Barrett Brown indicted, freedom of the press attacked
Oh the irony!
Barrett Brown was indicted last week on 12 new counts. The first was “Traffic in Stolen Authentication Features.” These authentication features (belonging to credit card numbers) were lifted from Stratfor by LulzSec/AntiSec around Christmas last year.
- Brown is not accused of being a member of LulzSec or AntiSec.
- Brown is not accused of being involved in the Stratfor hack.
- Brown is not accused of making fraudulent use of the credit card details.
He is accused that
On or about December 25, 2011, in the Dallas Division of the Northern District of Texas and elsewhere, defendant Barrett Lancaster Brown, aided and abetted by persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury, in affecting interstate commerce, did knowingly traffic in more than five authentication features knowing that such features were stolen and produced without lawful authority, in that Brown transferred the hyperlink “http://wikisend.com/download/597646/stratfor_full_b.txt.gz” from the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel called “#Anonops” to an IRC channel under Brown’s control called “#ProjectPM,” said hyperlink provided access to data stolen from the company Stratfor Global Intelligence, to include 5,000 credit account numbers, the card holders’ identification, and the authentication features for the credit cards known as the Card Verification Values (CVV), and by transferring and posting the hyperlink, Brown caused the data to be made available to other persons online without the knowledge and authorization of Stratfor Global Intelligence and the card holders.
In other words, Barrett Brown has been indicted for posting a link on the internet. He did nothing more than that. That’s more than a bit worrying. Is the FBI going to come after anyone posting a link to a file containing information it doesn’t wish to be public? What does that do to the freedom of the press?
But that link for which Brown has been indicted has been made public by the indictment. Now I believe I am outside of the FBI’s jurisdiction (McKinnon and O’Dwyer and indeed Assange may think differently), but the signatories to the indictment are not. Candina S Heath (Assistant United States Attorney, Northern District of Texas) has her name printed. The others I cannot decipher:
Signatories to Barrett Brown’s second indictment
In the interest of justice, then, I confidently await at least three new indictments with almost exactly the same wording as Brown’s, naming three new defendants who, by making public the same hyperlink, “caused the data to be made available to other persons online without the knowledge and authorization of Stratfor Global Intelligence and the card holders.” Unless, of course, every single one of the 5000 cardholders (and for that matter every single Stratfor client mentioned in the leaked file) has given explicit consent for the disclosure…
