Aaron Swartz, Barrett Brown, Andrew Auernheimer. How the feds are going after journalists

and activists on behalf of corporate America. And perhaps, Michael Hastings should be added to this list. No, I'm not suggesting that his car accident was anything but a car accident, but I do take him at his word that he was being investigated by the FBI.

Andrew Auernheimer
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Auernheimer is a member of the group of computer experts known as "Goatse Security" that exposed a flaw in AT&T security which allowed the e-mail addresses of iPad users to be revealed.[13] Contrary to what it first claimed, the group revealed the security flaw to Gawker Media before AT&T had been notified,[14] and also exposed the data of 114,000 iPad users, including those of celebrities, the government and the military. The actions of this group re-provoked the debate on the disclosure of security flaws.[15] Auernheimer maintains that Goatse Security used common industry standard practices and has said that "we tried to be the good guys".[3][15] Jennifer Granick of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has also defended the tactics used by Goatse Security.[15]

The FBI then opened an investigation into the incident.[16] The FBI investigation led to a criminal complaint in January 2011.[17]

Shortly after the investigation was opened, Auernheimer's house was raided by the FBI and local police. The FBI search was related to its investigation of the AT&T security breach, but Auernheimer was subsequently detained on state drug charges.[18] Police allege that, during their execution of the search warrant related to the AT&T breach, they found cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, and schedule 2 and 3 pharmaceuticals.[19] He was released on a $3,160 bail pending state trial.[20] After his release on bail, he broke a gag order to protest what he maintained were violations of his civil rights. In particular, he disputed the legality of the search of his house and denial of access to a public defender. He also asked for donations via PayPal, to defray legal costs.[3][21]

In January 2011, all drug-related charges were dropped immediately following Auernheimer's arrest by federal authorities. The U.S. Justice Department announced that he will be charged with one count of conspiracy to access a computer without authorization and one count of fraud.[22] Although his co-defendant, Daniel Spitler, was quickly released on bail, Auernheimer was initially denied bail due to his unemployment and lack of a family member to host him before being released on $50,000 bail in late February 2011.[2][23] Auernheimer was incarcerated in the Federal Transfer Center, Oklahoma City in February 2011. A federal grand jury in Newark, New Jersey, indicted Auernheimer with one count of conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to computers and one count of identity theft in early July 2011.[24] As of September 2011 he was free on bail and raising money for his legal defense fund.[25]

On 20 November 2012, Auernheimer was found guilty of one count of identity fraud and one count of conspiracy to access a computer without authorization.[26] Auernheimer tweeted that he would appeal the ruling.[27] Alex Pilosov, a friend who was also present for the ruling, tweeted that Auernheimer would remain free on bail until sentencing, "which will be at least 90 days out."[28]

On 29 November 2012, Auernheimer authored an article in Wired Magazine entitled "Forget Disclosure - Hackers Should Keep Security Holes to Themselves," advocating the disclosure of any zero-day exploit only to individuals who will "use it in the interests of social justice."[29]

In a January 2013 Tech Crunch article,[30] he likened his prosecution to that of Aaron Swartz, writing

[...]Aaron dealt with his indictment so badly because he thought he was part of a special class of people that this didn’t happen to. I am from a rundown shack in Arkansas. I spent many years thinking people from families like his got better treatment than me. Now I realize the truth: The beast is so monstrous it will devour us all.

On 18 March 2013, after being found guilty of identity fraud and conspiracy to access a computer without authorization, Auernheimer was sentenced to 41 months in federal prison and ordered to pay $73,000 in restitution.[31] Just prior to his sentencing, he posted an AMA on Reddit;[32] comments such as "I hope they give me the maximum, so people will rise up and storm the docks" and "My regret is being nice enough to give AT&T a chance to patch before dropping the dataset to Gawker. I won't nearly be as nice next time" were cited by the prosecution as justification for the sentence.[33]

Later in March 2013, civil rights lawyer and George Washington University Law School faculty Orin Kerr joined Auernheimer’s legal team, free of charge

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev

Aaron Swartz:

