Journalist and Anonymous Member Sentenced to 63 Months

Barrett Brown, a journalist and one-time member of Anonymous, was recently sentenced to 63 months in prison. His supporters from across the web had hoped the 33-year-old would be able to walk free with his 31 months of time served for “merely linking to hacked content”. However, the court decided it in the other way: Brown, who used to act as a spokesman for Anonymous hacking ring, has got more than twice that sentence. Moreover, he was also ordered to pay over $890,000 in restitution and fines.

 

Barrett Brown was sarcastic about the sentence, saying that the government must have decided that since he did such a great job investigating the cyber-industrial complex, they’re now sending him to investigate the prison-industrial complex.

On the other hand, Brown was facing a possible combined sentence of more than a century. However, when prosecutors dropped some charges against him following a plea deal, his sentencing parameters were reduced.

The industry observers pointed out that long sentence would set a precedent for journalists, because it means that if anyone shares a link to publicly available content without knowing what’s in it, they could be prosecuted.

Barrett Brown is known as an investigative journalist, essayist and satirist. He was working for the Onion, Vanity Fair, the Huffington Post, and the Guardian. The journalist has split with Anonymous in 2011. In addition, it is known that Barrett founded Project PM – this is a crowdsourced investigative thinktank disclosing the abuses by companies in surveillance.

He was arrested in September 2012 for allegedly threatening a federal agent in a YouTube video. After being held for 2 weeks without charge, Brown was indicted on charges of making an online threat and conspiring to release personal data about a government employee. After two more months, Barrett was indicted on a dozen of further charges connected with the hacking of private intelligence contractor Stratfor in 2011. In the meantime, the hacker who actually hacked Stratfor was already caught and sentenced to 10 years term in prison, while Brown was punished for merely linking to hacked content.

Brown remains a great speaker. In his statement to the judge before his sentencing, he said he regrets about posting the “idiotic” threatening videos, while pointing out that those were made in a manic state brought on by drug withdrawal. At the same time, Barrett also criticized the government for its methods in pursuing the case. He was particularly concerned that contributors to Project PM also might be indicted under the same charges.

After the judge announced the ruling, Barrett struck a different tone, claiming that for the next 32 months, he has a great job – he will get free food, clothes and housing while seeking to expose wrondgoing by Bureau of Prisons officials and otherwise report on “news and culture in the world’s greatest prison system”.

The interesting fact is that Ladar Levison, the operator of the Lavabit email service used by Edward Snowden, attended the court for the verdict. As you may remember, Levison preferred to close down his service rather than let the FBI in.