A Journalist-Agitator Facing Prison Over a Link ( Barrett Brown)

[Catherina]

A Journalist-Agitator Facing Prison Over a Link


The journalist Barrett Brown speaking in 2011 in New York.

By DAVID CARR
Published: September 8, 2013

Barrett Brown makes for a pretty complicated victim. A Dallas-based journalist obsessed with the government’s ties to private security firms, Mr. Brown has been in jail for a year, facing charges that carry a combined penalty of more than 100 years in prison.

Professionally, his career embodies many of the conflicts and contradictions of journalism in the digital era. He has written for The Guardian, Vanity Fair and The Huffington Post, but as with so many of his peers, the line between his journalism and his activism is nonexistent. He has served in the past as a spokesman of sorts for Anonymous, the hacker collective, although some members of the group did not always appreciate his work on its behalf.

...

But that’s not the primary reason Mr. Brown is facing the rest of his life in prison. In 2010, he formed an online collective named Project PM with a mission of investigating documents unearthed by Anonymous and others. If Anonymous and groups like it were the wrecking crew, Mr. Brown and his allies were the people who assembled the pieces of the rubble into meaningful insights.

Project PM first looked at the documents spilled by the hack of HBGary Federal, a security firm, in February 2011 and uncovered a remarkable campaign of coordinated disinformation against advocacy groups, which Mr. Brown wrote about in The Guardian, among other places.

Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern and a fan of Mr. Brown’s work, wrote in The Huffington Post that, “Project PM under Brown’s leadership began to slowly untangle the web of connections between the U.S. government, corporations, lobbyists and a shadowy group of private military and infosecurity consultants.”

...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/09/business/media/a-journalist-agitator-facing-prison-over-a-link.html?ref=media&_r=1&

[L0oniX]

1. K & R ...and this may be the future prospect for real journalists which will help destroy Democracy.

Democracy needs to have access to the truth to survive.

[questionseverything]

2. from the article

While the media and much of the world have been understandably outraged by the revelation of the PRISM program, Barrett Brown's work was pointing towards much deeper problems. First, he showed that this wasn't merely a problem of private intelligence firms spying on us -- it was worse than that. As I recently argued in a New York Times opinion piece, these firms are trying to manufacture a false reality for us. They are engaged in PSYOPS against a civilian population on behalf of their corporate clients.

But even this tells only half the story. One might have thought that private intelligence agencies were simply doing outsourced intelligence work for the U.S. Government. But unfortunately it seems that the tail has begun to wag the dog -- it appears that in many respects the U.S. Government and in particular the Department of Justice is now working for private intelligence firms. This is evident when, for example, Stratfor asks for FBI classified files on PETA or the Department of Justice is used to try and punish journalists for probing into these private intelligence companies.

In The Nation I argued that what we are in effect witnessing is the failure of the rule of law, but on reflection the situation is actually much worse than that. It is not as though the rule of law has simply broken down; it has been inverted from a system that protects us from powerful interests to one that is in the service of powerful interests, and one that will come down with all its might on someone, like Barrett Brown, who attempts to expose this new reality. It is the subversion of the rule of law.

[GermanSmoker]

3. I wrote an email to the mentioned DOJ attorney

Told her that i posted the same link in the past and wished her good luck arresting me. I did a lot of this stuff recently, but no one ever answers me. I am afraid they label me as "unimportant lunatic".

[Catherina]

4. Amazing that Brown faces 105 years for basically nothing. The guy that actually hacked the data

The guy that actually hacked the data faces only 10 years. Not that either of them should be serving time.

In contrast, the individual actually found guilty of hacking the data is serving a sentence of ten years.

http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2013/09/07/rolling-stone-profiles-barrett-brown-journalist-activist-and-american-political-prisoner/

THANK YOU for writing your letter.