Barret Brown

Bad, Bad Barrett Brown

January 26, 2015 Gabriella Coleman, www.slate.com Educate! Barret Brown, Journalism, Law, Media, NSA

Among both American and British law-enforcement communities, the temptation runs strong to treat hackers and hacktivists in simplistic terms. The public was offered a rare glimpse of this reductive tendency by a published cache of leaked NSA and GCHQ documents. In a presentation slide evaluating various uses of the anonymizing tool Tor, hacktivists like Anonymous are slotted firmly and unambiguously into the “bad” category—immediately adjacent to both pedophiles and criminals. Screen Shot 2015-01-26 at 6.42.35 AM On Thursday, this moral binary was once again rehashed in a Dallas courthouse, when Judge Samuel Lindsay handed down a stiff sentence to journalist and rabble-rousing activist Barrett Brown.

What Barrett Brown’s Charges Mean For Journalism

January 8, 2015 Sean Nevins, www.mintpressnews.com Educate! Barret Brown, Journalism, Law, Media

On Jan. 22, journalist, activist and author Barrett Brown, 33, is scheduled to be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Sam A. Lindsay in Dallas for threatening an FBI agent, hiding evidence during an FBI raid, and attempting to negotiate on behalf of a person wanted by the FBI — two felonies and a misdemeanor, respectively. Facing a maximum sentence of eight-and-a-half years in prison, Brown’s predicament is the result of his work as a journalist and his connections to sources engaged in revealing surveillance activities by public and private intelligence agencies. In 2011, Brown started a website called Project PM, an encyclopedic website with data about the intelligence contracting industry, which likely made him a target of the federal government.

Barrett Brown Pleads Guilty: What It Means For Hacker Journalism

August 29, 2014 Douglas Lucas, www.dailydot.com Educate! Anonymous, Barret Brown, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Journalism

Tuesday in Dallas federal court, “hacktivist journo” Barrett Brown pled guilty to three counts stemming from his reporting on a high-profile Anonymous hack and his long-running battles with the FBI. The hearing, in effect, concluded his plea deal with the Department of Justice. Instead of facing a staggering 105 years in prison, Brown is now looking at up to eight and a half years—with a sizable chance of serving far less time. For most of the year and a half that he awaited trial, Brown was charged with threatening an FBI agent, conspiring to hide his potentially evidence-bearing laptops, and sharing a link to credit card data publicized during the hack of the private intelligence firm Stratfor. Free speech advocates, such as the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders, called the allegations payback for his journalism. Brown's legal troubles kicked into high gear on March 6, 2012, when FBI agent Robert Smith led a raid on his apartment and mother's house in a hunt for the journalist's research into contractors who spy or conduct information warfare on behalf of government and corporate clients. The agents took away his computers and other electronics.

Barret Brown’s Lawyer Criticizes Justice System

April 29, 2014 Ed Pilkington, www.theguardian.com Educate! Barret Brown

The lawyer for Barrett Brown, the activist-journalist in jail in Texas on charges related to his involvement with computer hackers, has called for an overhaul in the way technology cases are handled by the criminal justice system to counteract potential abuses and excessive prosecutorial aggression on the part of the US government. In his first substantive comments since a gagging order on Brown and his legal team was lifted last week, Ahmed Ghappour told the Guardian that in his opinion, the US government had tried to "kill a fly with a sledgehammer”. He accused prosecutors of imposing overly broad charges that had put unnecessary strain on the system, had profound personal implications for Brown who has been in custody for more than 500 days, and sent a chill across public debate. “There needs to be discussion about how we avoid this kind of prosecutorial overreach in future. Prosecutors need to be more cautious in how they deal with complex cases like these to make sure the charges better reflect the conduct described, otherwise the effect is chilling to free speech,” Ghappour said.

Barrett Brown Could Leave Prison This Year With Plea Deal

April 4, 2014 Daniel Stuckey, www.motherboard.vice.com Resist! Barret Brown

On Monday, US Attorney Sarah Saldaña filed a superseding indictment in the government’s case against Barrett Brown. “It’s conceivable,” attorney Jay Leiderman told me yesterday, that the prosecution, which dismissed 11 of Brown’s charges last month, “is about to reach a plea deal with Barrett.” It appears now, that a plea deal has been reached. After bringing multiple cases against Brown, three of which he had pleaded "not guilty" to, federal prosecutors have salvaged a minute victory over Brown. Originally, they sought to put him behind bars for 105 years. The prosecutors were granted a seal on the plea agreement by the court. Of the two counts pleaded to in the indictment, one, of “Accessory After the Fact,” links Brown to Jeremy Hammond a/k/a “o,” and the 2011 Stratfor hack. The other claims that Brown, having been “aided and abetted by another person,” (his mother), obstructed the execution of a search warrant on March 6, 2012, the day after Hammond’s arrest.

Barrett Brown Describes Life In Jail

November 27, 2013 Barrett Brown, www.vice.com Educate! Barret Brown, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Jeremy Hammond, Whistleblowers

Like a lot of pompous, insufferable people, I didn’t watch television when I was previously “out in the world,” as my fellow inmates say. And if I were being held in a regular federal facility like a normal detainee, I wouldn't be exposed to it while incarcerated if I preferred to avoid it. This is because federal prisons (along with holding facilities where inmates await trial) are relatively humane affairs equipped with separate areas for various activities—for instance, sleeping and watching television are done in distinctly different rooms. The problem is that all the federal facilities here in the Northern District of Texas were filled up with inmates awaiting trial or sentencing when I became incarcerated. This isn’t simply because Texans are an inherently criminal bunch—although of course they are—but rather because, in addition to prosecuting actual crimes against property and persons, the federal government is also in a great big contest with the Chinese to see who can imprison the most people for bullshit non-crimes like selling drugs.

An Unconstitutional Gag Order Threatens to Further Silence Barrett Brown

September 6, 2013 Dustin Slaughter, www.occupy.com Educate! Barret Brown, Freedom of Speech and Assembly, Whistleblowers

"Legal proceedings surrounding the politically-charged, precedent-setting prosecution of investigative journalist Barrett L. Brown have taken another disconcerting turn as the government has requested a gag order to be placed on both Brown and his defense team."

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