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US Feds Won’t Reveal Reason For Throwing Journalist in Jail

Barrett Brown

© Photo: facebook.com/freebarrettbrown
By Grant Ferowich | Sputnik | April 29, 2017

One day after the arrest of intelligence reporter Barrett Brown for criticizing the US government, a government agency refused to state the reason for his detention.

Brown gained notoriety as a symbol for the attack on press freedom after he reported on a slew of leaks connected with hacker group Anonymous. In particular, Brown covered emails that showed Stratfor had been contracted out by private companies on the recommendation of the Justice Department to spy on activists connected with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

“We can not disclose the reason(s) for a specific inmate’s transfer of location,” the Bureau of Prisons said in a statement released Friday.

“Therein lies the cute terminology of the BOP,” Jay Leiderman, legal counsel to Barrett Brown, told Sputnik News Friday night. In the eyes of the BOP, Brown is an inmate, but technically, he’s half an inmate, Leiderman said.

“For privacy and security reasons,” the BOP went on, “we do not disclose information on a specific inmate’s living quarters.” However, Brown had been living outside a prison, and detaining a US citizen without due process is supposed to be prevented by rights enumerated in both the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, Leiderman confirmed to Sputnik.

On April 27, Brown attended a routine meeting with his case manager. From there, the award-winning journalist was taken into federal custody at the Seagoville Federal Correctional Institution in Texas. The reason? He spoke with media outlets without the government’s approval.

​Never mind that the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights states Congress “shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

​According to Leiderman, there is a limit to how long authorities can hold Brown. But the prospect of indefinite detainment, unfortunately, cannot be entirely ruled out. It’s not outside the realm of BOP’s practice, the attorney suggested, for a prison guard to poke himself on the arm and claim an inmate had done it, which could land another five year sentence for the unlucky prisoner. While the lawyer did not seem to think this would be likely, the mere specter of it raises questions about the extent of the federal government’s powerful reach.

Leiderman called it the Barrett Brown Rule: The BOP can deploy sneaky policy tactics to effectively silence and imprison someone they personally don’t like. This has happened in a handful of previous cases, Leiderman said, but now we could be watching another major government overreach unfold before our collective eyes.

Brown’s first exclusive interview following his release from jail was on Radio Sputnik’s By Any Means Necessary with Eugene Puryear. The writer has since interviewed with Vice News and was scheduled for a Friday interview with PBS before he was once again detained.

​It was only during the past three days that the BOP claimed Brown needed permission to conduct interviews. This information came “out of the blue,” Brown’s legal counsel, Jay Leiderman, told Sputnik News on Thursday. Brown asked the BOP for the policy manual stating this requirement, but was rebuffed.

​“There was never any mention of these rules during the past four months of his federally approved employment at D Magazine when he was working with media and involved in a range of interviews,” Brown’s mother said in a statement.

Free Barrett Brown website operator Kevin Gallagher told Reason that the conditions of Brown’s release never mentioned media restrictions. Brown is known for “being critical of the Bureau of Prisons in many different ways,” Gallagher said.

“I would call the people who did this a bunch of chicken-sh*t a**holes that are brutalizing the Constitution, Leiderman told the Intercept when Brown was taken into custody once more.

See also:

US Detains Journalist For Exercising Free Speech

April 30, 2017 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Barrett Brown Prosecution Threatens Right to Link, Could Criminalize Routine Journalism Practices

By Hanni Fakhoury and Trevor Timm | EFF | July 19, 2013

Twitter was abuzz yesterday when an unknown person published what were alleged to be a group of passwords for the email accounts of Congressional staffers. Multiple journalists, including reporters from the Daily Beast and Buzzfeed, commented on the list while linking to it.

While one would assume linking to the list is a First Amendment-protected activity—given the journalists had nothing to do with stealing the passwords—Barrett Brown is currently under indictment, in part, for remarkably similar behavior. And if he is convicted, it could have dire consequences for press freedom.

Brown, who has written for Vanity Fair and the Guardian among other publications, started a website called “Project PM” in 2009, which crowdsourced public information about security contractors who worked with government agencies like the NSA. Part of what Brown and other Project PM users investigated were leaked emails from security contractors like HB Gary and Stratfor.

Now, it’s important to note that, despite his fascination with Anonymous, Brown has never been accused of participating in any hacking. In fact, he lacks the expertise to even do so. Northwestern professor Peter Ludlow described what happened after Stratfor emails were leaked online by Anonymous: “When the contents of the Stratfor leak became available, Brown decided to put ProjectPM on it. A link to the Stratfor dump appeared in an Anonymous chat channel; Brown copied it and pasted it into the private chat channel for ProjectPM, bringing the dump to the attention of the editors.”

The link, it turned out, contained credit card numbers, among the wealth of information on the company itself. But by merely transferring the link from one chat room to another, Brown was indicted for trafficking in stolen authentication features (specifically the credit card verification values (“CVV”), or the three-digit number on the back of a credit card), access device (i.e., credit card) fraud and aggravated identity theft. (He is also indicted in two separate criminal cases with making online threats to an FBI agent and obstruction of justice, but those have no bearing on the charges being discussed here.)

The government’s prosecution theory isn’t limited to credit card numbers. The same theory could potentially be used against the Daily Beast or Buzzfeed journalists yesterday, or against any journalist that has linked to stolen material of a similar nature. That’s because the federal identity theft statute, 18 USC § 1028, is remarkably broad.

The statute criminalizes knowingly transferring an “authentication feature” known to be stolen or taken without lawful authority. “Authentication feature” means any “symbol,” “code” or “sequence of numbers or letters” used to authenticate a means of identification. And “means of identification” is defined as “any name or number that may be used alone or in conjunction with any other information, to identify a specific individual” including a “unique electronic identification number, address, or routing code.” The government has argued before—specifically in its prosecution of Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer—that this definition covers email addresses.

Under the government’s theory in Barrett Brown’s case, all journalists (and anyone else for that matter) tweeting out the link to the list of Congressional staffer email addresses and passwords were trafficking in authentication features and are guilty of a felony. While it turns out that many of the passwords in this case may not have been accurate, this lesson holds true anytime someone links to groups of stolen passwords posted online, which seems to happen fairly frequently.

And in this situation, under the Justice Department’s theory, those linking to the list violated the aggravated identity theft statute too because during that crime, they knowingly transferred “without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person”—the email addresses. These are serious charges; aggravated identity theft alone carries a mandatory two-year prison sentence that must run consecutively to any other sentence imposed.

It bears repeating: the government does not allege Brown participated in the hacking of Stratfor at all. Here, Brown didn’t even publish anything, he merely directed other people to where information was already published via a standard hyperlink. The right of journalists—or anyone for that matter—to link to already-public information, including sensitive information, is in serious jeopardy if Brown is convicted.

We’ll have more on the dangers of the Barrett Brown prosecution to both the press and public soon. In the meantime Brown’s case and the massive linking to the Congressional e-mail addresses and passwords that occurred yesterday emphasize why journalists should be worried when the right to link is threatened.

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July 20, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment