Barrett Brown enjoys an Egg McMuffin after being released from prison. (photo: FreeBarrettBrown/Twitter)
Barrett
Brown Leaves Prison Still Chained to a Crime He Didn't Commit
By Dell Cameron, The Daily
Dot
30 November 16
Dallas-based
journalist Barrett Brown walked
free from prison on Tuesday morning after spending more than four years behind
bars.
The
35-year-old cause célèbre, convicted in January 2015 after spending more
than two years in pretrial confinement, faces a laundry list of post-release
restrictions and obligations, including drug treatment, mental health
evaluations, and computer monitoring. After departing the Three
Rivers federal correctional institution in San Antonio, where Brown continued
his work as a writer over the past year, publishing award-winning essays at D
Magazine and the Intercept, he will report to a halfway house in
Hutchins, Texas, before 4pm CT.
Brown
has been ordered to continue paying at least $200 every month to Stratfor, the Austin-based intelligence firm,
over the devastating cyberattack that nearly crippled the company five years
ago. While Brown had no foreknowledge of the security breach—which, despite
popular belief, occurred more than a month prior to the involvement of Anonymous hacker Jeremy Hammond and his AntiSec crew—Brown is nevertheless stuck paying $890,250
in restitution for a computer crime he had neither the skillset nor the
inclination to carry out himself.
An
offbeat agitator, Brown is what David Carr, the late New York Times journalist, described as “a pretty
complicated victim.” His case, at its core, was often a battle over the
identity of the man himself: Whereas the United States government went to great
lengths in court to portray Brown and Anonymous as two sides of the same coin,
his supporters (Noam Chomsky, Cory Doctorow, and the late Michael Ratner among
them) saw him rather as a cocky, freewheeling journalist with anarchic views
about transparency.
Brown’s
eagerness to uncover the U.S. government’s dealings with private security and
intelligence contractors led to frequent exchanges with criminal hackers
(while, incidentally, under FBI surveillance) and
placed him perilously close to the national security investigation into WikiLeaks, which is ongoing to this day.
Brown
was convicted in a Dallas federal
courtroom in January 2015, after accepting a plea bargain that
significantly reduced his potential prison sentence. The charges to which he
pleaded guilty stemmed from an after-the-fact involvement in the Stratfor hack,
and a YouTube video in which he appeared to
threaten an FBI agent. While charges related to the theft of Stratfor’s credit
card data had been tossed out nearly a year before his sentencing began, the
financial impact the company endured at the hands of Anonymous continued to
play a major role in Brown’s prosecution.
Armed
with a litany of terrible metaphors, U.S.
attorney Candina Heath proceeded to paint Brown as “someone who knowingly stole
and distributed credit card information,” to quote D Magazine reporting from the courtroom.
“It doesn’t matter the number of hands it passes as long as they know it’s
stolen property,” she said, referring to the Stratfor documents obtained by
AntiSec, which had been widely circulated online by the time Brown acquired
them.
The
U.S. government’s position, Heath said, was that Brown, by copying and pasting
a hyperlink in a chatroom, had done the “same thing” as the hackers who had
actually infiltrated the company and stolen thousands of credit cards, which
they used—and Brown did not—to allegedly rack up more than $700,000 in
fraudulent charges. “Regardless of whether or not it had been made public by
somebody else,” Heath told the court, “Mr. Brown took material, data, credit
card information that he understood to be stolen and purposefully trafficked in
it to another location for other people to use.”
The
prosecution admitted it had no evidence that anyone who clicked on the link
shared by Brown had stolen any money. The “other people” to whom Heath referred
were an army of amateur researchers with whom Brown had begun to collaborate
with in chat rooms by late 2011, dissecting the various batches of stolen
emails Anonymous routinely dumped in bulk online. By that time, Brown had
repeatedly sought to disassociate himself from Anonymous. He had publicly disavowed the hacking collective on
several occasions up to three years before his conviction and had founded his
own organization, Project PM, to suit likeminded digital activists.
To
many journalists, both in the U.S. and abroad, the government’s insistence that
Brown had committed a crime by simply sharing an already broadly disseminated
URL was staggering. The case was often depicted in the press as having
potentially far-reaching consequences for
journalists and researchers who regularly receive and pore over hacked
material. Even more troubling was the government’s attempt in 2013 to silence
Brown while he was behind bars, at one point seeking a court order to prevent
him from publishing articles while in custody.
Chat
logs published by the Dot in
the weeks leading up to the final hearing, which were sealed by a court order
in the Southern District of New York, showed that Brown and the Stratfor
hackers were not exactly the compadres the prosecution made them out to be.
AntiSec, it turned out, viewed Brown primarily as a disruptive outsider
throughout its monthlong attack. “You have nothing to do with this operation,”
Hammond, who is serving the remainder of a 10-year sentence for his involvement
in the Stratfor hack, once told Brown during a heated online encounter. Brown
signed off telling Hammond, “Fuck yourself.”
In a
secured chatroom, absent Brown, which the FBI had been monitoring for more than a month,
Hammond and his crew discussed ways in which they could attack Brown’s
credibility and tarnish his reputation. The hackers entertained plans to
cripple his communications network, and, at one point, even proposed dumping a
batch of stolen credit cards online under his name.
When
the government introduced more than 500 pages of chat logs at Brown’s initial
sentencing hearing, however, it excluded documents from the Stratfor hack that
challenged the prosecution’s version of events, remaining firm in its
conviction that Brown had played a major part in the attack. Delivering yet
another bad metaphor, Heath likened Brown’s involvement to “somebody stealing
your car” after it had already been stolen. By sharing a link to Stratfor’s
stolen data, Brown had stolen it further, Heath argued, to the dismay of
reporters seated in the courtroom.
A rarely
reported fact: Stratfor’s credit card databases had been picked clean by a
hacker unaffiliated with Anonymous months prior to the group’s involvement in
early December 2011. Likewise, Stratfor had been thoroughly infiltrated well
before Brown was even aware of the breach. Furthermore, a confidential forensic report concerning
Stratfor’s systems—leaked to the Daily Dot and published more than two years
ago—reveals a catastrophic-level of negligence on the part of the company
itself.
A Verizon security team, contracted to audit
Stratfor’s servers in January 2012, found that only three out of 12 mandated
fraud prevention requirements had been met. Eight of the nine security
requirements not met by Stratfor directly contributed to the breach, the
researchers found. The firm’s corporate environment and e-commerce environment
were not properly segregated as they should have been; there was no anti-virus
solution deployed on any of the systems reviewed by investigators; and the
company’s stored customer data was not protected with industry-standard encryption.
“In
light of a confirmed system breach,” Verizon reported, “it should be noted that
several distinct vulnerabilities and network configurations existed that
allowed this breach and subsequent data compromise to occur.” Stratfor, asleep
at the wheel, offered the hackers something even more enticing: a high-level
administrator account that had, inexplicably, never been secured with a
password. In June 2012, only six months after the hack, Stratfor quietly
settled a class-action lawsuit with its customers to the tune of $1.75 million.
Brown,
whose first stop after prison was
for an Egg McMuffin, could not be immediately reached for comment.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The
master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class
has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment