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Attorneys for Barrett Brown want case on linking to hacked material dismissed
- discardorama 13y ago"You make an example out of a couple of people, and the rest fall in line pretty quickly" . . . . I wonder what Daniel Elsberg[1] or Woodward and Bernstein would face today, if they tried to do today what they did then? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- beedogs 13y agoIn a just world, these charges never would have been brought. In a sane world, a judge will dismiss these charges. We're not living in the first world, and I fear we're not in the second anymore, either.
- gamblor956 13y agoIn a just world, Barret Brown would not have DOXed an FBI agent and his family for doing his job, or distributed several thousand people's credit card numbers and corresponding identifying information. Barret Brown is not Aaron Schwartz. Schwartz at least had a colorable claim that what he was doing should not have been a crime. If the allegations are true, Barret Brown is definitely one of the bad apples and does not deserve our sympathy.
- ageisp0lis 13y agoHe didn't dox an FBI agent or his family (indeed, he's charged for his speech and there's a motion to dismiss that indictment on First Amendment grounds too); he was under duress and coming off meds, and outraged at the legal threats against his mother. The allegations are "conspiracy to dox" rather than any successful act. Literally they said that someone did a Google search with the goal of making "restricted personal information" public. He flipped out and lost his cool over constant government-sanctioned harassment. He's not perfect by any means—admitted substance abuse problems and a big naïve/foolish/arrogant streak—but still deserves sympathy. I don't think he would have known there was a law on the books making it illegal to dox feds. Doxing abusive cops on the other hand is legal and happens all the time between Anonymous/Occupy and even journalists do it sometimes. In order to convict on threats there needs to be a "true threat" of physical harm, a non-conditional statement made to a specific person. All he said was "if they come" he wouldn't be able to tell FBI from Zetas so he'd exercise self-defense. And he explicitly clarified when he said he was going to ruin the guy's life, he meant to expose him, not as a physical threat. One can disseminate a link without knowing whats in it. Brown is on the record in many places as being opposed to spreading credit cards. He was against that kind of stuff.
- tptacek 13y agoIt's disingenuous to suggest that Brown had no actual intent to harm law enforcement agents while leaving out the fact that the indictment starts by establishing a pattern over multiple weeks of Brown making direct threats to them on Twitter, including threats of violence. The threats aren't (as I understand it) unlawful either, but the combination of threats and any actions in furtherance of them can be.
- Zigurd 13y agoI would find it very difficult to find any sympathy for the prosecutors and FBI agents in this case. They are bullies, and they have gotten far less blowback than they deserve for doing shitty unethical and likely illegal but for their immunity things like threatening prosecution of family members and intentionally inflicting financial ruin on a defendant's whole family.
- ageisp0lis 13y agoThe indictment establishes a pattern of speech but doesn't establish actual unlawful offenses. No, I don't think he was threatening violence. The FreeBB people have written a bit about this. http://tumblr.freebarrettbrown.org/post/77390763109/debunking-supposed-threats http://tumblr.freebarrettbrown.org/post/77390763109/debunkin...
- kordless 13y agoThis is barely more than a thought crime. A link? Seriously? http://localhost http://localhost
- psykovsky 13y agoWhy are you posting my computer domain on the open Internet? I will sue you so hard, dude!
- TempleOSV2 13y agoAre you ready to meet your maker, pigs? God says... Shakespeare Church don't_count_on_it smart wont_you_be_my_neighbor how_hard_could_it_be birds quit what_luck soap_opera hypocrite mundo_stoked
- walru 13y agoSomeone once said, the pen is mightier than the sword. What does that then make a link worth? A nuclear warhead?
- TeMPOraL 13y ago> What does that then make a link worth? A guidance system.
- csense 13y agoHere are some questions raised by this case: (1) The circumstances under which hyperlinking to material posted and hosted by others is, or should be, a crime. (2) If it is a crime, whether the proposed sentence is proportional to the alleged offense. (3) Whether the prosecutor is trying to exert pressure for a plea bargain. E.g., if they offer him 100 days in jail if he pleads guilty, or 100 years in jail if he's convicted, it would make sense to plead guilty from a pure risk management perspective, even if he has an enormously strong case. (4) If this length of sentence for this behavior is authorized by statute, whether the statute falls foul of the Constitution's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. (5) Whether the First Amendment protects hyperlinks to unprotected speech.
