Barrett Brown sentenced to 63 months in prison
boingboing.net
boingboing.net
“Good news! — The U.S. government decided today that because I did such a good job investigating the cyber-industrial complex, they’re now going to send me to investigate the prison-industrial complex. For the next 35 months, I’ll be provided with free food, clothes, and housing as I seek to expose wrondgoing by Bureau of Prisons officials and staff and otherwise report on news and culture in the world’s greatest prison system. I want to thank the Department of Justice for having put so much time and energy into advocating on my behalf; rather than holding a grudge against me for the two years of work I put into in bringing attention to a DOJ-linked campaign to harass and discredit journalists like Glenn Greenwald, the agency instead labored tirelessly to ensure that I received this very prestigious assignment. — Wish me luck!”
I hope he publishes a book on the corruption of the prison system on the day that he's released and walks across the street of the prison to a book signing or something like that.
He writes here. He's written several articles about his incarceration. He is hillarious: http://frontburner.dmagazine.com/author/barrettbrown/
There is an Amazon wish list somewhere too, but I can't seem to find it.
However, I wouldn't believe random tweets. For example, one says:
"Notable that though there's no evidence Barrett took part in the hack releasing credit card info judge is determined he did. #FreeBB"
This is pretty unlikely, particularly if it was used as a sentencing factor. Every federal judge knows that you can't use facts not proven to a jury or in a plea agreement, to enhance a sentence.
This is completely well-settled law now. See United States v. Booker, 543 US 220 (2005), Blakely v. Washington, 542 U.S. 296 (2004) and Apprendi v. New Jersey, 530 U.S. 466 (2000)
(Apprendi is a little different in that it says you can't enhance past statutory maximum, but Booker and Blakely make plain you can't enhance at all except using facts admitted by the defendant or proven to a jury)
This is the same LulzSec that was being secretly run by the FBI via their turncoat, Sabu, during some of LulzSec's highest profile hacks (such as the Stratfor hack)
Also, in addition to his 5 year imprisonment, he's been ordered to pay nearly $900,000 in fines.
A very a la NSA illegal wiretaps putting people in prison under guise of "confidential informant".
This guy pled guilty. Maybe it was due to fear of courts handling tech cases, or maybe it was due to the fact that there was a large amount of evidence that he committed a crime that was not simply reporting.
Under the doctrine of parallel construction, as revealed in the Snowden disclosures, there is no way for the court to know if illegal NSA wiretaps or other surveillance activities were involved. The fruit of the poison tree is now on sale at your local justice supermarket.
It's as if they honestly don't understand why it's their responsibility to show they've reformed, and not our responsibility to show that they haven't. Life is just one big TV script to these people.
Oh, well... if they had enough imagination to contemplate what will happen when the next J. Edgar Hoover gains "Total Information Awareness," they'd be even more dangerous.
"Today, the SOD offers at least three services to federal, state and local law enforcement agents: coordinating international investigations such as the Bout case; distributing tips from overseas NSA intercepts, informants, foreign law enforcement partners and domestic wiretaps; and circulating tips from a massive database known as DICE."
...
"Wiretap tips forwarded by the SOD usually come from foreign governments, U.S. intelligence agencies or court-authorized domestic phone recordings. Because warrantless eavesdropping on Americans is illegal, tips from intelligence agencies are generally not forwarded to the SOD until a caller's citizenship can be verified, according to one senior law enforcement official and one former U.S. military intelligence analyst."
[1] http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE97409R20130805?irpc...
Ah, I stand corrected, thanks. I didn't know that. It's not the least bit material, but I'll be careful not to credit/blame Snowden for bringing us this little tidbit of knowledge in the future.
2) This is what the original article actually had to say about NSA involvement in parallel construction (emphasis mine): "Today, the SOD offers at least three services to federal, state and local law enforcement agents: coordinating international investigations such as the Bout case; distributing tips from overseas NSA intercepts, informants, foreign law enforcement partners and domestic wiretaps; and circulating tips from a massive database known as DICE."
