In its latest attack on the free speech, the Obama Administration has secured a gag order to prevent activist-journalist Barrett Brown and his lawyers from discussing his work exposing online surveillance by the Administration. On this occasion, however, Eric Holder and the Obama Administration convinced a federal judge to go along. U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay in Dallas Texas has issued a sweeping gag order to prevent not just Brown but his legal team from discussing the online surveillance. The Justice Department insisted on the order to protect Brown. That’s right, they insist that, if Brown discussed the abusive surveillance by the Obama Administration, it would endanger his right to a fair trial.
Federal judges have increasing issued gag orders in cases as a standard measure when it was once used only in rare cases. I have long been a critic of the orders which deny basic free speech rights and deny defendants and their counsel to answer damaging allegations in the public.
This order however is particularly problematic. Brown, 32, is facing 105 years in prison after his arrest last year. He writes on government online spying and has been a vocal critic of the Administration and its attack on privacy. The Obama Administration threw the book at him in a case that reminds many of Aaron Swartz case. Perhaps due to the blowback on the suicide of the Swartz case and criticism of his unrelenting prosecution, the Justice Department has tried to cut off Brown and his team from the media.
The court order prohibits Brown and his defense team, as well as prosecutors, from making “any statement to members of any television, radio, newspaper, magazine, internet (including, but not limited to, bloggers), or other media organization about this case, other than matters of public interest.” The reason is purportedly to protect Brown’s right to an unbiased jury. However, the order prevents him from writing about his own case. I believe such a limitation would have been viewed as inherently abusive by the Framers and tyrannical by writers like Thomas Paine.
Brown had been looking at hacked emails by Anonymous from the computer system of a private security firm, HB Gary. He wrote about an effort to destroy the reputations of WikiLeaks supporters and prominent liberal journalists and activists. In looking at other emails hacked from the private intelligence company Stratfor, Brown posted a link in a chat room that connected users to Stratfor documents. The documents included email addresses and credit card numbers belonging to Stratfor subscribers. He was charged with disseminating stolen information that simply linked to the site — a crime that could transform the Internet and radically reduce sites that challenge the government. If the Obama Administration is successful, it could prosecute anyone linked to sites containing Snowden documents or other exposed surveillance.
The Administration is complaining that Brown is working with the media to “manipulate the public through press and social media comments”. In other words, it has not been successful in suppressing discussion of a case where it could criminalize the simple act of linking to anti-government sites.
The case is extremely important to free speech and the Administration is seeking to establish a new crime that would curtail the use of the Internet to challenge it and future Presidents. It is worth following and talking about . . . except of course for Brown himself who is expected to remain silent as the Administration tries to put him away for 100 years.
Source: Guardian
“… a case that reminds many of Aaron Swartz case.” – JT
Yep.
” … a consortia that submitted a proposal to develop a “persona management” 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.” (from article Elaine posted at 8:00am)
http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQiSbLy2S8JrWAzZvga3p1Id0hVYC00jAQJWaBIi4mqBZgOOSEVJw
Would John Boehner impeach?
Doubt it… Loyalist.
Firstly, what James said.
Secondly, “we had to burn the village to save it”. Just an observation about how seriously those in office take their oath to defend the Constitution from enemies both foreign and domestic . . . especially when they are the enemy.
James, that is an excellent idea. I really agree with you about the need for courage.
Publish the entire investigation on non-U.S. heavily mirrored servers. Time for courage, since all the U.S. attorneys in the country traded their spines for… what, exactly? Fame? Christmas cards from the President?
The lack of courage is one of the worst symptoms of the American disease. second behind only its history.
Dear President O-bummer, Jam your Gag order, and choke on it!
OS,
I’m betting on both….
I agree with most of the comments here, but there is one problem and that is that he published peoples credit card numbers and other financial info that he stole. That is still a crime in my view.
Jailed Journalist Barrett Brown Faces 105 Years For Reporting on Hacked Private Intelligence Firms
Democracy Now
7/11/13
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/11/jailed_journalist_barrett_brown_faces_105
Excerpt:
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, for more, we’re joined by Peter Ludlow, professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. He has written extensively on hacktivist actions against people—against private intelligence firms and the surveillance state. His recent article for The Nation is called “The Strange Case of Barrett Brown.”
