

Why Is Barrett Brown Facing 100 Years in Prison? - dsr12
http://www.vice.com/read/why-is-barrett-brown-facing-100-years-in-jail

======
trotsky
I'm not disputing that what he's charged with (nothing that whitehats and
journos don't do all the time) doesn't suck, or that potential maximum
sentences in computer crime aren't oddly out of whack at times.

But lets cut the crap - Barret was a target because he dedicated a
considerable amount of his time to being the mouth piece of some of the more
radicalized groups inside anonymous, who went out of their way to directly
antagonize the US government over and over, the more public the better.

If you're going to ask as a spokesman for an ongoing criminal enterprise that
are making fools out of law enforcment you'd better hope to hell they get
caught before too long. Because you will always represent a decent 2nd place
trophy for them if push comes to shove.

I'm not saying it's right, it's just realism. It's nothing that wouldn't go
down the same way (or much worse) in a vast majority of nations.

It's like rolling your cat in bacon grease and sending it out to play with the
mountain lions. No doubt you loved your pet and it's sad that it died. And
maybe you're dumb enough that you didn't realize how stupid that was in
advance.

But you can't really blame the mountain lions, it's just their nature.

~~~
andrewcooke
you're not saying it's right, but you accept it.

so aren't you part of the problem? corruption shouldn't be the norm. justice
should be blind, not vengeful.

~~~
trotsky
You're right that I'm not an active part of the solution, here. If you have
the energy to actively campaign against every injustice you know of in this
world or anything even close then I honestly thank you for working so hard for
the public. From where I sit though, most of the world appears corrupt and
injust to varying degrees, many far worse than what's going down here. So I
pick other fights.

And while I have no illusion that I'm somehow being of any real help here, i
think it is fair to say that pointing out that it is extremely unsafe to play
in traffic is a reasonable approach to reducing the number of people who will
get hit by a bus.

------
rayiner
> even though there technically isn’t one) is facing up to 100 years in jail
> for three separate indictments. The most recent two indictments—the
> threatening of an FBI officer in a YouTube video and the concealing of
> evidence—do not seem worthy of such a harsh sentence, considering a man in
> Houston recieved only 42 months for threatening to blow up an FBI building,
> and a former dentist got 18 months for threatening to kill an FBI agent.

Interesting slight of hand comparing maximum possible jail time for three
separate offenses to actual sentences for one.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
>Interesting slight of hand comparing maximum possible jail time for three
separate offenses to actual sentences for one.

I don't think cutting a century into thirds would do much to refute the
disproportionality of the sentence to the underlying action.

And the fact that the maximum and what the typical guilty party receives are
so divergent is a big part of the problem. It leaves too much to the
discretion of prosecutors and courts and is unacceptably coercive to the
accused to have to risk anything like that sort of penalty merely in order to
exercise any of the constitutional rights that effectively evaporate the
moment you accept a plea bargain.

~~~
anigbrowl
We've had this discussion before. The maximum sentence available under law is
not a good guide to the maximum likely sentence. Think about the fact that
murder can get the death penalty of life in prison with no parole, but the
mean sentence is about 20 years and the median about 24 (from which you can
infer that quite a few people get short sentences in the 6-10 year bracket).

you can't talk about the disproportionality of the sentence because none has
been handed down yet. It's meaningless to talk about the disproportionality of
the maximum sentence when the law is designed to accommodate offences from the
trivial to the truly egregious.

You think this allows too much discretion to prosecutors and courts, OK, so
did a lot of other people at one point, and that's how we wound up with
standardized sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums. Typical sentence
lengths went up, because the sentencing guidelines are so exhaustive that
prosecutors pile on obscure enhancements. Mandatory minimums were recently
found to be unconstitutional, in _US v. Booker_. Federal sentencing guidelines
were put in place in 1984. It's not a coincidence that the US incarceration
rate took off for the stratosphere around the same time. Sentencing was more
lenient, albeit less consistent, when it was left to the discretion of the
courts.

You don't lose any of your constitutional rights when you accept a plea
bargain. The reality is that people take them because they don't expect to win
in court. The standard of proof in criminal trials is very high, so defense
lawyers have little incentive to accept a plea bargain unless the evidence
overwhelmingly points to guilt.

~~~
pzxc
You don't lose any constitutional rights when you accept a plea bargain, but
you voluntarily give up many constitutional rights.

To suggest that the only reason people take plea bargains is because they
don't expect to win in court is hardly reality. Many, many people take plea
bargains because of the cost of a protracted legal battle, not to mention the
stress.

You're right on one thing though: we _have_ had this discussion before. But if
it was a clear-cut as you implicate, there would be no reason Aaron Swartz
shouldn't have accepted a plea bargain.

~~~
anigbrowl
He should have. 6 months for a case where he was caught red-handed was a good
deal. He would have been in a minimum security prison with white-collar
criminals and possibly been a candidate for early release after 3-4 months.
Forget about JSTOR; it's _obviously_ against the law to secretly patch your
computer into someone else's network wiring closet and repeatedly circumvent
the security measures designed to keep you off the network.

Something that has bothered me about the HN debate on this is that people
think that because the MIT security response was weak and easily bypassed,
there was no real offense in doing so. This is equivalent to saying that that
only those with fortress-like security deserve legal protection from criminal
access. _Numerous_ people have objected that because the MIT wiring closet
wasn't secure enough then there can't be anything wrong about plugging into
it; essentially they're arguing that 'because I could' should be a valid legal
defense.

~~~
nitrogen
1\. People are upset that Aaron Swartz faced losing the right to vote, hold
public office, serve on a jury, or own a firearm, penalties entirely unrelated
and disproportionate to the crime.

2\. Your analogy fails because MIT IT certainly know what they could do to
secure their systems more robustly, and chose not to do so. This debate has
gone on long enough; most of HN disagrees with your position. Let it drop.

~~~
mpyne
> People are upset that Aaron Swartz faced losing the right to vote, hold
> public office, serve on a jury, or own a firearm, penalties entirely
> unrelated and disproportionate to the crime.

The "Felony" idea comes from the _maximum possible_ sentence for a crime. CFAA
has been on the books since like 1986 so as soon as Aaron decided to run afoul
of its provisions that was a done deal.

As it turns out many states have provisions to restore voting rights to
felons, firearm rights, etc. But this type of case is one of the few things
prosecutors _don't_ have discretion on, except by dropping charges completely
(which I understand is what you think should happen, but that's not going to
match what most of the rest of the country thinks, where fairness of justice
and due process are at least theoretically the ideal).

> This debate has gone on long enough; most of HN disagrees with your
> position.

Oh! Is HN the decider now? I browse this site and I wasn't aware my opinion
had been pre-determined for me. Are there any other HN-mandated opinions I
should adopt now that this question has been raised? Am I still allowed to
like Microsoft products? Are iPhones mandatory or can I keep my Android?

------
linuxhansl
Facing 100 years so that he'll waive his constitutional right to a trial
(undoubtedly before jury entirely incompetent in the matter) and accept a mere
10 years in a plea bargain.

~~~
anigbrowl
He's not facing 100 years for god's sake.It's ironic seeing you complain about
juries being incompetent when you're showing off such ignorance of the legal
system.

~~~
algorias
Well, please do share your insights with us. That's what this site is for, not
ad-hominems.

~~~
lmz
He has in another comment on this submission:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5155342>

------
nextparadigms
Why does US have such a stupid system that seems to be abused to get people to
accept plea bargains, which should be illegal in the first place, anyway? Is
there any other country where they "stack" sentences on top of each other?
Maximum sentence should be 20 or 25 years for 99.9% of criminals, and only the
most cruel ones (mass murderers, etc) should get "life".

~~~
bybjorn
Hear, hear!

------
logn
So he's facing 100 years for releasing thousands of credit card numbers and
security codes. He was leaking information and the numbers were not the
motivation. Seems quite harsh, but am I missing something?

Edit: He also appears to have just posted a link. Unless he actually uploaded
the data, hopefully he's acquitted for that. By this standard, wouldn't Google
be guilty of all sorts of terrible crimes?

~~~
ryan-c
I read the indictment, and indeed, it appears that they charged him for
sharing a link to a pastebin of credit card numbers from Stratfor customers on
IRC. It's an absurd charge, and I hope it gets dropped.

