Anonymous-tied
hacktivist faces prison for sharing link
Screenshot
from YouTube user Barrett Brown
11
December, 2012
A
federal grand jury has indicted Barrett Brown, an activist from Texas
with links to the Anonymous hacktivist movement, on a dozen federal
charges for sharing a hyperlink inside of an Internet chat room.
Brown,
31, had been in federal custody for nearly three months awaiting
trial for unrelated crimes when the US District Court for the
Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division, unsealed a new grand
jury indictment against him on Friday, December 6 [pdf].
Brown
was arrested in
September and charged with making online threats against a federal
officer after posting a series of YouTube videos and tweets sharply
criticizing an FBI agent. Now he has been charged with 12 unrelated
counts stemming from his alleged involvement in the high-profile hack
of Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor, late last year.
On
top of his previous charges, Brown now faces decades of additional
prison time if convicted on the newest crimes, including one count of
traffic in stolen authentication features, one count of access device
fraud and 10 counts of identity theft.
According
to the indictment, Brown is at fault not for hacking
into Stratfor during
a massive security breach in 2011, but for posting a link to the
hacked files while in an online chat. Prosecutors say that during
last Christmas, Brown affected interstate commerce by knowingly
trafficking without authorization the credit card information of 12
subscribers to the Stratfor global intelligence company’s
newsletter, information authorities say he knew “were
stolen and produced without lawful authority.”
Although
Brown is not being pegged with personally hacking Stratfor or
obtaining, collecting and categorizing the credit card data in
question, the Justice Department is attacking the hacktivist for
copying a link to a downloadable archive of the compromised data from
one Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel and pasting it into another.
“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,” the
authorities charge, which in turn provided access to stolen Stratfor
data including “in
excess of 5,000 credit card account numbers, the card holders’
identification information and the authentication featres for the
credit cards known as the Card Cerficivation Values (CVV).”
“[B]y
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,” the
indictment continues.
Although
Brown is only being charged with transferring the credit card data
obtained in the Anonymous-led assault on Stratfor, his alleged role
is but a very miniscule one in the grand scheme of the hack. While
Brown is being charged for sharing a dozen credit card numbers, the
information obtained by Anonymous included in all thousands of
sensitive information as well as a trove of millions of emails from
within Stratfor. That collection of correspondence was handed over to
the website WikiLeaks after the hack and has been steadily published
by the whistleblower site in the months since as part of the “Global
Intelligence Files.”
As
RT reported last month, 27-year-old activist Jeremy Hammond of
Chicago has been charged with
a direct role in illegally accessing Stratfor’s servers and has
been told by the court that prosecutors could seek a life sentence if
he’s convicted. That future of that case has been put in the air,
however, after details emerged recently that the presiding judge is
married to one of the thousands of Stratfor customers whose
credit cards information was compromised.
When
RT reported on developments in the Hammond case last month, we
indirectly linked to an archived copy of the very files that Brown is
alleged to have shared in an IRC channel. Further research reveals
that the archive of Stratfor data has been shared countless of times
since publicized last September, and is easily available across the
Web without any warning that extracting the data contains information
obtained without authorization and therefore in violation of federal
law. Absent from the indictment, even, is a tweet from
Brown sent on December 29, 2011 linking to a copy of the files hosted
on Megaupload.com. As of this writing, that message has been
re-tweeted dozens of times and word of his latest indictment has
spawned a “RightToLink” campaign on Twitter.”
“Link Barrett
accused of sharing was also posted on Cryptome + several blogs. Will
these websites be indicted for ‘transferring link’ too?” UK
journalist Ryan Gallagher asked on
Twitter over the weekend.
“Support
the #RightToLink. @Barrettbrownlol has been charged with retweeting.
You could be too. Support your right to retweet,”added Glen
Greenwald of the Guardian on Monday.
When
Anonymous went public with the Stratfor hack last year, Brown
published a statement regarding
the compromise while on his part never citing any role he may have
had.
“In
the wake of the recent operation by which Stratfor's servers were
compromised, much of the media has focused on the fact that some
participants in the attack chose to use obtained customer credit card
numbers to make donations to charitable causes. Although this aspect
of the operation is indeed newsworthy, and, like all things, should
be scrutinized and criticized as necessary, the original purpose and
ultimate consequence of the operation has been largely
ignored,” Brown
wrote.
“Stratfor
was not breached in order to obtain customer credit card numbers,
which the hackers in question could not have expected to be as easily
obtainable as they were. Rather, the operation was pursued in order
to obtain the 2.7 million e-mails that exist on the firm's servers.
This wealth of data includes correspondence with untold thousands of
contacts who have spoken to Stratfor's employees off the record over
more than a decade.”
“Although
Stratfor is not necessarily among the parties at fault in the larger
movement against transparency and individual liberty, it has long
been a ‘subject of interest’ in our necessary investigation,” he
wrote. “The
e-mails obtained before Christmas Day will vastly improve our ability
to continue that investigation and thereby bring to light other
instances of corruption, crime and deception on the part of certain
powerful actors based in the US and elsewhere.”
The
earlier federal indictment against Brown, unsealed in early October,
charges him with Internet threats, conspiracy to make publically
available restricted personal information of a federal employee and
retaliation against a federal law enforcement officer [pdf].
In that case, he is alleged to have made threats against FBI Agent
Robert Smith, one of the officers involved in a March 2012 raid on
Brown’s residence that coincided with an international crack-down
on alleged Anons with roles in the Stratfor hack from only a few
months prior. Although Brown was not charged with any crimes related
to the hack at the time, his computers was taken into custody and in
the days before his September arrest he demanded they be returned to
him.
During
that March 2012 raid, the FBI executed a search warrant for
all evidence relating to Anonymous, the LulzSec offshoot and IRC and
Twitter logs stored on his computers. In the only dispatch from
behind bars published online, Brown wrote, “I
am not and never have been the spokesman for Anonymous, nor its
‘public face’ or, worse, ‘self-proclaimed’ ‘face’ or
‘spokesperson’ or ‘leader.’”
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