Barrett Brown Faces 100 Years in Prison for Posting Hyperlink to Site Containing Hacked Material in Chat Room
March 4th, 2014Update: Charges Related to Publishing URL Dropped
*phew*
Via: IT News:
United States prosecutors today said they have dropped eleven charges against journalist Barrett Brown – including for publishing a hyperlink in an online chat forum – in one of the closest watched digital liberties trials yet.
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Via: Guardian:
Lawyers acting for Barrett Brown, the activist-journalist facing more than 100 years in prison for having posted a hyperlink to hacked material, have called for his case to be dismissed on grounds that it violates his First Amendment rights to free speech and would chill the internet.
Brown, 32, is being held in Texas ahead of two scheduled trials on 28 April and 19 May. He is charged with a total of 17 counts in three separate indictments relating to his work uncovering online surveillance.
The main allegation against him – spanning 12 counts – is that he posted a hyperlink on an internet chat room to a website containing material hacked from the private intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting, Inc, (Stratfor). The hack included email addresses of 860,000 Stratfor subscribers as well as 60,000 credit card details.
In a legal memorandum lodged with a federal court in Dallas, Texas on Tuesday, Brown’s lawyers argued that the charges against him should be dropped ahead of trial because they were too vague and were in breach of his constitutional right to free speech. By hyperlinking to the hacked material, Brown did not “transfer” the stolen information as he arguably would have done had he embedded the link on his web page, but merely created a path to files that had already been published elsewhere that were in the public domain.
“Republishing a hyperlink does not itself move, convey, select, place or otherwise transfer, a file or document from one location to another… The government only alleges that Mr Brown ‘transferred’ a hyperlink containing directions to where the Stratfor file was already placed by another person when the Stratfor files were uploaded to public web servers,” the motion argues.
