It’s now been almost a year since journalist and activist Barrett Brown’s was arrested—basically for doing his job. Brown—whose reporting shed light on the too-cozy relationship between private security firms, lobbyists, and the US government—faces up to 105 years in prison. His biggest crime? Pasting a link, in a chat room, to leaked documents available on WikiLeaks -- which is well within his First Amendment rights. Now the court has issued a gag order forbidding him or his lawyers from talking about his case to the media—making all too clear their purpose from the beginning: to silence journalists. Demand the Justice Department preserve the First Amendment and drop their charges against Barrett Brown. Brown did what all journalists do on a daily basis—shared a hyperlink to a set of documents readily available online. This case could criminalize completely normal and necessary journalistic practices and severely endanger the First Amendment. His intrepid journalism helped shed light on a shadowy underworld of corporate espionage, and a meticulously engineered smear campaign against anti-corporate activists, defenders of WikiLeaks, and liberal journalists like Glenn Greenwald.
Posted on: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 14:49:41 +0000