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99th_Monkey

(19,326 posts)
Wed Jul 17, 2013, 01:21 PM Jul 2013

The Strange Case of Barrett Brown: Journalist/hacktivist facing 105 yrs. in JAIL for doing his job

You've probably heard of Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, Michael Hastings & Edward Snowden, but you probably haven't heard yet about Barrett Brown? I hadn't either, not until 15 minutes ago, I stumbled across this, in a Democracy Now report, which aired about a week ago. Brown apparently had (or claimed to have) some connection to Anonymous, and was an accomplished journalist and hacker-for-justice with ties to TM



Jailed Journalist Barrett Brown Faces 105 Years For Reporting on Hacked Private Intelligence Firms
~*~*~*~ Democracy Now ~*~*~*~

Journalist Barrett Brown spent his 300th day behind bars this week on a range of charges filed after he used information obtained by the hacker group Anonymous to report on the operations of private intelligence firms. Brown faces 17 charges ranging from threatening an FBI agent to credit card fraud for posting a link online to a document that contained stolen credit card data. But according to his supporters, Brown is being unfairly targeted for daring to investigate the highly secretive world of private intelligence and military contractors. Using information Anonymous took from the firm HBGary Federal, Brown helped discover a secret plan to tarnish the reputations of WikiLeaks and journalist Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian. Brown similarly analyzed and wrote about the millions of internal company emails from Stratfor Global Intelligence that were leaked in 2011. We speak to Peter Ludlow, professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, whose article "The Strange Case of Barrett Brown" recently appeared in The Nation. "Considering that the person who carried out the actual Stratfor hack had several priors and is facing a maximum of 10 years, the inescapable conclusion is that the problem is not with the hack itself but with Brown’s journalism," Ludlow argues. He adds that the case against Brown could suggest criminality "to even link to something or share a link with someone."

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/11/jailed_journalist_barrett_brown_faces_105
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The Strange Case of Barrett Brown: Journalist/hacktivist facing 105 yrs. in JAIL for doing his job (Original Post) 99th_Monkey Jul 2013 OP
Am I smelling desperation in the air? RC Jul 2013 #1
 

RC

(25,592 posts)
1. Am I smelling desperation in the air?
Wed Jul 17, 2013, 01:39 PM
Jul 2013

Otherwise why imprison someone longer for reporting information from a hack, than the hacker who did it?

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