please visit this page and familiarize yourself with the persecution of barrett brown: "Barrett Brown, a journalist who had achieved some level of notoriety as the “the former unofficial not-spokesman for Anonymous,” the hacktivist group, now sits in federal custody in Texas. Mr. Brown came under the scrutiny of the authorities when he began poring over documents that had been released in the hack of two private security companies, HBGary Federal and Stratfor. Mr. Brown did not take part in the hacks, but he did become obsessed with the contents that emerged from them — in particular the extracted documents showed that private security contractors were being hired by the United States government to develop strategies for undermining protesters and journalists, including Glenn Greenwald, a columnist for Salon. Since the cache was enormous, Mr. Brown thought he might crowdsource the effort and copied and pasted the URL from an Anonymous chat server to a Web site called Project PM, which was under his control. Just to be clear, what Mr. Brown did was repost the URL from a Web site that was publicly available on the Internet. Because Stratfor had not encrypted the credit card information of its clients, the information in the cache included credit card numbers and validation numbers. Mr. Brown didn’t extract the numbers or highlight them; he merely offered a link to the database. For this he was charged on 12 counts, all of which pertained to credit card fraud. The charges against him add up to about 100 years in federal prison. It was “virtually impossible,” Mr. Greenwald, wrote recently in The Guardian, his new employer, “to conclude that the obscenely excessive prosecution he now faces is unrelated to that journalism and his related activism.” " -Hacktivists as Gadflies, NYT opinionator.blogs.nytimes/2013/04/13/hacktivists-as-gadflies/?_r=0
Posted on: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 02:09:08 +0000
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