Image source: vice.com
Some bad news surfaced recently. Barrett Brown is going to jail for hacking as a judge sentenced the journalist to spend 63 months in jail and to pay abour $890,000 as restitution for the Stratfor Global Intelligence hack in 2011. Supporters of the young activist and writer claim that he was doing nothing more than just providing links to the actual material. However, he is still going to jail for five years.
You most likely know Brown as a spokesperson for Anonymous, an unofficial title he used now and then. Barrett Brown isn’t known as a hacker, however. He wasn’t the one that actually hacked Stratfor. About a year ago, Jeremy Hammond, a member of Anonymous, was also charged on the same offence by a federal judge and was sent to spend 10 years in prison. It was Hammond who said to The Guardian in December that Brown did nothing more than just provide a link to the data that was hacked for the public.
The Department of Justice dropped several of the charges connected to the sharing of the link to the hacked data. Brown was left with a more serious charge claiming he helped a Stratfor hacker evade officials, one for search obstruction and several charges in a different case that claim Brown threatened a federal officer.
Over the duration of Brown’s trial, the charges regarding the link to the hacked data were removed. During that time, a campaign to free the 33 year old was being born. Barrett spent 31 months in jail, and activists claim that the judge’s decision to make Brown face an enormous fine and aggressive sentence is setting a “dangerous precedent”. However, Brown only has $225 to pay in fines. The rest of the $890,250 will go to clients of Stratfor, and Stratfor itself for… well, pay back.
More jaw dropping than this, however, is the fact that Brown was originally sentenced to spend 105 years in jail for the initial charges and other offenses. While no one is actually claiming Brown did absolutely nothing wrong, it’s the government’s aggressive stand against hackers and anyone it decides is a hacker, to be exact, that is absolutely terrifying.
The definition of hacking of the government in the United States is quite wide and the punishments are very severe, as we have learned after the suicide of Aaron Swartz. President Obama has just recently set in place a new set of proposals regarding cyber security which will broaden even further the US government’s definition of hacking and make the penalties even more severe. This will most likely make matters take an even worse turn.
It is now clear that the government is interpreting however it wants hacking laws that were put into place in the ‘80s. If this trend continues, the average person may be thrown in jail for just accessing or sharing a link to some hacked data. This is not a good thing to do to people who are using computers in a country that claims to respect the freedom of speech as much as the U.S. does.
