http://thiscantbehappening.net/print/1960

Fri, 09/13/2013 - 02:09
A century in jail for doing what you do all
the time
by: Alfredo Lopez

You're probably not familiar with Barrett
Brown.

As news coverage of surveillance,
internet intrusion and the government's
intense battle against privacy and
privileged communications seeps into the
public consciousness, Julian Assange,
Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning and
Edward Snowden are almost household
terms. But Brown's case and the
implications that flow from it are seldom
reported and, as a result, not well known.

That is itself a crime. The Texas-based
journalist is sitting in jail awaiting trial on
three different indictments and facing a
sentence of over a century if convicted in
a case that is so outrageous and
frightening that it rivals the cases and
plights of those better-known information
distributors.

Brown is being charged, essentially, with
doing something everyone (including
myself right now) does on the Internet: he
posted a link [1].

The Brown case raises all kinds of issues
around freedom of expression and
information but, perhaps most
importantly, it uncovers a deeper and
more dangerous aspect of the Obama
Administration's information policy.
Brown's case illustrates that, in addition
to targeting the use of the Internet for
spreading information, it is targeting the
very act of information distribution. That
includes the work that journalists
routinely do but it also includes the
information sharing you and I do on the
Internet almost as a reflex.

It also reveals a world the government
definitely doesn't want you to know
about: the murky, possibly sometimes
illegal, world of inter-connection between
the government and a network of
secretive information and cyber-security
companies. That was the world Brown
broke into and that, in the end, is probably
his "crime".

So intense is the government's desire to
keep this under wraps that on September
4 federal prosecutors imposed a gag
order that forbids Brown, who is currently
in prison but actively writing from there,
from saying or writing anything about his
case that isn't on the public record. In
short, he can't tell us what he actually did
and why: the information we all need to
know.

Barrett Brown is a well-known and
respected journalist whose articles have
appeared in all kinds of publications. He's
written a well-regarded book called
"Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern
Creationism, Intelligent Design and the
Easter Bunny" and is regarded as a solid
authority on surveillance and people's
rights.

He also is a good example of the "activist
journalist" who uses reporting as a tool
for organizing and resistance. He was, for
a time, the most visible "spokesperson"
for the progressive hacker collective
Anonymous although he apparently gave
that role up before his "crimes" and at
least some of the Anonymous
participants were happy when he did. And
in 2010, he formed an online collective
named Project PM [2] to investigate
documents unearthed by Anonymous and
others.

That's where the troubling story starts.

In 2011, Brown began examining a
selection of about five million documents
Wikileaks published involving a security
company called Stratfor Global
Intelligence. The emails had all kinds of
information including names, address
and credit card numbers of people with
whom Stratfor was involved. But that was
a small percentage of the material and
Brown appears to have ignored it. What
caught his interest, and what comprised
most of the files, were documents and
emails that reveal a very close and
inappropriate relationship between
Stratfor, several other security
contractors and several agencies of the
government (including the NSA).

The emails paint a picture of constant
information sharing with the government
giving the contractors vast amounts of
data from investigations and cases at the
companies' request. Of course, the
federal officials got plenty in exchange as
these security consultancies shared
anything they discovered with their
government partners when the feds
requested it. It's almost as if these
companies were operating as federal
agencies.

The point, of course, is that they're not
federal agencies and the normal
restrictions and oversight that apply to
government intelligence people, as weak
as they are turning out to be, are
irrelevant to these companies. They don't
report to Congress, go to court for
subpeonas and don't files reports for
Congress (and the public) to peruse. As
far as most of us know, they don't exist
and, because this type of relationship
dances on the edge of illegality, they work
hard to keep that curtain of secrecy
intact.

Brown and other Project PM activists
were working to change that by
unraveling the relationships and naming
some names. To do the unraveling, they
employed a practice frequently used by
on-line journalists known as
"crowdsourcing" in which a person posts
some information (usually too much for
one person to analyze alone) and invites
a group of people to dive in and
collaborate on the analysis. Brown
launched the crowdsourcing by posting a
link to the Wikileaks documents on
Stratfor in a chat room Project PM was
using.

That was all the government needed.
Prosecutors immediately started hitting
Brown with indictments focusing
primarily, not on the information they
obviously wanted to protect, but on the
spreading of illegally obtained credit card
information. They charged him with a
dozen counts of "identity theft" and then
things got even worse.

At some point, responding to the pressure
(friends say), Brown began using heroin
and his behavior became erratic. In
March, 2012, the F.B.I. tried to serve a
warrant on him when he was at his
mother’s house. The F.B.I. accused his
mother of trying to hide his laptop and
prosecutors charged her with obstruction
of justice. She pleaded guilty this past
March and is awaiting sentencing. Soon
after the raid, Brown posted a video on
Youtube threatening to ruin the lives of
the agent who led the investigation and
his family. While the threat was not about
physical harm and was clearly just
frustrating rant, the FBI takes threats
against its agents seriously and it
slapped him with yet another indictment.