Peter Ludlow, welcome to Democracy Now!
PETER LUDLOW: Hi. Thank you very much.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Talk to us about Barrett Brown, the importance of his case, given all the others that we’ve been dealing with on this show now for many years.
PETER LUDLOW: Well, yeah, it’s important for two reasons. First of all, it’s showing that, to some extent, all of us could be targets, because the principal reasons that they’re going after him with this sort of claim that he was involved in credit card fraud or something like that, I mean, that’s completely fallacious. I mean, in effect, what he did was take a link from a chat room and copied that link and pasted it into the chat room for Project PM. That is, he took a link that was broadcast widely on the Internet, and it was a link to the Stratfor hack information, and he just brought it to the attention of the editorial board of Project PM. And because there were, for whatever reason, unencrypted credit card numbers and validation codes among those five million other emails, the government is claiming that he was engaged in credit card fraud. They’re claiming that Project PM was a criminal enterprise. And so, basically, for our interest, why this is interesting to us is basically it makes this dangerous to even link to something or to share a link with someone.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And—
PETER LUDLOW: Go ahead, yeah, please.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, one of the things that you raise is, in some of your writings on this, is the incestuous relationship between the Justice Department, the government and these private firms that are being now targeted by cyber-activists. And could you talk about that, as well?
PETER LUDLOW: Well, sure. A lot of these private intelligence companies are started by ex-CIA, NSA people. Some people come from those agencies and rotate back into the government. I mean, you even see, with the case of Snowden, he was actually a contractor for a private intelligence company, Booz Allen. And, I mean, people think about the NSA, FBI, CIA, and they think of—those are the people that are doing the surveillance of you and doing this intelligence work, but really, if you look at how much the United States spends on intelligence, 70 percent of that is actually going to these private intelligence contractors. So, you know, if you add up CIA, NSA, FBI, that’s just a tip of the iceberg. So there’s all this sort of spook stuff going on in the private realm. And, yeah, right, a lot of it is very incestuous. There’s a revolving door. And no one is investigating it or even talking about it, as far as I can tell.
Lost a comment.
His reporting on H B Gary is embarrassing for the Chamber of Commerce among others. As well, H B Gary H B Gary Federal and partnering firms spearheaded a plan to embarrass various journalists including Brad Freedman of BradBlog and co-founder of Velvet Revolution. It actually went beyond embarrassment, the plan was to neutralize them by digging up dirt on them and their families and interfering with their work. If you go to BradBlog and search H B Gary there are bunches of articles, these are bad guys and they’re tight as ticks with some major players.
Stratfor is a prominent player in the intelligence industry and their reps appear on talk/news TV often. One of their folks was on a show just yesterday that I watched, discussing Syria. Organizations like Stratfor and H B Gary are partnered with the US intelligence organizations and law enforcement like DHS and FBI and share intelligence in a cooperative relationship as well as doing work for the government. They are likewise worthy of protection by the administration.
The Professor’s concern that this kind of prosecution potentially expands the government’s ability to control information dissemination using the Internet is correct. Using copyright to shut down aggregation services and the people that use aggregated information has been pretty successful- remember Kim Dotcom? His business was shut down.
“In January 2012, the New Zealand Police placed him in custody in response to US charges of criminal copyright infringement in relation to his Megaupload website. Dotcom was accused of costing the entertainment industry $500 million through pirated content uploaded to his file-sharing site, which had 150 million registered users.[14] Dotcom has vigorously denied the charges, and is fighting the attempt to extradite him to the United States” From Wikipedia
Government is waging a war over data control on two fronts, as the enforcement arm for big media and other commercial interests on the one hand and as a way to limit exposure for themselves and their collaborators in business and commerce on purely political grounds. Various law enforcement agencies at the Federal level have assumed responsibility for any cyber-crime the choose to take jurisdiction of.
