
Barrett Brown sentenced to 63 months in prison - aestetix
http://boingboing.net/2015/01/22/barrettbrown.html
======
fnordfnordfnord
Barrett's response to today's sentencing:

 _“Good news! — The U.S. government decided today that because I did such a
good job investigating the cyber-industrial complex, they’re now going to send
me to investigate the prison-industrial complex. For the next 35 months, I’ll
be provided with free food, clothes, and housing as I seek to expose
wrondgoing by Bureau of Prisons officials and staff and otherwise report on
news and culture in the world’s greatest prison system. I want to thank the
Department of Justice for having put so much time and energy into advocating
on my behalf; rather than holding a grudge against me for the two years of
work I put into in bringing attention to a DOJ-linked campaign to harass and
discredit journalists like Glenn Greenwald, the agency instead labored
tirelessly to ensure that I received this very prestigious assignment. — Wish
me luck!”_

~~~
wahsd
I like that guy. He has spirit that I only wish I had. I wonder if it is
possible to fund his prison fund or something.

I hope he publishes a book on the corruption of the prison system on the day
that he's released and walks across the street of the prison to a book signing
or something like that.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
I'm glad you asked.
[https://freebarrettbrown.org/](https://freebarrettbrown.org/)

He writes here. He's written several articles about his incarceration. He is
hillarious:
[http://frontburner.dmagazine.com/author/barrettbrown/](http://frontburner.dmagazine.com/author/barrettbrown/)

There is an Amazon wish list somewhere too, but I can't seem to find it.

------
DannyBee
It's hard to know what happened here, because the papers aren't available, and
honestly, PACER is a piece of shit to get stuff from anyway.

However, I wouldn't believe random tweets. For example, one says:

"Notable that though there's no evidence Barrett took part in the hack
releasing credit card info judge is determined he did. #FreeBB"

This is pretty unlikely, particularly if it was used as a sentencing factor.
Every federal judge knows that you can't use facts not proven to a jury or in
a plea agreement, to enhance a sentence.

This is completely well-settled law now. See United States v. Booker, 543 US
220 (2005), Blakely v. Washington, 542 U.S. 296 (2004) and Apprendi v. New
Jersey, 530 U.S. 466 (2000)

(Apprendi is a little different in that it says you can't enhance past
statutory maximum, but Booker and Blakely make plain you can't enhance at all
except using facts admitted by the defendant or proven to a jury)

~~~
drzaiusapelord
I just read through this document:

[https://freebarrettbrown.org/files/BB_factualresume.pdf](https://freebarrettbrown.org/files/BB_factualresume.pdf)

Sounds like he not only became a lulzsec negotiator and obstructor, he later
threatened an FBI agent and well as that agent's children. Uh yeah, the far
left wants to make this asshole a hero? You guys need better heroes. Mitnick,
Hammond, Ulbricht, Omari, lizard squad, etc. These guys are all pretty much
scumbags and clearly criminals from a non-biased perspective. The mental
gymnastics of deifying these scumbags is mystifying.

~~~
nemo
"the far left"

While some of his defenders are on the left, some are right-wing libertarians,
and I don't think it's really reasonable to make shallow politicized
generalizations about who his supporters are. For the record, I am very far to
the left and while I think the sentence was a bit over the top, I don't think
he was innocent or was a noble person. I'd also like to see all the lizard
squad kids (including Omari) nailed hard, and find Ulbricht despicable. I
liked Mitnick when I met him, though.

------
tptacek
_Brown originally faced more than a century in prison on a swathe of charges
relating hacks targeting corporations_

No, he didn't.

[https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-
sentenc...](https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence-
eleventy-million-years/)

~~~
Alupis
Sure 5 < 100, but does that somehow change the morality of what's being done
here?

~~~
tptacek
I'm less certain about the morality of the charges than you are. My certainty
also does not have the same magnitude as yours but on the inverse vector.
Someone will inevitably premise a reply on the idea that it does, though.

My understanding, after reading the news and the relevant stuff on
freebarrettbrown.org (which collects a bunch of filings) is that he faced
sentencing for three counts: (i) concealing laptops during the execution of a
warrant, (ii) threatening an FBI agents, and (iii) being an accessory after
the fact to the STRATFOR hack.

Of those three, (i) and (ii) seem open-and-shut. Even Brown's own motion to
dismiss concedes them. (The more damning of the two, about the laptops, was
accompanied with a sort of harebrained argument that it's not a crime to
conceal evidence so long as you hide it somewhere in the scope of the search
warrant, so that it is at least mathematically possible that agents executing
the warrant could have found it.) He plead guilty to them, then discussed them
in their particulars at his allocution.

Accessory-after-the-fact liability for relaying a URL to a bunch of stolen
credit cards is a fuzzier charge. I have no idea what I think about it. But
two things worth considering:

(1) Accessory-after-the-fact liability is a much lesser offense than being an
accomplice to the STRATFOR hack. Accomplice liability would have charged him
as a principal to the actual crime. That's not what he got convicted for.

(2) The charge doesn't criminalize sharing of URLs, but rather _intentionally_
facilitating the spread of stolen credit card numbers. The DOJ had the burden
of proving intent. His "actus reus" was, I think we all agree, very minimal.
But his mens rea might not have been.

His vulnerability to having mens rea proven at trial was probably greatly
enhanced by the fact that one of the open-and-shut charges against him was
about his effort to shield Jeremy Hammond from prosecution. It would have been
hard for him to argue that he wasn't much more intimately involved in the
STATFOR hack than some Twitter rando RT'ing a URL would have been.

I dunno. As usual, nothing is as simple as Boing Boing and Wired make things
out to be.

I think the government had a stronger case against Brown than it did against
Auernheimer.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Our opinions on the application of law and justice are usually diametrically
opposed, but I have to thank you for taking the time to write this out. It's
completely fair and even-handed, and focuses on the facts of the case.

