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, accessory to a cyber-attack, and obstruction of justice, for interfering with the execution of a search warrant. After his sentencing on Thursday, Brown released a satirical statement, saying, “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.”
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 2011, the group Anonymous hacked into the computer system of the private security firm HBGary 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.
Kevin Gallagher talking:
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. 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.
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, and even targeting PETA at the behest of Coca-Cola. Brown actually did most of his work on the HBGary emails and looking at things like persona management and the Team Themis scandal, more than he had a chance really to look into Stratfor.
By analyzing the information from the HBGary 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.” HBGary intended to spread disinformation to discredit both Glenn Greenwald and WikiLeaks.
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.
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.
— source democracynow.org
Kevin Gallagher, director of Free Barrett Brown, a support network and legal defense fund.