which is the maximum under the guidelines which the judge calculated according to the offense levels. But he could be out within one or two years if he completes an in-prison drug rehab program. And, you know, the bottom line is, this is not going to deter him from doing his work, which is writing, making people laugh through his hilarious column, and investigating government wrongdoing.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Kevin Gallagher, we want to thank for joining us, writer, activist and systems administrator currently working for Freedom of the Press Foundation, also director of the Free Barrett Brown—Free Barrett Brown, a support network, advocacy group and legal defense fund. Yes, Kevin Gallagher attended Brown’s sentencing hearing on Thursday in Dallas.





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sA6rUQo4920

[charrob]

-here's more on Barrett Brown, his case, and how this poses a threat to the First Amendment and the Fourth Estate:



Barrett Brown's Prison Time Raises Cybersecurity, Journalism Concerns (http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/01/23/barrett-browns-prison-time-raises-cybersecurity-journalism-concerns)

--The sentencing of an online writer and activist raises new questions about the nature of journalism in a digital age.

A federal judge's five-year prison sentence for a freelance journalist who linked to documents obtained by hackers is raising questions about the roles of and protections for journalists in a digital age.

Barrett Brown was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Dallas to 63 months in prison and ordered to pay about $900,000 in restitution Thursday on charges stemming from the incident, in which he posted a hyperlink in his reporting to information obtained by the Anonymous collective in a 2011 hack of intelligence contractor Stratfor.

Brown pleaded guilty in April to a federal charge of assisting the hackers after the fact, along with two other charges that resulted from his subsequently obstructing the execution of a search warrant [hiding his laptop in a kitchen cabinet] and threatening an FBI agent on YouTube. Arrested in September 2012, Brown has been jailed already for two years and will have that time deducted from his term.

But critics of the sentence, including Brown himself, say he has done nothing that many mainstream journalists haven't also done in their work and that he is being persecuted because he does not have the protection of a large media organization. Reporters for outlets like the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Guardian, for example, have not faced the same prosecution efforts from the government for their part in publishing documents stolen from the National Security Agency by former contractor Edward Snowden.

“The government asserts that I am not a journalist and thus unable to claim the First Amendment protections guaranteed to those engaged in information-gathering activities,” Brown wrote in a prepared statement he planned to deliver before the judge at his sentencing. “If I am not a journalist, then there are many, many people out there who are also not journalists, without being aware of it, and who are thus as much at risk as I am.”

The government's charges suggested that Brown, often described as an advocate for Anonymous, went further than simply collect information, accusing him in court papers of working to "conceal the involvement and the identity" of the hacker, to "create confusion" about what had been done and of communicating with the company that had been targeted in a manner that "diverted attention away from the hacker." Anonymous, a collective of loosely connected groups, engages in activities ranging from online protest against big business to stealing and disclosing data. Some members of the collective have been jailed for cybersecurity violations.

Brown’s five-year sentence also places a spotlight on new criminal statutes being drafted for cybersecurity. President Barack Obama has promised to support cybersecurity reform that would both expand authority to prosecute online crimes and adjust penalties for computer crimes to ensure “insignificant conduct does not fall within the scope of the statute.”

Penalties for hacker crime outlined by the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act have been criticized by members of Congress, including Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who has called for reform of the law. The charges against Brown, for instance, could have resulted in more than 100 years in prison.

The ruling also comes after Obama’s recently called for police to stop “arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs” — comments made in the wake of complaints that authorities harassed journalists reporting on protests in Ferguson, Missouri.

During the past two years press freedom groups, including the ‘Committee to Protect Journalists’, have called Brown's case a dangerous precedent for online reporting.

“By seeking to put Brown in prison for linking to publicly-available, factual information, the U.S. government sends an ominous message to journalists who wish to act responsibly by substantiating their reporting,” Geoffrey King, Internet advocacy coordinator for the committee, said in a September 2013 blog post.

[CaptainAmerica]

Ive just about given up on this nazi fucking society.