#freebb hacktivism

This is supported by the case of Barrett Brown, a journalist who established a journalistic project (Project PM) that crowd-sourced the analysis of the Stratfor and other hacks. Brown did not hack anything; he copied a link to the e-mails that Hammond uploaded to the Internet and brought the link to the attention of the editorial board of Project PM. Today, Brown sits in federal custody, facing 105 years in prison. He has been denied bail. The pretext for most of the charges that led to his incarceration is that because there were unencrypted credit card numbers and validation codes in the Stratfor e-mails, when he shared that link with Project PM he was guilty of trafficking in stolen authentication features, access device fraud and aggravated identity theft. But, of course, what the FBI was more likely interested in was Project PM and what it had learned about Stratfor and other private intelligence firms. In March, the Justice Department served the domain hosting service CloudFlare with a subpoena for all records on the Project PM website, and asked in particular for the IP addresses of everyone who had accessed and contributed to Project PM. Just as prosecutors had retaliated against Swartz for trying to defend himself on the Internet, prosecutors moved to prevent Brown and his legal team from doing the same. On June 18, I published an article on TheNation.com called “The Strange Case of Barrett Brown.” After it came out, I was interviewed about Brown on Democracy Now! Based on the article, the TV appearance and a handful of similar media mentions of Brown, the prosecution cobbled together a false story claiming that defense attorneys for Brown were orchestrating a PR campaign on his behalf. Prosecutors sought a gag order on Brown and his defense team; now neither he nor his lawyers are allowed to discuss his case in the media. What could be the justification for this? Prosecutors claimed that the media mentions were making it impossible to empanel a neutral jury in north Texas. But it seems more likely that the prosecution was concerned that media attention would shed more light on the secrets divulged by Project PM as well as the prosecution’s own malfeasance in the matter. In Brown’s case as in others, prosecutors drew on existing laws and then stretched, warped and mutilated the interpretation of those laws beyond their obvious intent.