~~~
tptacek
Thank you. I doubt we're diametrically opposed, unless you're an anarcho-
capitalist.

A detail I didn't have until this comment was too stale to edit:

The "accessory after the fact" charge seems to have been --- according to Kim
Zetter --- based _not_ on the transmission of the link, but rather the
specific role Brown played as a go-between for the Stratfor hacker and
Stratfor itself. To wit: Brown is apparently accused of exploiting that role
for the purpose of throwing the scent off Jeremy Hammond.

You can be deeply aware of a crime in progress and not have any duty under US
criminal law to police your fellow citizens. But that's a precarious position
to be in: as soon as you do anything that can be construed as _helping_ the
crime, you graduate from witness to accessory. That seems to have been what
happened to Brown.

------
dmix
> 63 months in federal prison, minus 28 months already served. For count one
> in the case, he receives 48 months.

Does he not get any credit for time served in jail pre-trial [1] or is the 28
being subtracted 1-for-1?

In the Canadian criminal law code you get time-and-a-half for time served in
jail so he'd only have 26 months in prison vs the 48 stated here. Historically
it was often 2-for-1 of time served pre-trial which in this case would have
mean only 12 additional months in prison.

In America I believe it is up to the judge to provide 'credit' during
sentencing and there is no pre-defined ratio.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_served](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_served)

------
specialp
For those that are interested, here is the court document outlining the
charges against Barrett Brown:

[https://freebarrettbrown.org/files/BB_factualresume.pdf](https://freebarrettbrown.org/files/BB_factualresume.pdf)

------
tomohawk
And just got done listening to how a local child molester was sentenced to
probation.

~~~
FeeTinesAMady
The child molester didn't embarrass powerful people.

------
con-templative
The US did poorly in 2014 Press Freedom Index, falling 13 places to 46th in
the world:
[http://rsf.org/index2014/data/index2014_en.pdf](http://rsf.org/index2014/data/index2014_en.pdf)

------
shit_parade
The US government's system of justice seems increasingly opaque, arbitrary,
and solely for the purpose of maintaining the status quo and those already in
power.

Meanwhile, much worse crimes by those in power such as torture go unpunished.

~~~
tptacek
Institutionalized and organized torture programs are a monstrous offense, so
by implication you're saying it's immoral to enforce laws against all lesser
offenses, not just the ones that have a lot of HN valence. For instance, you
would also believe it's immoral to enforce laws against car theft, or
counterfeiting.

I'm as frustrated as everyone else that the CIA and its horrible contractors,
some of whom enriched themselves to the tune of millions of dollars by
designing an abhorrent and utterly ineffective scheme to torture random people
from West Asia, are apparently going to be shielded from liability. It's a
miscarriage of justice. But history is full of miscarriages of justice; we
don't give up on civilization when they happen.

~~~
thaumaturgy
> _...so by implication you 're saying it's immoral to enforce laws against
> all lesser offenses..._

After reading and re-reading the rest of this subthread, I think there's an
error here. I don't see that shit_parade was saying that; they were just
expressing frustration at what appears to be disproportionate resources
dedicated to prosecuting the likes of Barrett Brown vs. resources dedicated to
prosecuting state-sponsored torturers.

(For the record, I recognize that all moral issues aside, prosecuting state-
sponsored torturers is a _lot_ harder than prosecuting someone like Barrett
Brown.)

I don't see anything in their comment that implied the morality of enforcing
laws against lesser offenses.

Or maybe more clearly: "I wish those in power guilty of torture would be
punished" is not quite the same as, "Those in power guilty of torture should
be punished before anyone else is".

~~~
tptacek
I agree. Buried somewhere downthread is a comment where I admitted being a bit
knee-jerk about this.

------
lectrick
I really appreciate that prosecutor Candina Heath used secret evidence to
convict, played on FUD, and in particular made it illegal to merely link to
certain publicly-available information.

I will definitely sleep easier at night knowing that I better always agree
with the government, no matter how corrupt it gets.

~~~
specialp
Why don't you read the court documents of the facts that he pled guilty to. He
hid his laptops and put out a decoy device when he knew the feds were coming.
He threatened to kill the feds on Youtube and Twitter. Those 2 things are not
exactly secret evidence.

Then he was working with FBI infiltrated Lulzsec/Anonymous while they were
actively breaking into Stratfor before it was known and being a spokesperson
for Anonymous afterwards. This to me seems to be kinda crossing the line when
it comes to reporting on something. Should we have reporters that know of a
crime that will happen and then become the intermediary between the criminals
and the victim when it becomes public? That is not linking publicly available
information it is a bit more than that. He was not charged for linking.

------
hellbanner
This is scary. And what law is this "trying to hide a laptop computer during a
raid" as one of his charges?

~~~
tptacek
It's the same law that makes it illegal for giant companies to delete all
their emails and file server contents when they're charged with fraud, and the
reason they all maintain expensive and convoluted document retention policies.
You can't deliberately hide evidence; that's a crime.

