Barret Brown

[Peter Lemkin]

When Posting a Website Link is a Crime

By Alfredo Lopez
You're probably not familiar with Barrett Brown.

As news coverage of surveillance, internet intrusion and thegovernment's intense battle against privacy and privilegedcommunications seeps into the public consciousness, the names Julian Assange,Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning and Edward Snowden are almosthousehold terms. But Brown's name, the government's case against him, and the implications that flowfrom it are seldom reported and, as a result, not well known.

That is itself a crime. The Texas-based journalist is sitting injail awaiting trial on three different indictments and facing asentence of over a century if convicted in a case sooutrageous and frightening it rivals the cases and plights ofthose better-known information distributors.

Brown is charged, essentially, with doing something everyone(including myself right now) does on the Internet: heposted a link.


Barrett Brown: What was his crime? by Alphaville Herald

Barrett Brown: What was his crime? by Alphaville Herald


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

It also reveals a world the government definitely doesn't want youto know about: the murky, possibly sometimes illegal, world ofinter-connection between the government and a network of secretiveinformation and cyber-security companies. That was the world Brownbroke into and that, in the end, is probably his "crime".

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

Barrett Brown is a well-known and respected journalist whosearticles have appeared in all kinds of publications. He has written awell-regarded book called "Flock of Dodos: Behind ModernCreationism, Intelligent Design and the Easter Bunny" and isregarded as a solid authority on surveillance and people'srights.

He also is a good example of the "activist journalist" who usesreporting as a tool for organizing and resistance. He was, for atime, the most visible "spokesperson" for the progressive hackercollective "Anonymous," although he apparently gave that role upbefore his "crimes," and at least some of the Anonymous participantswere happy when he did. And in 2010, he formed an online collectivenamed Project PM to investigate documents unearthed by Anonymous andothers.

That's where the troubling story starts.

In 2011, Brown began examining a selection of about five milliondocuments Wikileaks published involving a security company calledStratfor Global Intelligence. The emails had all kinds ofinformation, including the names, addresses and credit card numbers ofpeople with whom Stratfor was involved. But that was a smallpercentage 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 andinappropriate relationship between Stratfor, several other securitycontractors and several agencies of the government (including theNSA).

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

The point, of course, is that they're not federal agencies, and thenormal restrictions and oversight that apply to governmentintelligence people, as weak as they are turning out to be, areirrelevant to these companies. They don't report to Congress, go tocourt for subpeonas and don't files reports for Congress (and thepublic) 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 byunraveling the relationships and naming some names. To do theunraveling, they employed a practice frequently used by on-linejournalists known as "crowdsourcing" in which a person posts someinformation (usually too much for one person to analyze alone) andinvites a group of people to dive in and collaborate on theanalysis. Brown launched the crowdsourcing by posting a link to theWikileaks documents on Stratfor in a chat room Project PM wasusing.

That was all the government needed. Prosecutors immediately startedhitting Brown with indictments, focusing primarily, not on theinformation they obviously wanted to protect, but on the spreadingof illegally obtained credit card information. They charged himwith a dozen counts of "identity theft" and then things got evenworse.

At some point, responding to the pressure (friends say), Brownbegan 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 hismother's house. The F.B.I. accused his mother of trying to hide hislaptop, and prosecutors charged her with obstruction of justice. Shepleaded guilty this past March and is awaiting sentencing. Soonafter the raid, Brown posted a video on Youtube threatening to ruinthe lives of the agent who led the investigation and his family.While the threat was not about physical harm and was clearly justfrustrating rant, the FBI takes threats against its agentsseriously, and it slapped him with yet another indictment.

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

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

That significant issue isn't being discussed much publicly partlybecause few journalists are really covering the case. While therehave been some articles of late, they don't come close to themaelstrom 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 themost polite descriptions of his conduct and personality point to anobsessiveness that can easily become nasty and an ego that can beoverwhelming.

Adrian Chen, a technology writer for Gawker, was less thandiplomatic. "...Barrett Brown is also a megalomaniacal troll. Notto mention a real a**hole," Chen wrote. "As the self-appointed Face of Anonymous, he put asmuch bad information in the public sphere as good, once starting abogus "war" with the Zetas drug cartel for attention. Yeah, some ofthe charges against Brown give me shivers as a journalist. But ithas been amazing, the way the story of Barrett Brown, the truthcrusader, has been whitewashed to fit into the Information Martyrmold."

Then there is the more "general" issue that has been infused intomany of the most recent information debates: many mainstreamjournalists simply don't consider people like Brown part of their profession. Forthem, these "new journalists" are either activists (and therefore"biased") or untrained in journalistic practice and thereforeamateurs. That myopic perspective excludes most of the topcontemporary information distributors from the traditionalconstitutional protections journalists have. The logic goes thatBrown isn't a real journalist so his problems have nothing to dowith the concept of a "free press".

But none of that detracts from the facts of the case and theimportance 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 precedentfor all of us.

And that's the answer to "why?"

It has nothing to do with credit card theft. Prosecutorsacknowledge that Brown didn't pay any attention to the cardinformation. 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 stolenit or hacked Stratfor's documents. Besides, Chicago-based hacker, Jeremy Hammond, who actually pleaded guilty to participating in theoriginal Stratfor hack, faces a possible sentence of only ten yearsin jail.

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

Rather, as the United States attorney's office explained in itspress release, "By transferring and posting the hyperlink, Browncaused the data to be made available to other persons online,without the knowledge and authorization of Stratfor and the cardholders."

There we have it. Brown's real "crime" is that he posted a linkanyone could get to and therefore released to the public files thatimplicated the government in possibly illegal activity. What's ontrial here is the use of links: the "hypertext" protocol that iswhat makes the Internet special and what gives it the ability toallow 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 chargedfor it," Jennifer Lynch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation toldthe New York Times. "I think that this administration is tryingto prosecute the release of information in any way it can."

To make this personal, do you use links? Or, a less absurdquestion, are you sure the links you post don't include criminalinformation? Today, there are an estimated 4500 federal criminalstatures and that means that, at some point in your life, you'veprobably violated federal law without knowing it. The same is trueof the people who posted the material you are linking to. Asridiculous as it may seem, based on the Brown prosecution, youcould be charged with a crime without having any involvement in itby linking to material posted by people who have no idea theycommitted a crime.

For example, here's the link to theStratfor files. While it indicates that these linked documentshave now been cleansed of credit card information, I can't be sureof that. Nor do I know that other information the governmentconsiders illegal (or may in the future) isn't in there. I haven'tread all the documents. But based on what prosecutors are saying,if these files do contain information they eventually considerillegal, I could be charged with spreading it.

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

For those who might want to do something about this, there's awebsite ofpeople trying to organize a campaign in his support.