Image: Free Barrett Brown Group
Barrett Brown, who became a cause célèbre after he was charged with crimes related to the 2011 Stratfor hack, will not go free as his supporters hoped. He was sentenced today in Texas to five years and three months in prison.
Brown was facing a possible eight-and-a-half years in prison after pleading guilty earlier this year to two charges related to aiding-and-abetting and obstruction of justice and a separate charge involving threats he made to an FBI agent. His attorneys sought a sentence of 30 months with consideration for time served and other mitigating factors, which would have left him with just two months remaining in jail. Brown has been in custody without bail since he was arrested in September 2012 while in the middle of an online chat. The sentence today—of 63 months—means he could spend up to an additional two-and-a-half years in prison.
The ruling, in Texas, brings to a close an unusual saga that had the feds initially charging Brown with 12 counts of aggravated identity theft and trafficking in stolen data for simply posting a link in a chat room. That link pointed to a file containing data stolen by members of the hacktivist group Anonymous from the intelligence firm Stratfor, or Strategic Forecasting. The data included company emails as well as credit card numbers belonging to subscribers of Stratfor’s service. The charges against Brown caused a stir when they were first revealed, because Brown hadn’t stolen the data himself, but had simply copied the hyperlink from one public chatroom and posted it to another.
The trial was poised to become an important First Amendment test case until those charges were dropped in 2013, leaving Brown to face just two charges for accessory after the fact and for obstructing the execution of a search warrant. Brown was also facing charges in a separate case related to threats he made against an FBI agent in a YouTube video. In the video titled “Why I’m Going to Destroy FBI Agent Robert Smith Part Three: Revenge of the Lithe,” Brown threatened to “dox” FBI Agent Robert Smith by posting his address and other details online. Brown was charged with making internet threats, conspiracy to make publicly available restricted personal information of a federal employee and retaliation against a federal law enforcement officer. He pleaded guilty to making the internet threat. That case was combined with the Stratfor case for purposes of sentencing.
Under the accessory-after-the-fact charges in the Stratfor case, authorities say Brown tried to help the Stratfor hacker avoid apprehension by creating confusion about his identity “in a manner that diverted attention away from the hacker,” according to court documents. This included communicating with Stratfor employees after the hack in a way that authorities say drew attention away from the hacker. The hacker is not named in court documents filed in Brown’s case, but Anonymous hacktivist Jeremy Hammond was sentenced in 2013 to 10 years in prison over the Stratfor hack.
The obstruction charge relates to an attempt by Brown and his mother to hide a laptop from authorities during a search of her home in March 2012. Brown’s mother was separately charged with obstruction and given six months probation.
Brown had originally been scheduled for sentencing in December but during that hearing Judge Sam A. Lindsay took the unusual step of delaying after prosecutors attempted to re-introduce issues that had long ago been dismissed in the case. It was just one more bizarre turn in an already bizarre case.
According to Brown’s defense attorney Ahmed Ghappour, prosecutors wanted the judge to base sentencing in part on the dismissed charge for trafficking in stolen data—namely, the credit card numbers that were stolen in the Stratfor hack.
“The question is whether there are multiple victims of the accessory-after-the-fact conduct or whether it’s just one vicim, which is Strafor,” Ghappour told WIRED. “The government argued that there were multiple victims because every one of those credit cards was attributable to a different victim. We argued that those charges have long since been dropped, and he did not contribute to any harm that resulted because all he did was cut and paste a link [to a file containing the credit card numbers].”
The government insists that the credit cards are relevant, even though the actual charge over them was dropped, because they say Brown was part of a conspiracy that included the theft of the cards and should therefore be sentenced as a member of the conspiracy.
“The government tried to posit that there was a vast conspiracy by Anonymous to exfiltrate all this data from various security companies and that Barrett was somehow part of this giant RICO conspiracy,” Ghappour said, calling it a “very wily move on the government’s part.”
The judge, however, pushed back on the government’s attempt to increase Brown’s sentence in this way and decided to postpone sentencing until he could review all of the arguments thoroughly.
“In all the trials I’ve been a part of … and they’re all complex cases … I’ve never seen a judge take a time-out to issue his sentence,” Ghappour says. The move indicated to him that the judge was taking extra care to get the sentencing right and not be unduly swayed by the government’s forceful arguments.
In his statement to the court today, Brown took responsibility for his actions and expressed regret for them but also called out the government for its handling of his case, noting several incidents in which government agents lied to or misled the court.
“Normally this sort of thing is left to one’s lawyers rather than the defendant, because to do otherwise runs the risk of making the defendant seem combative rather than contrite,” he said, according to a prepared statement released to reporters. “But I think Your Honor can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time. I think Your Honor understands that one can regret the unjust things one has done, while also being concerned about the unjust things that have been done to him.”
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