Groups Disappointed in U.S. Sentence for Journalist Who Hyperlinked to Stolen Documents
Some groups were disappointed that investigative journalist Barrett Brown was sentenced on Thursday to 63 months in prison and ordered to pay $890,000 in restitution for hyperlinking to illegally obtained documents on the Internet. U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay in…
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Dallas sentenced Brown to serve 63 months. Brown will have to serve only 32 months in prison, as he has already been in prison for 31 months. Kevin Gallagher, director of the Free Barrett Brown campaign, said in a statement that he was disappointed with the sentencing, since Brown’s case sets a precedent that “if you share a link to publicly available material without knowing what’s in it -- maybe it could contain stolen credit card info -- you could be prosecuted.” An Electronic Frontier Foundation statement said it also was disappointed and encouraged the public to continue to fight for transparency. In his sentencing statement, Brown also encouraged the public to understand the privacy, transparency and free speech issues at play in his case. In 2011, Brown, who reported for The Guardian, Huffington Post and Vanity Fair, founded Project PM. It’s a “think-tank which researches and reports on matters related to the intelligence contracting industry” that allows the public to review documents for journalistic and transparency purposes, said Free Barrett Brown. It said Brown was taken into custody for linking to, and therefore publicizing, documents that he received from online hacktivist groups. Brown and supporters argued the emails included proof that there were ongoing discussions at government contractor HBGary to assassinate certain individuals and silence groups of individuals including journalists, political groups and foreign leaders. The government said it was concerned with the privacy violations that stemmed from the release of the emails, since they contained tens of thousands of credit card numbers and their verification codes. Brown originally was charged on 12 counts, including aggravated identity theft. Brown and supporters argued that in the interest of having a transparent government, journalists should be allowed to hyperlink their stories to documents that are of interest to the public, even if the documents were illegally obtained before they were given to the journalist. In March, the U.S. government dropped 11 of the hyperlinking charges against Brown. A month later, Brown signed a plea agreement reducing the remaining charges against him to three, and pled guilty to being an accessory to the unauthorized access of computers of another government contractor, Stratfor.