- sillysaurus3 13y agoif they offer him 100 days in jail if he pleads guilty, or 100 years in jail if he's convicted, it would make sense to plead guilty from a pure risk management perspective, even if he has an enormously strong case. I'm not so sure about that. Imagine the terrible precedent you'd set. EDIT: Risk aversion is sometimes toxic to society.
- sdrothrock 13y agoHow many people are idealistic and generous enough to take that kind of risk with their own lives? It's not (a quick) death, but life in isolation in the penal system for... not setting a precedent? I don't think I would be that idealistic or generous.
- EGreg 13y agoAnd that's just the thing. When cops pull you over and point a gun at you, telling you to get out of the car, do you get out of the car or not? Even if you don't have to get out of the car, you won't take that risk with your own life. Same with cops asking for anything else at gunpoint etc.
- insuffi 13y agoBefore your edit, you wrote about risk aversion and how it's toxic for a society. I disagree, mainly because this case is an asymmetric risk scenario - his gains from pleading not guilty are extremely miniscule when compared to his losses(compared to the 100 days he'd have to spend in jail, if he were to plead guilty).
- EGreg 13y ago"as he arguably would have done had he embedded the link on his web page, but merely created a path to files that had already been published elsewhere" I am pretty sure they meant "documents" not "link" here
- ageisp0lis 13y agoA link can't contain credit card numbers or CVVs on its own. It's just a pointer to where the data resides. It's entirely possible that Brown didn't know what he was disseminating. One has to download and open the file to find out. The government is expecting us to know what's in a link before we share it, which is an unreasonable burden. And they're equating transmitting the link with possessing the underlying information. Moreover they haven't shown any illicit transactions resulting from it being shared. How can reporters verify sources or security researchers examine data dumps without fear of being prosecuted now? This is a chilling attack on digital rights and needs to be stopped. I hope the judge listens. Stratfor was sued because they failed to sufficiently protect their systems and rightfully so. The actual hacker Jeremy Hammond got less time than this guy faces.
- hnha 13y agoEven worse, link's destinations are outside your control. The funny picture can be replaced with anything by the person in control of it. I have goatsed many people when someone embedded an image from my server. In that case it was visible. Changing what a page linked-to.shows is much more hidden.
- staticelf 13y agoCut off the US from the rest of the world's internet or you guys will ruing everything for us as well.
- n1ghtmare_ 13y agoIf this is not bullshit, I don't know what is!
- thenerdfiles 13y agoHm. I wonder if this question poses more harm than good, but I'll ask it: Does the right to free speech protect in this way: <a href="[not_protected]">[protected]</a> ?
- thenerdfiles 13y agoI ask because it seems that we're moving in the direction of <a href="[not_protected]">[not_protected]</a> That said: blah blah blah .... blah blah Now if a crawler scans that, puts it into an aggregate feed and cites me as the source, and there's a hyperlink in there... That means trouble for everyone. But really, if I give you some text and you copy-paste a substring of it into a search engine and get a Stratfor document, what's that mean? Is it the function of a hyperlink + intent, or is it just the speech itself? Doesn't "speech" imply intentionality which itself is what is examined by law?
- RKoutnik 13y agoReality check: The actual verdict will probably be much lower than 100 years, given that this is his first arrest. http://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence-eleventy-million-years/ http://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence...
- ageisp0lis 13y agoIt's a maximum potential sentence of all the charges combined, I think most smart people realize that. As another person noted the media does this to show the charges as excessive.
- kjjw 13y agoReality check: what does it matter? This person is facing 15 years in prison for linking to material in an ephemeral setting - a chat room. That there are not people protesting on the streets is a good indicator of how much US citizens enjoy living in an ultranationalist state.
- chii 13y agoGeorge orwell is turning in his grave - thought crime is becoming a reality these days.
- quackerhacker 13y agoWow, so now we should all start linking through bit.ly to circumvent direct links? (sarcasm...yet timidly true) What I find concerning is his lawyer's argument, "Brown did not 'transfer' the stolen information as he arguably would have done had he embedded the link on his web page" ... does this mean for us webmasters, linking to a webpage (even as Google or Bing may do) would mean incrimination. I understanding hosting....but linking!!! WTF!
