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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

Sure 5 < 100, but does that somehow change the morality of what's being done here?

I'm less certain about the morality of the charges than you are. My certainty also does not have the same magnitude as yours but on the inverse vector. Someone will inevitably premise a reply on the idea that it does, though.

My understanding, after reading the news and the relevant stuff on freebarrettbrown.org (which collects a bunch of filings) is that he faced sentencing for three counts: (i) concealing laptops during the execution of a warrant, (ii) threatening an FBI agents, and (iii) being an accessory after the fact to the STRATFOR hack.

Of those three, (i) and (ii) seem open-and-shut. Even Brown's own motion to dismiss concedes them. (The more damning of the two, about the laptops, was accompanied with a sort of harebrained argument that it's not a crime to conceal evidence so long as you hide it somewhere in the scope of the search warrant, so that it is at least mathematically possible that agents executing the warrant could have found it.) He plead guilty to them, then discussed them in their particulars at his allocution.

Accessory-after-the-fact liability for relaying a URL to a bunch of stolen credit cards is a fuzzier charge. I have no idea what I think about it. But two things worth considering:

(1) Accessory-after-the-fact liability is a much lesser offense than being an accomplice to the STRATFOR hack. Accomplice liability would have charged him as a principal to the actual crime. That's not what he got convicted for.

(2) The charge doesn't criminalize sharing of URLs, but rather intentionally facilitating the spread of stolen credit card numbers. The DOJ had the burden of proving intent. His "actus reus" was, I think we all agree, very minimal. But his mens rea might not have been.

His vulnerability to having mens rea proven at trial was probably greatly enhanced by the fact that one of the open-and-shut charges against him was about his effort to shield Jeremy Hammond from prosecution. It would have been hard for him to argue that he wasn't much more intimately involved in the STATFOR hack than some Twitter rando RT'ing a URL would have been.

I dunno. As usual, nothing is as simple as Boing Boing and Wired make things out to be.

I think the government had a stronger case against Brown than it did against Auernheimer.

Our opinions on the application of law and justice are usually diametrically opposed, but I have to thank you for taking the time to write this out. It's completely fair and even-handed, and focuses on the facts of the case.

Thank you. I doubt we're diametrically opposed, unless you're an anarcho-capitalist.

A detail I didn't have until this comment was too stale to edit:

The "accessory after the fact" charge seems to have been --- according to Kim Zetter --- based not on the transmission of the link, but rather the specific role Brown played as a go-between for the Stratfor hacker and Stratfor itself. To wit: Brown is apparently accused of exploiting that role for the purpose of throwing the scent off Jeremy Hammond.

You can be deeply aware of a crime in progress and not have any duty under US criminal law to police your fellow citizens. But that's a precarious position to be in: as soon as you do anything that can be construed as helping the crime, you graduate from witness to accessory. That seems to have been what happened to Brown.

That he threatened federal agent(s)? That he knowingly claimed to be part of a [mostly] criminal hacking group? That he knowingly and willfully obstructed an investigation?

He did stupid, illegal things, and honestly it sounds like he got off pretty light, to me.

Have you heard his "threats" against federal agents?

God forbid journalists protect their sources.

https://wikileaks.org/Assange-statement-on-the.html

His own sentencing allocution --- which was, to say the least, not a weak-kneed cowtowing to the DOJ to minimize his sentencing --- admitted fully to those threats and blamed them on withdrawal from Paxil and Suboxone. The threatening videos and tweets were the most unambiguous regret he expressed. Regrets he expressed moments before haranguing the DOJ, at length, for their misconduct during the case.

>Regrets he expressed moments before haranguing the DOJ, at length, for their misconduct during the case.

Is that supposed to make a difference?

Yes, but not the way you think it does: my point is just that he wasn't admitting to random things to kowtow to the court and minimize his sentence. The majority of the allocution is accusatory, combative, and unrepentant. And, good for him for being honest. But it follows logically that things he did admit in the allocution, he was admitting sincerely.

tptacek previously linked[1] to Brown's threats, but it was a screenshot. Here's a partial transcription:

   Brown called FBI Special Agent [RS] a "fucking
   chicken shit little faggot cocksucker"

   Brown stated "when I say [RS's] life is over,
   I don't say I'm going to kill him, but I am
   going to ruin his life and look into his fucking
   kids"

   Brown stated "I"m armed, that I come from a military
   family, that I was taught to shoot by a Vietnam Vet
   and by my father a master hunter ... I will shoot
   all of them and kill them if they come"

Sorry. Those are hardly the words of an objective "journalist". Law enforcement generally frowns upon threats of personal violence against them and against their children. Like it or not, this is settled law. You don't get a free pass about this stuff.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8932468

First Amendment law makes this murky. A legally actionable threat has to be "true": credible, specific, intended to convey actual fear to its target. Even if it's to a federal agent.

https://www.google.com.au/search?num=100&site=&source=hp&q=d... One law for all, evenly applied.

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