[P2P-F] Cyberwarrior jailed: Barret Brown's journalism & hacktivism

[Michel Bauwens]

Subject: [Debate-List] (Fwd) Cyberwarrior jailed: Barret Brown's journalism
& hacktivism
To: DEBATE <debate-list at fahamu.org>


fascinating *Democracy Now! *coverage of Brown case:
http://williambowles.info/2013/07/11/video-jailed-journalist-barrett-brown-faces-105-years-for-reporting-on-hacked-private-intelligence-firms/

 The Strange Case of Barrett Brown

Amid the outrage over the NSA's spying program, the jailing of journalist
Barrett Brown points to a deeper and very troubling problem.
 Peter Ludlow <http://www.thenation.com/authors/peter-ludlow>
 June 18, 2013


*Barrett Brown. (Photo courtesy of Barrett Brown’s YouTube
channel.<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOW7GOrXNZI>)
*

In early 2010, journalist and satirist Barrett Brown was working on a book
on political pundits, when the hacktivist collective Anonymous caught his
attention. He soon began writing about its activities and potential. In a
defense<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barrett-brown/anonymous-australia-and-t_b_457776.html>of
the group’s anti-censorship operations in Australia published on
February
10, Brown declared, “I am now certain that this phenomenon is among the
most important and under-reported social developments to have occurred in
decades, and that the development in question promises to threaten the
institution of the nation-state and perhaps even someday replace it as the
world’s most fundamental and relevant method of human organization.”
 About the Author
  Peter Ludlow <http://www.thenation.com/authors/peter-ludlow>
Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, is
currently co-producing (with Vivien Lesnik...
    Also by the Author
  WikiLeaks and Hacktivist
Culture<http://www.thenation.com/article/154780/wikileaks-and-hacktivist-culture>
(Internet and New
Media<http://www.thenation.com/section/internet-and-new-media>,
Law <http://www.thenation.com/section/law>, Media
Activism<http://www.thenation.com/section/media-activism>,
Peace Activism <http://www.thenation.com/section/peace-activism>)

WikiLeaks is not the one-off creation of a solitary genius, and with or
without Julian Assange, it is not going away.
 Peter Ludlow <http://www.thenation.com/authors/peter-ludlow>
 6 comments <http://www.thenation.com/node/#comment>

By then, Brown was already considered by his fans to be the Hunter S.
Thompson of his generation. In point of fact he wasn’t like Hunter S.
Thompson, but was more of a throwback—a sharp-witted, irreverent journalist
and satirist in the mold of Ambrose Bierce or Dorothy Parker. His acid
tongue was on display in his co-authored 2007 book, *Flock of Dodos: Behind
Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design and the Easter Bunny*, in which he
declared: “This will not be a polite book. Politeness is wasted on the
dishonest, who will always take advantage of any well-intended concession.”

But it wasn’t Brown’s acid tongue so much as his love of minutiae (and
ability to organize and explain minutiae) that would ultimately land him in
trouble. Abandoning his book on pundits in favor of a book on Anonymous, he
could not have known that delving into the territory of hackers and leaks
would ultimately lead to his facing the prospect of spending the rest of
his life in prison. In light of the bombshell revelations published by
Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman about government and corporate spying,
Brown’s case is a good—and underreported—reminder of the considerable risk
faced by reporters who report on leaks.

In February 2011, a year after Brown penned his defense of Anonymous, and
against the background of its actions during the Arab Spring, Aaron Barr,
CEO of the private intelligence company HBGary, claimed to have identified
the leadership of the hacktivist collective. (In fact, he only had screen
names of a few members). Barr’s boasting provoked a brutal hack of HBGary
by a related group called Internet Feds (it would soon change its name to
“LulzSec”). Splashy enough to attract the attention of *The Colbert
Report<http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/426198/may-09-2013/colbert-s-book-club%E2%80%94-learning%E2%80%94the-great-gatsby->
*, the hack defaced and destroyed servers and websites belonging to HBGary.
Some 70,000 company e-mails were downloaded and posted online. As a final
insult to injury, even the contents of Aaron Barr’s iPad were remotely
wiped.