In total, Brown is facing 105 years if
convicted of the 17 charges against him.

There are many questions raised by this
case all summarized with one question:
"what exactly did this guy do wrong?".

That significant issue isn't being
discussed much publicly partly because
few journalists are really covering the
case. While there have been some articles
of late, they don't come close to the
maelstrom of analysis and argument the
Snowden revelations, Wikileaks or the
Manning case have provoked.

Part of the reason may be Brown himself.
He is, by even his friends (and his own)
account, not an easy man to get along
with. Even the most polite descriptions of
his conduct and personality point to an
obsessiveness that can easily become
nasty and an ego that can be
overwhelming.

Adrian Chen, a technology writer for
Gawker, was less than diplomatic.
"...Barrett Brown is also a
megalomaniacal troll. Not to mention a
real asshole," Chen wrote [3]. "As the self-appointed Face of Anonymous, he put as
much bad information in the public
sphere as good, once starting a bogus
"war" with the Zetas drug cartel for
attention. Yeah, some of the charges
against Brown give me shivers as a
journalist. But it has been amazing, the
way the story of Barrett Brown, the truth
crusader, has been whitewashed to fit
into the Information Martyr mold."

Then there is the more "general" issue
that has been infused into many of the
most recent information debates: many
mainstream journalists simply don't
consider people like Brown part of their
profession [4]. For them, these "new
journalists" are either activists (and
therefore "biased") or untrained in
journalistic practice and therefore
amateurs. That myopic perspective
excludes most of the top contemporary
information distributors from the
traditional constitutional protections
journalists have. The logic goes that
Brown isn't a real journalist so his
problems have nothing to do with the
concept of a "free press".

But none of that detracts from the facts of
the case and the importance it has. It's
not about whether we like Barrett Brown
(many actually do) or consider him a real
journalist (which he is); it's about how the
charges against him set a horrifying
precedent for all of us.

And that's the answer to "why?"

It has nothing to do with credit card theft.
Prosecutors acknowledge that Brown
didn't pay any attention to the card
information. In fact, like any self-respecting Internet journalist, he has long
denounced the theft of all personal
information including card numbers. They
don't even accuse him of having stolen it
or hacked Stratfor's documents. Besides
Chicago-based hacker Jeremy
Hammond, who actually pleaded guilty to
participating in the original Stratfor hack,
faces a possible sentence of only ten
years in jail.

In fact, Brown's true "crime" isn't even the
use of this source material which
publications all over the world have
reported on for years now.

Rather, as the United States attorney’s
office explained in its press release, “By
transferring and posting the hyperlink,
Brown caused the data to be made
available to other persons online, without
the knowledge and authorization of
Stratfor and the card holders.”

There we have it. Brown's real "crime" is
that he posted a link anyone could get to
and therefore released to the public files
that implicated the government in
possibly illegal activity. What's on trial
here is the use of links: the "hypertext"
protocol that is what makes the Internet
special and what gives it the ability to
allow everyone in the world to share
information.

“The big reason this matters is that he
transferred a link, something all of us do
every single day, and ended up being
charged for it,” Jennifer Lynch of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation told the
New York Times [5]. “I think that this
administration is trying to prosecute the
release of information in any way it can.”

To make this personal, do you use links?
Or, a less absurd question, are you sure
the links you post don't include criminal
information? Today, there are an
estimated 4500 federal criminal statures
and that means that, at some point in
your life, you've probably violated federal
law without knowing it. The same is true
of the people who posted the material you
are linking to. As ridiculous as it may
seem, based on the Brown prosecution,
you could be charged with a crime
without having any involvement in it by
linking to material posted by people who
have no idea they committed a crime.

For example, here's the link to the Stratfor
files [6]. While it indicates that these linked
documents have now been cleansed of
credit card information, I can't be sure of
that. Nor do I know that other information
the government considers illegal (or may
in the future) isn't in there. I haven't read
all the documents. But based on what
prosecutors are saying, if these files do
contain information they eventually
consider illegal, I could be charged with
spreading it.

On the one hand, they attack privacy,
which makes the Internet useful for us.
Now they're attacking links, the protocol
that makes the Internet...well, the
Internet. That's something we can't afford
to lose

For those who might want to do
something about this, there's a website [7]
of people trying to organize a campaign
in his support.

Source URL: http://thiscantbehappening.net/barrettbrown

Links:
[1] http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/09/10/barrett-brown-cant-talk-about-w...[2] http://barrettbrown.blogspot.com/2012/05/purpose-of-project-pm.html
[3] http://gawker.com/stand-by-your-troll-rallying-for-barrett-brown-ov...
[4] http://gigaom.com/2013/09/04/is-barrett-brown-a-journalist-or-an-ac...[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/09/business/media/a-journalist-agita...