<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div><br>Subject: [Debate-List] (Fwd) Cyberwarrior jailed: Barret Brown's journalism & hacktivism<br>To: DEBATE <<a href="mailto:debate-list@fahamu.org" target="_blank">debate-list@fahamu.org</a>><br>
<br><br>
fascinating <i>Democracy Now! </i>coverage of Brown case:
<a href="http://williambowles.info/2013/07/11/video-jailed-journalist-barrett-brown-faces-105-years-for-reporting-on-hacked-private-intelligence-firms/" target="_blank">http://williambowles.info/2013/07/11/video-jailed-journalist-barrett-brown-faces-105-years-for-reporting-on-hacked-private-intelligence-firms/</a><br>
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<h2> The Strange Case of Barrett Brown </h2>
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<p>Amid the outrage over the NSA's spying program, the jailing of
journalist Barrett Brown points to a deeper and very troubling
problem.</p>
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<div> <a href="http://www.thenation.com/authors/peter-ludlow" target="_blank"><span>Peter Ludlow</span></a> </div>
<div> <span>June
18, 2013</span> </div>
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<p><img alt="" src="cid:part2.01060701.09090205@mail.ngo.za" style="width: 615px; min-height: 327px;"><br>
<i>Barrett Brown. (Photo courtesy of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOW7GOrXNZI" target="_blank">Barrett Brown’s YouTube channel.</a>) </i><br>
<br>
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 <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barrett-brown/anonymous-australia-and-t_b_457776.html" target="_blank">defense</a>
of the group’s anti-censorship operations in Australia published
on <span tabindex="0" class=""><span class="">February 10</span></span>, 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.”</p>
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<h3>About the Author</h3>
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<h5> <a href="http://www.thenation.com/authors/peter-ludlow" target="_blank">Peter
Ludlow</a></h5>
<div> Peter Ludlow, a professor of
philosophy at Northwestern University, is currently
co-producing (with Vivien Lesnik...</div>
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<h3>Also by the Author</h3>
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<div>
<div> <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/154780/wikileaks-and-hacktivist-culture" target="_blank">WikiLeaks
and Hacktivist Culture</a> <span>(<a href="http://www.thenation.com/section/internet-and-new-media" target="_blank">Internet
and New Media</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/section/law" target="_blank">Law</a>,
<a href="http://www.thenation.com/section/media-activism" target="_blank">Media
Activism</a>, <a href="http://www.thenation.com/section/peace-activism" target="_blank">Peace
Activism</a>)</span></div>
<div>
<p>WikiLeaks is not the one-off creation of a
solitary genius, and with or without Julian
Assange, it is not going away.</p>
</div>
<div> <a href="http://www.thenation.com/authors/peter-ludlow" target="_blank">Peter
Ludlow</a></div>
<div> <img src="cid:part12.08080702.05040808@mail.ngo.za">
<a href="http://www.thenation.com/node/#comment" target="_blank">6
comments</a> </div>
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<p>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, <i>Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern
Creationism, Intelligent Design and the Easter Bunny</i>, 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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i><a href="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-" target="_blank">The
Colbert Report</a></i>, 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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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 “<a href="http://boingboing.net/2011/02/18/hbgarys-high-volume.html" target="_blank">persona
management</a>” 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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Main_Page" target="_blank">ProjectPM</a>,
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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="http://www.hunton.com/" target="_blank">Hunton and
Williams</a>, 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 <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/19/chamber-of-commerce-still_n_768076.html" target="_blank">Richard
Wyatt</a> as the person to work with. Wyatt, famously, was the
lead attorney in the Chamber of Commerce’s lawsuit against the
Yes Men.</p>
<p>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, <a href="http://images2.americanprogress.org/ThinkProgress/ProposalForTheChamber.pdf" target="_blank">like
Chamber Watch</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/28/AR2011022805810.html" target="_blank">asked
for an investigation</a> into this arrangement, to no avail.</p>
<p>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 <i>Sabu.</i> 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 <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/news/lulzsec-jeremy-hammond-bail-denied-hacker/" target="_blank">Jeremy
Hammond</a> has pled guilty to the attack and is currently
facing ten years in prison for it.</p>
<p>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.
:-)”</p>
<p>(Stratfor employees also seemed to take a keen interest in
Jeremy Scahill’s writings about Blackwater in <i>The Nation</i>,
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].”)</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Brown began looking into <a href="http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Endgame_Systems" target="_blank">Endgame
Systems</a>, 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. <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/cyber-weapons-the-new-arms-race-07212011.html" target="_blank">Business
Week</a> 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.</p>
<p>The FBI acquired a <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/mhastings/exclusive-fbi-escalates-war-on-anonymous" target="_blank">warrant</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.)</p>
<p>By his own admission, the FBI’s targeting of his mother made
Brown snap. In September 2012, he uploaded an incoherent YouTube
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOW7GOrXNZI" target="_blank">video</a>,
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:</p>
<p>“<i>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.”</i></p>
<p>“<i>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?”</i></p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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<i>The Guardian</i>: “It is virtually impossible to
conclude that the obscenely excessive prosecution he now faces
is unrelated to that journalism and his related activism.”</p>
<p>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 <a href="http://leaksource.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/doj-issues-subpoena-for-info-on-barrett-browns-project-pm-site/" target="_blank">subpoena</a>
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.</p>
<p>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 <i>also</i>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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Read more: <a style="color:rgb(0,51,153)" href="http://www.thenation.com/article/174851/strange-case-barrett-brown#ixzz2Z1nEnzHE" target="_blank">The
Strange Case of Barrett Brown | The Nation</a> <a style="color:rgb(0,51,153)" href="http://www.thenation.com/article/174851/strange-case-barrett-brown#ixzz2Z1nEnzHE" target="_blank">http://www.thenation.com/article/174851/strange-case-barrett-brown#ixzz2Z1nEnzHE</a>
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