The US government's system of justice seems increasingly opaque, arbitrary, and solely for the purpose of maintaining the status quo and those already in power.
Meanwhile, much worse crimes by those in power such as torture go unpunished.
Meanwhile, much worse crimes by those in power such as torture go unpunished.
> 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'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".
-Voltaire