Only the article's second sentence matters, as far as I'm concerned:
Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations (of American citizens) truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.
And with respect to
"Wiretap tips forwarded by the SOD usually come from foreign governments, U.S. intelligence agencies or court-authorized domestic phone recordings. Because warrantless eavesdropping on Americans is illegal, tips from intelligence agencies are generally not forwarded to the SOD until a caller's citizenship can be verified, according to one senior law enforcement official and one former U.S. military intelligence analyst."
These people break countless laws and tell countless lies every day, with total impunity even when said lies are told before Congress. Excuse me if I don't believe "one senior law enforcement official and one former intelligence analyst" for one minute. Give me one reason to.
Okay please stop this nonsense. It is not necessary or reasonable to expect any individual to be able to collect of provide evidence that the most well-financed, most-powerful spy agency ever known to exist has spied on them and that the government (DOJ) has illegally used information obtained that way in a prosecution against same. It's not unprecedented, and it's not as if it is even possible to discover every case of this happening.
>This guy pled guilty. Maybe it was due to fear of courts handling tech cases
Or maybe because any individual is hopelessly outmatched by the state in a case such as this.
There is always a possibility that the NSA could exchange information entirely covertly between itself and the DEA, but I think this is unlikely to be totally ironclad.
The comment to which you reply is pointing out the very real asymmetry in ability between a citizen and the amalgamated federal government. It is, in fact, unreasonable to put the burden of proof on the much less able party when there is real evidence showing that the NSA->DEA information flow does in fact exist, and could potentially be used in any case.
It's not likely to have been used in this case, because Brown seems to have indeed made real threats and probably plead guilty because of that. But that doesn't change the unreasonability in the general form of argument the comment grandparent makes.
More importantly, you've missed my point. Which was, to the extent you can make these NSA claims about the Brown case, you can make them about every criminal justice case. Which, fine, but I think it'd be more intellectually to lead off with the fact that you don't believe it's possible that any criminal investigation in the US is conducted in good faith.
Here, the argument that NSA secretly tipped the FBI off is especially outlandish because Hector Monsegur ratted Brown out. The FBI had a gold-plated criminal informant. Why would they jeopardize their case with tainted SIGINT?
I disagree entirely. Ideas are either falsifiable or not. An idea is not unfalsifiable because the experiment required to test it is expensive beyond some M. Real physicists discuss and publish theories that are impossible to test with current levels of technology, but they would never say such theories are unfalsifiable.
>More importantly, you've missed my point. Which was, to the extent you can make these NSA claims about the Brown case, you can make them about every criminal justice case.
Yes, this is true.
>Which, fine, but I think it'd be more intellectually to lead off with the fact that you don't believe it's possible that any criminal investigation in the US is conducted in good faith.
You seem here to convert a probabilistic claim to an absolute claim. The claim was not that all criminal investigations are conducted in bad faith, but that there is a possibility any given investigation is conducted in bad faith.
But this is not the focus of my comment, which was to say that it is very reasonable to point out that this possibility exists for all criminal investigations, and that the fact the experiment to test whether the possibility is justified (by observing illegal evidence being used in a specific criminal case) is not in fact unfalsifiable.
>Here, the argument that NSA secretly tipped the FBI off is especially outlandish because Hector Monsegur ratted Brown out. The FBI had a gold-plated criminal informant. Why would they jeopardize their case with tainted SIGINT?
Please see:
>>It's not likely to have been used in this case, because Brown seems to have indeed made real threats and probably plead guilty because of that. But that doesn't change the unreasonability in the general form of argument the comment grandparent makes.
By "the general form of argument the comment grandparent makes," I was referring to this request:
""" Do you have any cases where NSA illegal wiretaps were used as evidence in court in a standard trial like this against a U.S. citizen? """
The request you're referring to isn't mine; it's 'specialp's. It's in response to this comment (in its entirety):
My guess is he plead guilty under advisement his case was hopeless. There's a significant likelihood evidence necessary to aide his case is locked away deep inside the FBI.
A very a la NSA illegal wiretaps putting people in prison under guise of "confidential informant".