What he's in real hot water for is threatening a specific FBI agent, that
agent's family and law enforcement in general. I also seem to recall reading
that he posted something along the lines of "if any heavily armed people
dressed as law enforcement show up at my home I'm going to shoot them because
they're probably zetas dressed as cops".

------
Strshps1MoreTim
Why? Are you playing naive? Information today is the ultimate power, those
surveillance systems are operated by the most powerful people in the world. A
guy takes actions against them, how shocking he's getting punished.

------
chasing
"Facing 100 years" != "will serve 100 years."

~~~
InclinedPlane
That's the problem. The only way to guarantee serving a reasonable amount of
time instead of "he murdered his family and wore their skins to work" time is
through plea bargaining, which perverts the justice system.

~~~
mpyne
The "maximum sentence" isn't even the recommended sentence that the accused
would be having to plea bargain against, which is determined by the Federal
sentencing guidelines.

We went over _all of this_ with Aaron's case, and yet people apparently still
refuse to pay attention to how the U.S. legal system works, and instead
continue to use MPAA/RIAA tactics when discussing these cases. I have to say
it's certainly not very heartening to know that there is seemingly no ideology
that won't use propaganda just as soon as it suits their cause. :(

~~~
InclinedPlane
Is it in any way conceivable that the so-called "maximum sentence" could,
speaking legally not about averages or practicalities, be applied in these
cases?

As far as I can tell, it is legally possible. And that's a big problem.
Because it exposes the defendant to an exceptional amount of risk, regardless
of their innocence or the facts of the case. It makes people much less likely
to actually make use of their rights and to go to trial because no sane person
is going to let even a tiny chance of going to prison for a century happen if
they have a better out through plea bargaining.

This case is a perfect example of that. If the defendant was facing a more
reasonable maximum penalty such as, say, a year or two in prison he would
likely be far more emboldened to take it to trial and have his day in court.

~~~
mpyne
Risk is simply a probability, so it's inappropriate to treat a risk with a
probability of approximately epsilon the same as a level of risk that could
actually be seen on a pie chart.

You're saying that because the risk of hitting the maximum sentence is not
actually zero, that the defendant is exposed to an exceptional amount of risk,
but this doesn't even make logical sense.

Either way, whatever else defense attorneys might say to the prosecutors,
judges, and the public, they know how the risks translate for their client
even better than you or I do and have a professional responsibility to inform
their client of the same.

So there's no reason for a defendant to freak out about a theoretical maximum
sentence, they should only be worried about the one the judge might actually
assign after all the arguments and motions are made.

> If the defendant was facing a more reasonable maximum penalty such as, say,
> a year or two in prison he would likely be far more emboldened to take it to
> trial and have his day in court.

The maximum should be whatever is most effective for the interests of justice
overall, not just whatever is most convenient for whoever happens to be
sitting in the defendant's seat that day.

I have a First Amendment right to say and speak my mind, but that doesn't mean
I would go picketing funerals with hateful messages like WBC. I have a Second
Amendment right to bear arms, but that doesn't mean I would stand near a
school carrying a Bushmaster. And I would certainly never expect the
government to provide me a Bushmaster and have me stand outside a school just
to demonstrate that they care deeply about my rights.

So yes, by all means, take your day in court if it comes to it, but it's not
the government's job to ensure that is the only course available to you the
defendant, it's the government's job to secure the blessings of liberty for
_all_ of the people.

------
tzs
He's not facing 100 years.

To get the maximum sentence for a Federal crime, you have to (1) be the Hitler
or Moriarty of that type of crime, and (2) have an extensive prior criminal
record.

------
serf
maybe Vice can go interview him , forget to sanitize the EXIF data, and
somehow make things worse.

~~~
mpyne
Well they linked to Barrett Brown stating that many of them (Anonymous) would
not hesitate to employ the same amoral "might makes right" tactics that they
deplore from the government, if they found it necessary:

<http://pastebin.com/WPE73rhy>

I guess he thinks "might makes right" is OK as long as the dictator is
benevolent enough?

------
OGinparadise
_"considering a man in Houston recieved only 42 months for threatening to blow
up an FBI building, and a former dentist got 18 months for threatening to kill
an FBI agent"_

Nonsense! I bet those guys were also _facing_ decades if not centuries of
jail. What they got after the trial or a plea bargain is another story.

