Feds No Longer Trying to Convict Journalist for Hyperlinking

Journalist-Activist Barrett Brown is one of the
lesser-known victims of the federal government’s war on journalism.
Brian Doherty
highlighted his case last June. In short, Brown, a supporter of
Anonymous, was targeted for prosecution because he hyperlinked to a
website containing material hacked from intelligence firm Stratfor.
To be clear, he did not himself hack Stratfor – a member of hacking
group AntiSec has already pleaded guilty. He linked to an online
dump of the materials in order to try to crowdsource research into
the documents.

But he was targeted by the FBI (along with his mother) and faced
17 criminal charges related not just to the hacking but his
emotional response to being targeted, which included a YouTube
video naming and threatening retaliation against an agent. He faced
a maximum penalty of 105 years in federal prison (though he would
be unlikely to ever be sentenced that much time).

It seems the feds have finally recognized some level of
absurdity in their behavior. They are dropping 11 of the 17 counts
against Brown, the counts that essentially accuse Brown of being
responsible for hacking Stratfor or stealing from Stratfor simply
by posting a hypertext link to the contents. The Guardian

notes:

The US government’s decision to drop counts one and three to 12
in the indictment relating to the Stratfor hack came just a day
after lawyers for Brown filed a legal
memorandum calling for those counts to be dropped.
Brown’s attorneys argued in the memo that the prosecution was a
violation of the First Amendment right to free speech, saying that
“republishing a hyperlink does not itself move, convey, select,
place or otherwise transfer, a file or document from one location
to another”.

Federal prosecutors have given no further information about why
they decided to drop the counts, and a request for comment was not
immediately returned. One possible explanation is that government
lawyers assessed the steep hill they had to climb overcoming First
Amendment protections and decided instead to focus on the other
charges still facing Brown.

The activist, who wrote for the Guardian and other publications
before his arrest in September 2012, remains accused of count two
in this indictment – that he committed access device fraud relating
to the credit card details released in the Anonymous hack. He also
faces two separate indictments, one for obstruction of justice by
allegedly attempting to hide laptops, and the other for allegedly
making threats in a YouTube video against an FBI officer and
disclosing information about an FBI agent and his family.

So of the charges that remain, all but one are an outcome of the
FBI targeting him for something they now acknowledge is not a
criminal act. He still faces a maximum possible prison sentence of
70 years (though again, he would be very unlikely to get that much
time).

In February, J.D. Tuccille took note that the federal
government’s treatment of Brown contributed to America sliding down
13 spots in the
World Press Freedom Index.