- sillysaurus3 13y agoI wonder, as the world moves to cloud computing, will there be much difference between "hosting" and "linking"? Documents are digital, but "digital" used to mean that the bits were on a device that you own, which is becoming less true with time. Does the location of bits on a harddrive determine guilt, or does the intent to distribute the protected information? If intent, then is linking intent?
- ageisp0lis 13y agoThat's not the lawyers argument, it's actually the Guardian writer's failed paraphrase of a point they were trying to make. The government is relying on copyright law which traditionally distinguishes "in-line" linking from "embedded" linking. Since this is neither, their reliance on that is flawed... the writer of this article just didn't fully grok it. I recommend you skim the motion.
- gamblor956 13y agoFUD. This is a federal case, and the Federal Sentencing Guidelines (while now discretionary, see Booker) simply don't work that way. 100 years is the potential maximum he would get if the sentences were served consecutively, but at the federal level, there must be special circumstances to justify imposing consecutive sentences. Consequently, consecutive sentencing is the exception, not the rule, and is almost exclusively reserved for the most heinous crimes, i.e., rapes, murders, or high-level drug offenses. (Note that certain factors can also result in consecutive sentences, such as gun "enhancements" which can add 5-25 years to a base sentence.) Edit: The above assumes the case even proceeds to the sentencing stage. Several US courts have already ruled that merely hyperlinking is not enough; there must be an additional circumstance to make the hyperlinking illegal. For example, if the information hyperlinked was clearly intended to be protected or private (i.e., Schwartz and the AT&T subscriber data), then dissemination of links could fall within the meaning of one or more statutes for unauthorized access. A physical analogy to explain why this matters: a URL isn't simply an address; it is a path, and this makes all the difference. A p.o. address, for example, may tell you how to get to someone's apartment but it wouldn't tell you how to get up there if the front door is locked. A URL is more akin to giving someone an address and telling them how to get inside. (And for you nitpickers, in this example also assume that you don't know the person at this address; you simply know the URL.)
- sillysaurus3 13y agoWhy did it become socially acceptable for prosecutors to throw around 100-year threats, though? It seems like the only reason that's not a crime is because they're the legal system. Maybe there should be a limit on the span between maximum threat and minimum sentence, so that 100-year threats can't be thrown around unless the minimum plea is at least 5-10 years. That would make a prosecutor hesitate to employ such a powerful weapon, because the defendant would be more willing go to trial in that scenario, which reduces their chances of landing that conviction.
- etherael 13y agoIt seems like the only reason that's not a crime is because they're the legal system. Of all of the activities undertaken by the state, an increasingly high percentage fall firmly under this definition.
- icholboy 13y agoHow many years should the 5 Eyes alliance get then? not for the linking but for the hacking itself. Ridiculous.
- jmnicolas 13y agoSeeing it from outside the American judicial system looks really scary. Maybe I'm making a generality of a few fringe cases but since 9/11, and the rise of TSA and several horror stories of Police abuse I abandoned my project to one day visit this great country.
- GFischer 13y agoAs someone that hasn't visited the U.S. yet, I think there are risks, but not as bad as to prevent me from visiting. I believe the likelihood of having a serious run-in with the law in the U.S. as similar to having an accident when doing an "extreme" sport - you have to be aware of the possibility when doing it and accept them, but they're not so bad. The most likely scenario, from what people who visited experienced: you will be treated a bit roughly at customs/inmigration (fingerprints, questioning your motives) and then you'll be free to have a nice time. Do your homework and have your visa and papers and travel schedule and hotels in advance, and you'll be fine. It's still one of the least friendly countries to enter (and that's validated by people I know that have visited 100+ countries, I've visited 50+ myself), but I think it's worth it and I'll visit someday.
- wreegab 13y agoExactly how I feel. I've come to see the U.S. as one of those unsavoury places which is best to avoid. I rather pay extra on my flight tickets than get better deals with transit flights in the U.S. It's sad really. Bill Clinton once said "There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America", and at the time I agreed with that. It has been a while since I do not believe this anymore.
