Barrett Brown: Standing Up for Journalistic Freedom

Field of Vision – Relatively Free

Alex Winter (2016)

Field of Vision is the first media interview journalist Barrett Brown gave (in November 2016) after spending four years in federal prison. He was originally arrested for publishing (on his website) publicly available material that had been hacked from private intelligence/security contractor Stratfor. When these charges were eventually dropped, he pled guilty to making threats against an FBI office, obstruction of justice and being an accessory to cyber threats.

While in federal prison, he spent six months in solitary confinement.

***

The link below is a Democracy Now clip from a May 2017 interview from Brown’s halfway house. It delves more deeply into ongoing federal harassment again him, owing to his role in publicizing illegal collusion between the FBI, Stratfor and other private security contractors. Among others, Brown published emails in about private corporations who received Department of Justice assistance in discrediting activists who tried to expose their various criminal activities.

One particular email revealed a request by Bank of America to discredit Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald, based on fears they were about to publish leaked documents about their illegal BoA activities.

During the interview, Brown reveals the FBI re-arrested him in April to prevent him from appearing in a PBS documentary. The FBI claims (erroneously) that he’s prohibited from speaking to the media as a condition of his probation. He was only released after a first amendment lawyer threatened to sue the Department of Justice for violating federal law.

Brown is thinking strongly of immigrating after he completes his probation.

Democracy Now: Jailed Reporter Barrett Brown

Anonymous – The Hacker Wars

Anonymous – The Hacker Wars

Vivien Lesnik Weisman (2014)

Film Review

The Hacker Wars is a riveting documentary about members of Anonymous – the leaderless international hacking community – who have made their identity public. It focuses on four individuals: Andrew (Weev) Auernheimer, Barrett Brown, Jeremy Hammond and a hacker turned FBI informant who went by the screen name SABU.

The first two men made their identify public as a form of civil disobedience – directed at government surveillance, secrecy and suppression of civil liberties. Hammond’s name became public after an FBI informant named SABU entrapped him into hacking into Stratfor, the infamous private intelligence/security contractor.

Weev was arrested in 2013 – not for hacking – but for downloading over 100,000 government email addresses from an unscecure AT&T website and sharing the security glitch with journalists. He served 13 months in jail before his conviction was overturned on appeal.

Barrett Brown, a non-hacker, was a journalist who reported on Anonymous activities. He was arrested for allegedly copying a publicly available Stratfor link to his Project PM website, a clear violation of his first amendment rights. He was sentenced to 63 months in Federal prison. He was released to a halfway house (on house arrest) in November 2016.

SABU was arrested in June 2011 and released after one day after agreeing to infiltrate Anonymous on behalf of the FBI. Eight days later (at the behest of the FBI), he formed the splinter group Antisec, which in September 2011 aggressively promoted Occupy Wall Street to other Anonymous members. In December 2011, he persuaded Jeremy Hammond to assist him with the infamous Stratfor Christmas Hack. This was the operation in which scores of ex-CIA and ex-military operatives who worked for Stratfor woke up on Christmas to discover they had donated $50,000 each to various charities.

Hammond pled guilty and was sentenced to ten years.

The FBI was an active member of Anonymous for nine months in all. SABU’s role as an informant came out at his trial in April 2012. Owing to his invaluable service to the FBI, he walked away a free man.