Which is an even less falsifiable argument than the specific one we're debating!
I don't care about that. I just thought your assessment of an earlier statement as unfalsifiable was wrong and I responded to it.
>Which is an even less falsifiable argument than the specific one we're debating!
It seems equally falsifiable and falls under my earlier test.
Again, falsifiability is a binary condition, not a spectrum. Something either has the potential to be empirically determined, and is falsifiable, or cannot.
There's no justice here. It's just an exercise in power in order to send a message.
Plus, you know, he conceded a lot of the facts in the indictment at the point he tried to have the indictment dismissed, so ...
The sentence doesn't fit the crime.
https://freebarrettbrown.org/files/BB_factualresume.pdf
Sounds like he not only became a lulzsec negotiator and obstructor, he later threatened an FBI agent and well as that agent's children. Uh yeah, the far left wants to make this asshole a hero? You guys need better heroes. Mitnick, Hammond, Ulbricht, Omari, lizard squad, etc. These guys are all pretty much scumbags and clearly criminals from a non-biased perspective. The mental gymnastics of deifying these scumbags is mystifying.
While some of his defenders are on the left, some are right-wing libertarians, and I don't think it's really reasonable to make shallow politicized generalizations about who his supporters are. For the record, I am very far to the left and while I think the sentence was a bit over the top, I don't think he was innocent or was a noble person. I'd also like to see all the lizard squad kids (including Omari) nailed hard, and find Ulbricht despicable. I liked Mitnick when I met him, though.
No, he didn't.
https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...
My understanding, after reading the news and the relevant stuff on freebarrettbrown.org (which collects a bunch of filings) is that he faced sentencing for three counts: (i) concealing laptops during the execution of a warrant, (ii) threatening an FBI agents, and (iii) being an accessory after the fact to the STRATFOR hack.
Of those three, (i) and (ii) seem open-and-shut. Even Brown's own motion to dismiss concedes them. (The more damning of the two, about the laptops, was accompanied with a sort of harebrained argument that it's not a crime to conceal evidence so long as you hide it somewhere in the scope of the search warrant, so that it is at least mathematically possible that agents executing the warrant could have found it.) He plead guilty to them, then discussed them in their particulars at his allocution.
Accessory-after-the-fact liability for relaying a URL to a bunch of stolen credit cards is a fuzzier charge. I have no idea what I think about it. But two things worth considering:
(1) Accessory-after-the-fact liability is a much lesser offense than being an accomplice to the STRATFOR hack. Accomplice liability would have charged him as a principal to the actual crime. That's not what he got convicted for.
(2) The charge doesn't criminalize sharing of URLs, but rather intentionally facilitating the spread of stolen credit card numbers. The DOJ had the burden of proving intent. His "actus reus" was, I think we all agree, very minimal. But his mens rea might not have been.
His vulnerability to having mens rea proven at trial was probably greatly enhanced by the fact that one of the open-and-shut charges against him was about his effort to shield Jeremy Hammond from prosecution. It would have been hard for him to argue that he wasn't much more intimately involved in the STATFOR hack than some Twitter rando RT'ing a URL would have been.
I dunno. As usual, nothing is as simple as Boing Boing and Wired make things out to be.
I think the government had a stronger case against Brown than it did against Auernheimer.
A detail I didn't have until this comment was too stale to edit:
The "accessory after the fact" charge seems to have been --- according to Kim Zetter --- based not on the transmission of the link, but rather the specific role Brown played as a go-between for the Stratfor hacker and Stratfor itself. To wit: Brown is apparently accused of exploiting that role for the purpose of throwing the scent off Jeremy Hammond.
You can be deeply aware of a crime in progress and not have any duty under US criminal law to police your fellow citizens. But that's a precarious position to be in: as soon as you do anything that can be construed as helping the crime, you graduate from witness to accessory. That seems to have been what happened to Brown.
He did stupid, illegal things, and honestly it sounds like he got off pretty light, to me.
God forbid journalists protect their sources.
Is that supposed to make a difference?