- marukokinno 13y agoI had exactly the same thoughs today earlier, before seeing this article. "horror stories" was exactly the words in my mind. To be a prosecutor in the US is a political career, and they go nuclear to sentence the highest number of people they can, with the maximum charges they can, doesn't matter the situation, all out war, to get some press. to make things even better, the jail sistem is private, to build and run jails is a business. There was a guy who the cop befriended and pretended to be his good friend for 2 years, just to convince him to bet some money on football, then the cop sent the SWAT to arrest him for betting , and the Swat guys killed the man in his house. It was on HN i think. Being a third world foreigner and not so white as I am, It becomes easier to abandon the dream of ever stepping the foot on the country. Is a Pity, I really would like to see the girls in the California beaches and Las vegas.
- suprgeek 13y agoGoogle links to a lot of sites, even a large number that contain Hacked/Obscene/Defamatory/Copyrighted material as defined by appropriate laws. Since Google is posting these publicly (using many fancy techniques to improve their relevance no less) how many billion years of Sentencing will Brin & Page face under these extremely well worded/just/sane Federal Laws?
- quarterwave 13y agoAre there any countries where this kind of prosecution would not even get past the court clerk?
- nounaut 13y agoAt the time of his arrest the biggest fuss was made about him threatening a federal agent and his family in a vlog post. Are these charges dropped?
- ageisp0lis 13y agoNo but they are also subject to a motion to dismiss by his defense. http://freebarrettbrown.org/files/BB_motiontodismiss1.pdf http://freebarrettbrown.org/files/BB_motiontodismiss1.pdf The allegations there are actually not as significant as the linking. If he were convicted of threats and that was the only charge, he'd be out by now.
- ama729 13y agoReading all the comments here, have people not been watching the news like ... ever? Large sentence are the norm in the US, not the exception. Petty thief in California and elsewhere[1] are sentenced to 25 years minimum if they are repeat offender, it's completely crazy. In that regard, it seem unlikely Brown would get a light sentence. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_strikes_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_strikes_law
- guelo 13y agoThe sad part about our system of justice is that the police and prosecutors are immune from any consequences of their abuses.
- gadders 13y agoI've never understood the hate for StratFor. I signed up to see what all the hatred was about, but their analysis of foreign affairs seem interesting and detailed. If they remind me of anything, it would be Economist articles.
- esbranson 13y agoNAME THAT PROSECUTOR Sarah R. Saldaña is the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas... But who is the lead Assistant U.S. Attorney (AUSA) on this case?
- yaix 13y agoDon't judges feel somewhat stupid sentencing people to "100 years" of something?
- zacinbusiness 13y agoI read somewhere (many years ago) regarding hacking that the actual act of intruding a system and/or causing damage and so forth is one crime, and that teaching someone how to do it is another. It could be that the source was simply incorrect (as there are security courses readily available), but I wonder if this is the same kind of scenario? Regardless, -linking- to something isn't the same as actually doing it. But I feel that the same kind of argument has been made against, say, Isohunt.com and it seems to have worked against them.
- jheriko 13y agothis is disproportionate and sadly very expected... although something about playing with fire and being burned comes to mind..
- sentientmachine 13y agoYou don't ban pool halls because mafia members wink and nudge to each other all the time there. Banning the pool hall is not going to deter the crime. And banning links in chatrooms by making it illegal will not do anything either. The problem is not the criminal, it's the guy trying to classify the criminal. Just because the baby is in the bath water has a little dirty water on him, doesn't mean we bag up the baby and throw it out.
- tim333 13y agoI wonder where they'll draw the line? I mean what if you just say where to find the info? For example much of the Stratfor stuff Brown linked to can be found by googling "wikileaks stratfor". Does saying that make me eligible for 100 years too?
- vpeters25 13y agoU.S. prosecutors are out of control and something needs to be done to reign in on the practice of piling on charges to extort a plea, a couple of ideas: - Accused have the option to take the plea but continue the trial. If found guilty he only serves what he pleaded. - Sentences are limited to the max sentence already applied for same crime to somebody else.
- tzs 13y agoHe's facing 100 years the same way I faced a 75000 calorie lunch when I went to McDonald's a few days ago seeking a burger, a side, and a drink.