The HBGary hack may have been designed to humiliate the company, but it had
the collateral effect of dropping a gold mine of information into Brown’s
lap. One of the first things he discovered was a plan to neutralize Glenn
Greenwald’s defense of Wikileaks by undermining them both. (“Without the
support of people like Glenn, wikileaks would fold,” read one slide.) The
plan called for “disinformation,” exploiting strife within the organization
and fomenting external rivalries—“creating messages around actions to
sabotage or discredit the opposing organization,” as well as a plan to
submit fake documents and then call out the error.” Greenwald, it was
argued, “if pushed,” would “choose professional preservation over cause.”

Other plans targeted social organizations and advocacy groups. Separate
from the plan to target Greenwald and WikiLeaks, HBGary was part of a
consortia that submitted a proposal to develop a “persona
management<http://boingboing.net/2011/02/18/hbgarys-high-volume.html>”
system for the United States Air Force, that would allow one user to
control multiple online identities for commenting in social media spaces,
thus giving the appearance of grassroots support or opposition to certain
policies.

The data dump from the HBGary hack was so vast that no one person could
sort through it alone. So Brown decided to crowdsource the effort. He
created a wiki page, called it
ProjectPM<http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Main_Page>,
and invited other investigative journalists to join in. Under Brown’s
leadership, the initiative began to slowly untangle a web of connections
between the US government, corporations, lobbyists and a shadowy group of
private military and information security consultants.

One connection was between Bank of America and the Chamber of Commerce.
WikiLeaks had claimed to possess a large cache of documents belonging to
Bank of America. Concerned about this, Bank of America approached the
United States Department of Justice. The DOJ directed it to the law and
lobbying firm Hunton and Williams <http://www.hunton.com/>, which does
legal work for Wells Fargo and General Dynamics and also lobbies for Koch
Industries, Americans for Affordable Climate Policy, Gas Processors
Association, Entergy among many other firms. The DoJ recommended that Bank
of America hire Hunton and Williams, explicitly suggesting Richard
Wyatt<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/19/chamber-of-commerce-still_n_768076.html>as
the person to work with. Wyatt, famously, was the lead attorney in the
Chamber of Commerce’s lawsuit against the Yes Men.

In November 2010, Hunton and Williams organized a number of private
intelligence, technology development and security contractors—HBGary, plus
Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and, according to Brown, a
secretive corporation with the ominous name Endgame Systems—to form “Team
Themis”—‘themis’ being a Greek word meaning “divine law.” Its main
objective was to discredit critics of the Chamber of Commerce, like Chamber
Watch<http://images2.americanprogress.org/ThinkProgress/ProposalForTheChamber.pdf>,
using such tactics as creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting
periodical financial information,” giving it to a progressive group
opposing the Chamber, and then subsequently exposing the document as a fake
to “prove that US Chamber Watch cannot be trusted with information and/or
tell the truth.” In addition, the group proposed creating a “fake insider
persona” to infiltrate Chamber Watch. They would “create two fake insider
personas, using one as leverage to discredit the other while confirming the
legitimacy of the second.” The leaked e-mails showed that similar
disinformation campaigns were being planned against WikiLeaks and Glenn
Greenwald.

It was clear to Brown that these were actions of questionable legality, but
beyond that, government contractors were attempting to undermine Americans’
free speech—with the apparent blessing of the DOJ. A group of Democratic
congressmen asked for an
investigation<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/28/AR2011022805810.html>into
this arrangement, to no avail.

By June 2011, the plot had thickened further. The FBI had the goods on the
leader of LulzSec, one Hector Xavier Monsegur, who went under the nom de
guerre *Sabu.* The FBI arrested him on June 7, 2011, and (according to
court documents) turned him into an informant the following day. Just three
days before his arrest, Sabu had been central to the formation of a new
group called AntiSec, which comprised his former LulzSec crew members, as
well as members as Anonymous. In early December AntiSec hacked the website
of a private security company called Stratfor Global Intelligence. On
Christmas Eve, it released a trove of some 5 million internal company
e-mails. AntiSec member and Chicago activist Jeremy
Hammond<http://www.dailydot.com/news/lulzsec-jeremy-hammond-bail-denied-hacker/>has
pled guilty to the attack and is currently facing ten years in prison
for it.

The contents of the Stratfor leak were even more outrageous than those of
the HBGary hack. They included discussion of opportunities for renditions
and assassinations. For example, in one video, Statfor’s vice president of
intelligence, Fred Burton, suggested taking advantage of the chaos in Libya
to render Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who had been released
from prison on compassionate grounds due to his terminal illness. Burton
said that the case “was personal.” When someone pointed out in an e-mail
that such a move would almost certainly be illegal—“This man has already
been tried, found guilty, sentenced…and served time”—another Stratfor
employee responded that this was just an argument for a more efficient
solution: “One more reason to just bugzap him with a hellfire. :-)”

(Stratfor employees also seemed to take a keen interest in Jeremy Scahill’s
writings about Blackwater in *The Nation*, copying and circulating entire
articles, with comments suggesting a principle interest was in the question
of whether Blackwater was setting up a competing intelligence operation.
E-mails also showed grudging respect for Scahill: “Like or dislike
Scahill’s position (or what comes of his work), he does an amazing job
outing [Blackwater].”)

When the contents of the Stratfor leak became available, Brown decided to
put ProjectPM on it. A link to the Stratfor dump appeared in an Anonymous
chat channel; Brown copied it and pasted it into the private chat channel
for ProjectPM, bringing the dump to the attention of the editors.

Brown began looking into Endgame
Systems<http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Endgame_Systems>,
an information security firm that seemed particularly concerned about
staying in the shadows. “Please let HBGary know we don’t ever want to see
our name in a press release,” one leaked e-mail read. One of its products,
available for a $2.5 million annual subscription, gave customers access to
“zero-day exploits”—security vulnerabilities unknown to software
companies—for computer systems all over the world. Business
Week<http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/cyber-weapons-the-new-arms-race-07212011.html>published
a story on Endgame in 2011, reporting that “Endgame executives
will bring up maps of airports, parliament buildings, and corporate
offices. The executives then create a list of the computers running inside
the facilities, including what software the computers run, and a menu of
attacks that could work against those particular systems.” For Brown, this
raised the question of whether Endgame was selling these exploits to
foreign actors and whether they would be used against computer systems in
the United States. Shortly thereafter, the hammer came down.

The FBI acquired a
warrant<http://www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/exclusive-fbi-escalates-war-on-anonymous>for
Brown’s laptop, gaining the authority to seize any information related
to HBGary, Endgame Systems, Anonymous and, most ominously, “email, email
contacts, ‘chat’, instant messaging logs, photographs, and correspondence.”
In other words, the FBI wanted his sources.

When the FBI went to serve Brown, he was at his mother’s house. Agents
returned with a warrant to search his mother’s house, retrieving his
laptop. To turn up the heat on Brown, the FBI initiated charges against his
mother for obstruction of justice for concealing his laptop computer in her
house. (Facing criminal charges, on March 22, 2013, his mother, Karen
McCutchin, pled guilty to one count of obstructing the execution of a
search warrant. She faces up to twelve months in jail. Brown maintains that
she did not know the laptop was in her home.)

