In 2012, Barrett Brown was hit with 12 charges related to a link he posted in IRC.
Barrett Brown, a self-proclaimed spokesperson for the hacking group Anonymous, was arrested in 2012 and has criminal trials scheduled for later this year. The charges against Brown stemmed from when he posted a hyperlink from one Internet relay chat channel, called #Anonops, to another channel under his control, called #ProjectPM.
Federal prosecutors filed papers today indicating that they want to drop all but one of the 12 charges in their original indictment, including all the counts related to hyperlinking. Brown no longer faces 10 charges of “aggravated identity theft,” but he is left to deal with a charge of possessing stolen credit card numbers.
The government’s backing down comes a day after Brown’s defense lawyers filed a motion to dismiss all the charges against him. Brown’s lawyers say that all he did was post a hyperlink, which can’t amount to the “transfer” of stolen information. The charges against him violate First Amendment free speech protections, the motion argues.
The information that Brown’s link pointed to all stemmed from an Anonymous hack against Strategic Forcasting, Inc., also known as Stratfor. In addition to information related to thousands of credit cards, e-mail addresses of hundreds of thousands of Stratfor subscribers were stolen.
Brown, who is 32, was one of the most public faces of the group Anonymous a few years ago, but he says he left the group in 2011. After his departure, many members of the hacker collective distanced themselves from Brown.
Separately, Brown faces charges related to concealing evidence from the FBI and alleged threats he made against an FBI agent. His 2012 arrest came just hours after he posted a YouTube video called “Why I’m Going to Destroy FBI Agent Robert Smith.”
According to the Dallas Morning News, the US Attorney declined to comment on the dropped charges.