On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested near the Harvard campus. He was arraigned in Cambridge District Court on two state charges of breaking and entering with intent to commit a felony.[11][12][13][72][76][77]

On July 11, 2011, Swartz was indicted in Federal District Court on four felony counts: wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer.[14][15][78][79]

On November 17, 2011, Swartz was indicted by a Middlesex County Superior Court grand jury on state charges of breaking and entering with intent, grand larceny and unauthorized access to a computer network.[80][81]

On December 16, 2011, the district attorney’s office filed a nolle prosequi declaration in the case generated by Swartz's initial January 6, 2011 arrest.[12] The state charges against Swartz stemming from the November 17, 2011 indictment were dropped on March 8, 2012.[82] According to a spokesperson for the Middlesex County prosecutor, the state charges were dropped in order to permit federal prosecution to proceed, unimpeded.[82]

On September 12, 2012, the prosecution filed a superseding indictment adding nine more felony counts.[15][83]

After his death, federal prosecutors dismissed the charges

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Arrest_and_prosecution

Barrett Brown:

http://www.thenation.com/article/174851/strange-case-barrett-brown#ixzz2Wk1yndKF

Glenn Greenwald in March of this year on the Barrett Brown case:

The persecution of Barrett Brown - and how to fight it

Aaron's Swartz's suicide in January triggered waves of indignation, and rightly so. He faced multiple felony counts and years in prison for what were, at worst, trivial transgressions of law. But his prosecution revealed the excess of both anti-hacking criminal statutes, particularly the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), and the fixation of federal prosecutors on severely punishing all forms of activism that challenge the power of the government and related entities to control the flow of information on the internet. Part of what drove the intense reaction to Swartz's death was how sympathetic of a figure he was, but as noted by Orin Kerr, a former federal prosecutor in the DOJ's computer crimes unit and now a law professor at GWU, what was done to Swartz is anything but unusual, and the reaction to his death will be meaningful only if channeled to protest other similar cases of prosecutorial abuse:

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Prosecutorial abuse is a drastically under-discussed problem in general, but it poses unique political dangers when used to punish and deter online activism. But it's becoming the preeminent weapon used by the US government to destroy such activism.

Just this week alone, a US federal judge sentenced hactivist Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer to 3 1/2 years in prison for exploiting a flaw in AT&T's security system that allowed him entrance without any hacking, an act about which Slate's Justin Peters wrote: "it's not clear that Auernheimer committed any actual crime", while Jeff Blagdon at the Verge added: "he cracked no codes, stole no passwords, or in any way 'broke into' AT&T's customer database - something company representatives confirmed during testimony." But he had a long record of disruptive and sometimes even quite ugly (though legal) online antagonism, so he had to be severely punished with years in prison. Also this week, the DOJ indicted the deputy social media editor at Reuters, Matthew Keys, on three felony counts which carry a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison for allegedly providing some user names and passwords that allowed Anonymous unauthorized access into the computer system of the Los Angeles Times, where they altered a few stories and caused very minimal damage. As Peters wrote about that case, "the charges under the CFAA seem outrageously severe" and, about Keys' federal prosecutors, observed: "apparently, they didn't take away any lessons from the Aaron Swartz case."

But the pending federal prosecution of 31-year-old Barrett Brown poses all new troubling risks. That's because Brown - who has been imprisoned since September on a 17-count indictment that could result in many years in prison - is a serious journalist who has spent the last several years doggedly investigating the shadowy and highly secretive underworld of private intelligence and defense contractors, who work hand-in-hand with the agencies of the Surveillance and National Security State in all sorts of ways that remain completely unknown to the public. It is virtually impossible to conclude that the obscenely excessive prosecution he now faces is unrelated to that journalism and his related activism.

A brief understanding of Brown's intrepid journalism is vital to understanding the travesty of his prosecution. I first heard of Brown when he wrote a great 2010 essay in Vanity Fair defending the journalist Michael Hastings from attacks from fellow journalists over Hastings' profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone, which ended the general's career. Brown argued that establishment journalists hate Hastings because he has spent years challenging, rather than serving, political and military officials and the false conventional wisdom they spout.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/21/barrett-brown-persecution-anonymous