Brown called FBI Special Agent [RS] a "fucking
chicken shit little faggot cocksucker"
Brown stated "when I say [RS's] life is over,
I don't say I'm going to kill him, but I am
going to ruin his life and look into his fucking
kids"
Brown stated "I"m armed, that I come from a military
family, that I was taught to shoot by a Vietnam Vet
and by my father a master hunter ... I will shoot
all of them and kill them if they come"
Does he not get any credit for time served in jail pre-trial [1] or is the 28 being subtracted 1-for-1?
In the Canadian criminal law code you get time-and-a-half for time served in jail so he'd only have 26 months in prison vs the 48 stated here. Historically it was often 2-for-1 of time served pre-trial which in this case would have mean only 12 additional months in prison.
In America I believe it is up to the judge to provide 'credit' during sentencing and there is no pre-defined ratio.
Meanwhile, much worse crimes by those in power such as torture go unpunished.
-Voltaire
I'm as frustrated as everyone else that the CIA and its horrible contractors, some of whom enriched themselves to the tune of millions of dollars by designing an abhorrent and utterly ineffective scheme to torture random people from West Asia, are apparently going to be shielded from liability. It's a miscarriage of justice. But history is full of miscarriages of justice; we don't give up on civilization when they happen.
I concede ahead of time that there's a coherent political philosophy that says "that's right, and that's a good thing". It's just not mine.
And that would be bad because?
it is immoral to enforce laws against one group of people while systematically ignoring violations of laws [especially of the laws of the same or greater severity] by another group of people [especially when the latter group is "closer" to the enforcers]. Such immoral system of selective law enforcement constitutes oppression.
>It's a miscarriage of justice.
Systematic miscarriage of justice is just an absence of justice.
Amazingly, the parent didn't actually say or imply that. "worse crimes go unpunished" doesn't imply "enforcing laws against lesser offenses is immoral".
Saying "the US justice system seems only to protect the status quo because it vigorously enforces email leaks out of shady private spying companies while ignoring torture" doesn't imply that car theft should go unpunished at all.
But then, if you're an HN celebrity, you can probably count on being able to say anything and get upvoted, and then having anything said against you downvoted. You could test this by masking the username on a comment until after a vote, but HN would never do that because the people who could do that are all people that benefit from this effect, and the powerful never cede power. (I hope to be proven wrong, but cynicism is rarely wrong in the world where we live.)
(I mean, I agree that my comments will get upvoted much more quickly than yours no matter what I say, not that my comment above was so incoherent that it could only be upvoted out of bias).
The problem with masking usernames prior to votes is that it would make all comments anonymous, and spur a lot of pointless voting.
I'd much rather an HN flag that simply stopped awarding karma or, for that matter, comment scores above (say) 5 once a commenter crosses (say) 50k karma. Dan wouldn't even have to make it mandatory; he could just make it public whether or not you've opted-in to that "level playing field" feature. Most high-karma commenters would.
The top 10 commenter karma scores on the leaderboard were removed after I lobbied for it for months. I wish they'd extend it all the way down to that 50k threshold; at a certain point, you should just have "karma: lots" (like Slashdot used to) and no gradations between those users.
I'd still get bonus upvotes though, because there are people who more or less "subscribe" to my comments. Same thing with Patrick, George Grellas, and 'mechanical_fish. And, god willing, 'tzs.
Finally, believe me, my real professional circle is mostly made up of people who think very little of HN, and my karma here is not a source of "celebrity" for me, or at least, not in a good sense.
Well, for one the point is that you govern by example, and the example of giving the corrupt elit a "get out of jail free card" is bad for society. So, the comment could be read as: punish all guilty, don't selectively punish.
Another point to be made reading the comment is that there are essential crimes any moral citizen should abhor (such as torture and imprisonment without due process) that are going unpinished because those in power like them, and stuff that has no real merit to be illegal or to be punished that harshly but that it is, because those in power don't like it.
Nobody would read it as advice to not punish theft, domestic abuse etc because there's officially santioned torture that goes unpinished.
In fact, I don't see any critique of your views in this comment. The comment is entirely a rewording and expansion of the original comment.
