Barret Brown

[Peter Lemkin]

The U.S. attorney's office filed a motion Wednesday to dismiss the bulk of its criminal case against a Dallas man who has claimed to be the spokesman for the hacking group Anonymous. Prosecutors are asking a federal judge to dismiss all but one of the 12 charges against Barrett Brown in a case accusing him of trafficking in data, including credit card numbers, that was stolen from private intelligence firm Stratfor.
He did so by posting a link to the data online, according to his indictment. He had faced charges of aggravated identity theft and device fraud in a case that has received national attention for its free speech implications.
On Tuesday, Brown's defense team filed a 48-page motion to dismiss the indictment, claiming the government failed to show any proof that Brown committed a crime.
The defense motion said the link Brown posted had already been made public, and that the government's case was a clear violation of the Constitutional right of free speech.
"The activities prohibited include those of everyday members of the public desiring to conduct research on the Internet, cyber security researchers who wish to analyze and prevent cyber-attacks and journalists who wish to perform routine press activities such as newsgathering and verification of sources," said defense attorney Ahmed Ghappour in the motion.
The U.S. attorney's office declined to comment.
Brown, who has been in federal custody since his arrest in 2012, still faces two other federal cases against him.
He is charged with two counts of obstruction of justice by concealing evidence, stemming from an FBI raid on his Dallas apartment in 2012. Brown also faces charges related to alleged threats he made against an FBI agent.
If convicted on all counts, Brown had faced the possibility of up to 105 years in federal prison.
The government obtained limits on pretrial publicity in the cases, noting that Brown has been the subject of articles in print and online, including one in Rolling Stone.

http://crimeblog.dallasnews.com/2014/03/...brown.html

Federal prosecutors have dropped a number of key charges against Barrett Brown, an activist-journalist covering online surveillance who has spent more than a year behind bars. Supporters say Brown has been unfairly targeted for investigating the highly secretive world of private intelligence and military contractors. On Wednesday, prosecutors dropped 11 of 17 counts, including a charge for posting a weblink online to a document that contained stolen credit card data. All of the dropped charges relate to the hacking of the private intelligence firm Stratfor, which unearthed how the firm monitors activists and spies for corporate clients. The dropping of charges came just one day after Brown's attorneys filed a motion to have the same counts dropped, arguing posting a weblink is protected by freedom of speech. Brown still faces up to 70 years in prison.