Satirist Barrett Brown: The Nemesis

Barrett Brown would not be one of the funniest satirists in the U.S.A. had he not — after spending 28 months in a Texas jail — opened his trial’s closing statement with a joke. He owed the public an explanation, said Brown on Thursday in Dallas: “Because, of course, the public didn’t simply pay for my defense through its donations, they also paid for my prosecution through its tax dollars.”

One hundred supporters had sent letters to the court asking for his release. Many describe him as a political prisoner of the U.S.A. As a journalist, Brown researched the entanglement of the state and private security firms. Long before Edward Snowden became a whistleblower, Brown warned of the “dangerous technology” propagated by Snowden’s employer, the private security firm Booz Allen Hamilton.

At the same time, he was one of the most aggressive public voices of the hacker collective Anonymous, the online campaign conducted against Scientology or a Mexican drug cartel, but which also supported activists of the Arab Spring. In the fall of 2012, Brown threatened to destroy the life of an FBI agent in a YouTube video. Brown, who smoked weed, shot heroin and was going through withdrawal at the time, felt he was being persecuted. In fact, the FBI was pursuing a criminal prosecution against him.

Apology for an “Idiotic” Threat

Because of the videos, and because he is supposed to have hidden a laptop from investigators, he was eventually threatened with eight and a half years in jail. At one point it had been 105 years, having been accused in the meantime of disseminating a link to hacked data, something, mind you, that many did at the time. As a journalist, he wanted to better understand the intelligence complex. As an activist, it was for him a question of the data. The U.S. government disputes that Brown is a journalist; a strategy also employed against the journalists surrounding Snowden.

In his closing statement, Brown called the YouTube threat “idiotic” and apologized for it. Presumably, he said, the government also believed that the facts spoke for his release. “I would even argue that the government itself believes that the facts warrant my release today, because look at all the lies they decided they would have to tell to keep me in prison.”

The indictment refutes that. “The government does not persecute Mr. Brown for political reasons,” said a lawyer for the U.S. Justice Department.*

Barrett Brown’s lawyer pleaded for a sentence of 30 months. With this he would have already served most of his time.

Sixty Three Month Detention

The court ultimately sentenced Brown to 63 months, reported journalists from the courtroom in Dallas. That is five years and three months. He is thus supposed to spend a further 25 months in prison. Furthermore, he is supposed to pay restitution in the amount of $890,000 to the private intelligence company Stratfor from whose servers, among others, Brown hacked the data.

In a statement that his supporters published after the decision, Barrett Brown expressed thanks that he would now, supported by the government with free room and board, have 35 months to report on the transgressions of responsibility in the world’s best prison system. Brown writes a column for Dallas Magazine about everyday life behind bars.

The Matter of the Link

The charge that Brown had copied a — freely available on the net — link and thereby illegally traded in credit card data which, among other items, he then hid, became one of the central issues in the trial. Brown’s defense attorney argued that a conviction for the copying of links would question the Internet’s entire functionality.

Although the charge was dropped, along with various others over the past year, it continues to play an important role in sentencing discussions. Representatives of the Justice Department insist that they take it into consideration. The judge reportedly implied that he held the copying of the links to be clearly illegal trade in credit card data.

In his closing statement Brown indicated that, had he known of this charge, he could have settled with the court on a markedly lighter sentence at an earlier point in time. But he holds the freedom of the press as such an important value that he did not.

Barrett Brown is one of the most resolute people that I know, said one of his lawyers after the court decision. “I look forward to his release.”*

*Editor’s Note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.