I think you're confusing the comment reading as if torture should be punished with the comment reading as if you think torture should be unpunished. That is, you're reading a comment that disagrees with you, and assuming that it implies you hold the opposite side.
I don't think you think torture should go unpunished. However, you seem to think that saying the justice system is corrupt because it punishes Brown while not punishing torturers implies that Brown should go unpunished. This is not the case either, and the original commenter need not believe that. The systematic corruption of the justice system is clear no matter what your views on Brown's guilt in this matter happen to be.
Can you say why it is you think the original comment argued in favor of not prosecuting car theft? So far you don't seem to have done so, but responded by asking why anyone wouldn't think so, which doesn't explain why you think so.
I guess my question is: so, we all agree that failure to prosecute CIA torturers and torture-preneurs is a travesty.
Now what? What does that have to do with Barrett Brown?
Is it just that we should militate for more prosecutions? I'll sign that petition. But I don't feel like that's a fringe issue; I hear that concern everywhere.
Governments are seen as evil when they are seen as the large bullying the small.
This is an example of that pattern.
One connection is that what Barrett Brown did before he got punished was basically hurt the same military-industrial-intelligence complex that put those torturers in place.
(Regardless of if one can find 10 other technical legal violations in his actions to hypocritically punish him for. So yes, I'm saying that the "justice system" cares more for threats of that kind than what he supposedly was sentenced for. It's not like its unconceivable for the law to be hypocritical, as some assume).
I don't even agree that the "CIA torturers" should be prosecuted (well, they should, but only as mere cogs doing their job). It's not like they were some "rotten apples", activing on their own. And it's that seeing of this as a more general phenomenon that connects it with cases like Barrett Brown's (and Mannings, et al).
No, it's just a tool it uses and with ties to governments, foreign diplomacy, policy makers etc. And it's not only about Statfor, it's about sending a message against this kind of journalism and against meddling with this kind of institutions and interests.
Whether "serious foreign policy journalists, made fun of Stratfor" doesn't say much. They also make fun of the CIA as incompetents who couldn't predict things like the fall of the Soviet Union and so on...
The military-industrial complex did not "use Stratfor as a tool". The military-industrial though Stratfor was a bunch of tools.
Here's ex- Atlantic and WaPo writer Max Fisher (now at Vox) on Stratfor:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/02/str...
Here's Daniel Drezner from Foreign Policy:
http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/future-imperfect
http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/02/27/wake-me-when-wikileaks-p...
I wrote it as a response to how you framed the grant-parent's comment, as if it was analogous to advising not to punish lesser crimes because grand crimes like torture go unpunished.
I'm trying to show that his comment doesn't imply that at all, and should be read differently (and obviously, at least to me).
After reading and re-reading the rest of this subthread, I think there's an error here. I don't see that shit_parade was saying that; they were just expressing frustration at what appears to be disproportionate resources dedicated to prosecuting the likes of Barrett Brown vs. resources dedicated to prosecuting state-sponsored torturers.
(For the record, I recognize that all moral issues aside, prosecuting state-sponsored torturers is a lot harder than prosecuting someone like Barrett Brown.)
I don't see anything in their comment that implied the morality of enforcing laws against lesser offenses.
Or maybe more clearly: "I wish those in power guilty of torture would be punished" is not quite the same as, "Those in power guilty of torture should be punished before anyone else is".
> He ultimately signed a plea deal on three lesser charges: transmitting a threat, trying to hide a laptop computer during a raid, and to being "accessory after the fact in the unauthorized access to a protected computer."
The factual stipulation justifies each of these: https://freebarrettbrown.org/files/BB_factualresume.pdf.
1) He didn't just report on the HBGary hack, he emailed the CEO acting as a go-between for Anonymous.
2) His threats in YouTube were not taken out of context. They were directed at a specific person, that person's kids, and mentioned being armed and responding with violence multiple times.
3) He coordinated with his mother to conceal two computers from the FBI during a search pursuant to a valid warrant.