By his own admission, the FBI’s targeting of his mother made Brown snap. In
September 2012, he uploaded an incoherent YouTube
video<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOW7GOrXNZI>,
in which he explained that he had been in treatment for an addiction to
heroin, taking the medication Suboxone, but had gone off his meds and now
was in withdrawal. He threatened the FBI agent that was harassing his
mother, by name, warning:

“*I know what’s legal, I know what’s been done to me.… And if it’s legal
when it’s done to me, it’s going to be legal when it’s done to FBI Agent
Robert Smith—who is a criminal.”*

“*That’s why [FBI special agent] Robert Smith’s life is over. And when I
say his life is over, I’m not saying I’m going to kill him, but I am going
to ruin his life and look into his fucking kids…. How do you like them
apples?”*

Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just
$9.50!<https://subscribe.thenation.com/servlet/OrdersGateway?cds_mag_code=NAN&cds_page_id=122425&cds_response_key=I12SART1>

The media narrative was immediately derailed. No longer would this be a
story about the secretive information-military-industrial complex; now it
was the sordid tale of a crazy drug addict threatening an FBI agent and his
(grown) children. Actual death threats against agents are often punishable
by a few years in jail. But Brown’s actions made it easier for the FBI to
sell some other pretext to put him away for life.

The Stratfor data included a number of unencrypted credit card numbers and
validation codes. On this basis, the DOJ accused Brown of credit card fraud
for having shared that link with the editorial board of ProjectPM.
Specifically, the FBI charged him with traffic in stolen authentication
features, access device fraud and aggravated identity theft, as well as an
obstruction of justice charge (for being at his mother’s when the initial
warrant was served) and charges stemming from his threats against the FBI
agent. All told, Brown is looking at century of jail time: 105 years in
federal prison if served sequentially. He has been denied bail.

Considering that the person who carried out the actual Stratfor hack had
several priors and is facing a maximum of ten years, the inescapable
conclusion is that the problem is not with the hack itself but with Brown’s
journalism. As Glenn Greenwald remarked in*The Guardian*: “It is virtually
impossible to conclude that the obscenely excessive prosecution he now
faces is unrelated to that journalism and his related activism.”

Today, Brown is in prison and ProjectPM is under increased scrutiny by the
DOJ, even as its work has ground to a halt. In March, the DOJ served the
domain hosting service CloudFlare with a
subpoena<http://leaksource.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/doj-issues-subpoena-for-info-on-barrett-browns-project-pm-site/>for
all records on the ProjectPM website, and in particular asked for the
IP addresses of everyone who had accessed and contributed to ProjectPM,
describing it as a “forum” through which Brown and others would “engage in,
encourage, or facilitate the commission of criminal conduct online.” The
message was clear: Anyone else who looks into this matter does so at their
grave peril.

Some journalists are now understandably afraid to go near the Stratfor
files. The broader implications of this go beyond Brown; one might think
that what we are looking at is Cointelpro 2.0—an outsourced surveillance
state—but in fact it’s worse. One can’t help but infer that the US
Department of Justice has become just another security contractor, working
alongside the HBGarys and Stratfors on behalf of corporate bidders, with no
sense at all for the justness of their actions; they are working to protect
corporations and private security contractors and give them license to
engage in disinformation campaigns against ordinary citizens and their
advocacy groups. The mere fact that the FBI’s senior cybersecurity advisor
has recently moved to Hunton and Williams shows just how incestuous this
relationship has become. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is
*also*using its power and force to trample on the rights of citizens
like Barrett
Brown who are trying to shed light on these nefarious relationships. In
order to neutralize those who question or investigate the system, laws are
being reinterpreted or extended or otherwise misappropriated in ways that
are laughable—or would be if the consequences weren’t so dire.

While the media and much of the world have been understandably outraged by
the revelation of the NSA’s spying programs, Barrett Brown’s work was
pointing to a much deeper problem. It isn’t the sort of problem that can be
fixed by trying to tweak a few laws or by removing a few prosecutors. The
problem is not with bad laws or bad prosecutors. What the case of Barrett
Brown has exposed is that we confronting a different problem altogether. It
is a systemic problem. It is the failure of the rule of law.

Read more: The Strange Case of Barrett Brown | The
Nation<http://www.thenation.com/article/174851/strange-case-barrett-brown#ixzz2Z1nEnzHE>
http://www.thenation.com/article/174851/strange-case-barrett-brown#ixzz2Z1nEnzHE
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