The courts are playing the same role with this private conflict that they do regarding classified information in the public sector. They help the government hide what is going on from the citizenry. This is the functional equivalent of the FISA Court granting a NSL and making the revelation of same by the recipient a crime. Citizen knowledge of what is happening is as unwanted as citizen input about it. It’s a disgusting state of affairs.
Meanwhile a journalist is looking at a 100 year potential sentence.
***
“U.S. Chamber of Commerce Thugs Used ‘Terror Tools’ for Disinfo Scheme Targeting Me, My Family, Other Progressive U.S. Citizens, Groups
And why they are likely to get away with it…”
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8354
***
“Cybercrime: An Overview of the
Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Statute
and Related Federal Criminal Laws”
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/97-1025.pdf
Democrats call for an investigation of law firm, 3 tech companies
By Dan Eggen
Monday, February 28, 2011
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/28/AR2011022805810.html
Excerpt:
A group of House Democrats is calling on Republican leaders to investigate a prominent Washington law firm and three federal technology contractors, who have been shown in hacked e-mails discussing a “disinformation campaign” against foes of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
In a letter to be released Tuesday, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) and more than a dozen other lawmakers wrote that the e-mails appear “to reveal a conspiracy to use subversive techniques to target Chamber critics,” including “possible illegal actions against citizens engaged in free speech.”
The lawmakers say it is “deeply troubling” that “tactics developed for use against terrorists may have been unleashed against American citizens.”
The call for a congressional probe marks the latest development in the controversy over tens of thousands of e-mails stolen from HBGary Federal, whose computer system was attacked in early February by members of a loose collective of unidentified hackers known as Anonymous.
The e-mails, which are widely available on file-sharing sites, show HBGary Federal, Berico Technologies and Palantir Technologies teaming up with a sales pitch to undermine chamber opponents.
The companies proposed forming a “corporate information reconnaissance cell” and discussed tactics such as creating online personas to infiltrate activist Web sites; planting false information to embarrass U.S. Chamber Watch and other groups; and trolling for personal information using powerful computer software.
The e-mails contain test runs in which the firms culled personal information, including family and religious data, on anti-chamber activists.
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.
By Peter Ludlow
June 18, 2013
http://www.thenation.com/article/174851/strange-case-barrett-brown#
Excerpt:
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, 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” 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, 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, 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 as the person to work with. Wyatt, famously, was the lead attorney in the Chamber of Commerce’s lawsuit against the Yes Men.
As a responsible lifetime gun owner, I must “AMEN” voltaic’s chilling appraisal – which is pretty good coming from an Agnostic……
The police/security state has becoming a far reaching monster that now only protects itself. Free speech, rule of law, Constitution, Bill of Rights be damned.
There is one thing that always strikes me during these times. When government wants to limit the size of a AK-47 magazine to 100 rounds, the 2nd Amendment crowd hits the streets and FOX is chanting Obama is trying to take your guns! But when the 1st Amendment is being destroyed beyond recognition, these same 2nd Amendment hollerers are absent the discussion. I guess as long as you have lots of guns then you are free? To me it’s shocking that bugging everyone’s digital communications and punishing free speech falls silent on the crowd so loud to support more guns. Think about the fact that it’s easier to buy an AK-47 than to speak the truth. A bizarre world they have created….
Anyone taking any bets on whether the DoJ is going to ask the trial either be closed to the public, or a gag order issued to reporters?
Years ago, in Mississippi, there was a trial involving a Sheriff and local officials. They tried to stifle media coverage by issuing subpoenas to every TV or print media reporter that came to cover the trial, then invoking the Rule. Reporters were held in witness rooms, not allowed to leave or have access to telephones. I would not put that kind of stunt past Holder and company.
The creeping police state. As long as we have a rubber stamp Congress, a rubber spine administration, and SCOTUS justices who are more ideologues than judges, this kind of thing is going to continue.
A client once gave me a little sign to put on my desk that said, “Just because you are paranoid, doesn’t mean they are not really out to get you.”
Hopefully Holder won’t get to pick the jury. ……
Big Brother hasn’t destroyed this one yet…… or has he….. Oh OH !!
Reblogged this on Brittius.com.