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"My name is Barrett Brown and I've been waiting for this day for about six months."
So riddle me this Truthloader's how can posting a link leave you facing 105 years in jail?
Barrett Brown was a journalist and for a while he was the media's go to man to speak to about
Anonymous. He wasn't a hacker but he was the founder of Project PM. He's also a former
heroine addict and has been called a moral *** and a fame ***, but it's the first four
of these things that are important to understanding his current situation.
This is Aaron Barr who was CEO at HBGary Federal. He claimed that he had tracked down the leadership
of Anonymous, as he called it, and would publish their names and bring down the organization.
Forgetting that it's not an organization but an idea. But here's what actually happened.
Anonymous hacked HBGary and Aaron Barr's Twitter accounts, they stole tens of thousands of
e-mails and stuck them on a torrent site. In doing so they destroyed Barr's reputation
and he was forced to resign a little while later.
"I've got a case of the giggles."
But remember Barrett Brown isn't a hacker so how did he end up facing 105 years inside?
Well, here's what happened after the HBGary hack. Most people read through a couple of
e-mails, decided it was mainly tosh and pish and lost interested. But Brown focused on
some dodgy relationships between government agencies like the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and
so on and private intelligence contractors. He had already set up Project PM which is
an open-sourced investigation project using volunteering investigators to look into the
content of these huge information dumps. He and the volunteers went through the HBGary
e-mails and here's some of the stuff they discovered.
Private intelligence contractors were plotting to discredit WikiLeaks and intimidate and
attack its supporters, including The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald who's behind the Edward Snowden
whistle-blowing story. That was being done on behalf of Bank of America which was worried
that WikiLeaks had information that could bring it down. Then there's Team Themes, a
group of private intelligence contractors developing disinformation software that would
infiltrate social networks with fake personas and bring organizations down from the inside.
These private intelligence contractors were plotting to subvert groups and start feuds,
exploit divisions, and start disinformation campaigns. It's basically like the private
sectors version of the FBI's co-intel pro.
Next up came the Stratfor hack and for those of you who don't know Stratfor they're another
private intelligence company. One Anon in Chicago called Jeremy Hammond took five million
documents from Stratfor and stored them on a server provided by a Lulzsec leader known
as Sabu.
Barrett Brown then posted the link to Project PM and his team of investigators started looking
into the documents. While they were doing so they uncovered something called Trapwire
which they believed was a major, major find and three months after the attack FBI agents
led by Agent Robert Smith raided his apartment and his mother's apartment in Dallas, Texas.
He wasn't arrested but his laptop, which they found in his mother's kitchen cupboard, was
seized along with his Xbox and some other equipment. Over the next few months he was
hassled by the FBI as he struggled to go cold turkey on Suboxone that had helped him kick
heroine. In that time he posted a number of videos, including this one to do with Agent
Smith.
"Uh anyway so that's why Robert Smith's life is over and when I say his life is over I
don't say I'm going to kill him but I'm going to ruin his life and look into his f***ing
kids because Aaron Barr did the same thing and he didn't get ratted for it. How d'ya
like them apples?"
Now after that video he was arrested and charged with threatening a federal agent. Since then
he's spent more than a year in prison waiting for his trial. Recently his legal team were
subjected to a gag order meaning that he can't speak to the press at all. The US Government
thought he might prejudice his trial if he carried on speaking but that alone doesn't
clear up why he's facing 105 years in jail, especially when you compare that to Jeremy
Hammond, the guy behind the Stratfor hack who was facing 30 but is now only facing 10
after a plea bargain. Well here's the thing. Stratfor's documents contained credit card
information for 5,000 clients so despite the fact that he had nothing to do with the hack,
didn't host the stolen material on any of his own servers, may not even have known that
the credit card numbers were in there when he posted the link, he's being charged with
intentionally transferring the data with the intention of committing identity and credit
card fraud. Those charges relating to the credit card information are the most serious
of the ones against him and that is why Barrett Brown faces 105 years in jail and if he is
found guilty then linking will be criminalized and that has massive implications for journalism
and for anybody who uses the internet.