This is not someone who got prosecuted just for reporting on a criminal organization. He got prosecuted for getting involved, then flipping out and threatening agents when he was investigated.
Is that a crime? It occurs to me the HBGary or Stratfor might not have minded the opportunity, even if it was only a tip to them of what was to come. It also demonstrates some sort of good faith.
From the IRC logs “Earlier it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to tell Stratfor that you guys will consider making any reasonable redactions to emails that might endanger, say, activists living under dictatorships with whom they might have spoken […] If they fail to cooperate, it will be on them if any claims are made about this yield endangering anyone,” -BB
The video threats are the one charge he seems unambiguously contrite about.
Compare to:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/iv9i3r85fdcpu6g/Screenshot%202015-... https://www.dropbox.com/s/rnk8x15b6y1uw5j/Screenshot%202015-... https://www.dropbox.com/s/fw7nmmht41vtdsi/Screenshot%202015-...
Here's the applicable statute:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/875
He plead guilty to 875(c), and the DOJ dropped the "Retaliation" and "Conspiracy to make publicly available restricted information" charges for the same fact pattern. Notable in part because the retaliation charge had a stiffer sentence.
If you do put it in the context of nobody involved in the criminal conspiracies exposed at HBGary being charged let alone convicted, for example, you can't really pretend this is anything remotely resembling blind justice.
But yeah, the hack of stratfor didn't do anyone any real damage other than really shining a light on the snouts in the trough of "security consulting" in Washington. Those bozos were getting paid(!) but they leaked emails in the hack suggesting there was nothing to Assange's rape accusation. You can't leak that opinion if you're getting paid in Washington, it's counter to message. Makes everyone on the gravy train nervous. Bad for business.
The "justification" of this sentence, significantly more draconian than wealthy child rapists, like Epstein, whose deal was a very different one, still has this epic, horrendous, penetrating stench of "there is not one law for everybody in this land, the system is completely bent and nobody really believes otherwise."
Are you ok with it? I'm not really ok with it myself because revolutionary change is a horrendous thing, but it's what happened the world over if reform of endemic corruption is stopped. Ask someone from a country that has done that, they aren't nice stories for ordinary people.
But Holder isn't going to let police confiscate your property and money without charges anymore. Maybe. Perhaps. Holder decided just now in the land of the free. So there's that, right?
oh and while we're dealing with opinion 1) what journalist following the story wouldn't email HBGary? Who wouldn't tease a criminal organisation to get more information about the conspiracy in which they were involved? It's a massive story. 2) Incoherent rant, significantly less threatening than the plea bargain. He looks a mess and incapable of tying his shoes. I have trouble believing anyone would be scared by that. But interesting in the light of the number of death threats we see from people not in that state in the media, no? But the people receiving the death threats aren't liked by those with their snouts in so they're probably more credible so we need to let those go because Free Speech. 3) Warrant to search his reporting notes after he'd exposed the crooks. How do you feel about that? I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with it. What did they find when they searched? Well this was the best charges they could make stick and could only do that with plea bargain blackmail doubled down with frankly ridiculous sentencing. Pretty weak huh?
I haven't seen anything suggesting his intent was anything other than altruistic, nor anything to suggest the results of his actions unintended or otherwise were damaging to anyone who isn't crooked. But that last bit is just "my opinion" and what I really object to is the law being applied unfairly and unequally. The people running Sabu at the FBI, HBGary, Stratfor and all those highly paid, consultants in washington will disagree with me that he should have been found guilty and let go on time served with some mixed words from the bench, some praise for intent, some praise for result and some admonishment for recklessness.
I will definitely sleep easier at night knowing that I better always agree with the government, no matter how corrupt it gets.
Then he was working with FBI infiltrated Lulzsec/Anonymous while they were actively breaking into Stratfor before it was known and being a spokesperson for Anonymous afterwards. This to me seems to be kinda crossing the line when it comes to reporting on something. Should we have reporters that know of a crime that will happen and then become the intermediary between the criminals and the victim when it becomes public? That is not linking publicly available information it is a bit more than that. He was not charged for linking.