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All right, y'all, welcome back.
Scott Horton Show.
I'm him.
ScottHorton.org's the website.
Next up on the show is Christian Stork.
He's writing for WhoWhatWhy at whowhatwhy.com.
And he's got a blog called AmericanSumIsDot at christianstork.com.
And this piece is The Saga of Barrett Brown, Inside Anonymous and the War on Secrecy, a great investigative piece.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well, thanks, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
So Barrett Brown, I've talked with him a couple of times, 2010, I think, and 2012, a little bit about Anonymous and talked about their role in helping the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and this kind of thing.
And I guess I knew he was in trouble, but I hadn't followed up exactly on what all had happened.
But I'm just shocked looking at this first paragraph.
Barrett Brown, this activist, is facing over 100 years in prison.
And to boil it down here, Christian, for what?
Is he facing 100 years?
Well, I mean, there's two ways to answer that.
The government has their own answer.
Their answer is set forth in three separate indictments against Barrett Brown, one for basically threats made against a federal officer, another for linking to a cache of leaked e-mails from the Stratfor hack of 2011, which supposedly contained credit card information, and the third is for obstruction of justice charges for allegedly concealing a laptop during a raid on his apartment in March of 2012.
So they stand clearly by their charges and believe that Brown is guilty of committing all three felons.
But what my piece sets out to examine and I think explains pretty clearly is that Brown first came onto the radar of the government as a spokesman, in quotes a spokesman, for the diffuse hacktivist collective known as Anonymous.
Now, the media and your listeners and even myself, before getting into further contact with members of Anonymous and to the sources for this story, they generally have a pretty incomplete picture of what exactly Anonymous is and the type of relationships that can even be formed between members of Anonymous, what they call themselves anons, and really how it more or less amounts to an online virtual relationship.
So these tenuous connections that the government's trying to draw between him doing certain media advocacy work on behalf of Anonymous and lumping him in as this hacker himself, as someone who is engaging in these strategic hacks of protected data, it's really spurious.
And clearly, as you can tell from their charges, they're not able to link him to any of these illegal actions by Anonymous.
Yet clearly his work as a journalist is what upset them the most.
Now, in that vein, his work as a journalist centered around an initiative called Project PM.
It was a wiki and collaborative research effort in which people were able to parse through a bunch of emails that were hacks from the private security firm HBGary in February of 2011.
Now, these emails, I'm not sure if any of your listeners are familiar with the blogger Brad Freeman at Bradblog and the blogger, not blogger anymore, the columnist at The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald, formerly of Salon.
They gave this piece in some good press, or not this piece, this incident in some good press around the time it came out, primarily because they were actually part of the story.
Those two bloggers were named in these emails as enemies of clients of the firm HBGary.
And so there was initially a brief blip in the media traction of this story back in February and early spring of 2011, but then it basically just went underground and has laid dormant since until Barrett Brown was just further indicted on January 23rd with that last round of charges I had mentioned for obstruction of justice for an initial raid in March on his home.
Wow.
And then, still it's amazing, isn't it, that that can amount to, that any of these charges all combined could ever amount to 100 years in federal prison?
Oh, yeah, I mean, certainly.
This is certainly no new tactic on behalf of prosecutors, particularly federal prosecutors across the country.
If your listeners are familiar with the case of Aaron Swartz, he was facing 50-plus years in jail.
Now, these lengthy sentences don't always translate into time served, so often in these cases they're basically put up to extort guilty pleas out of defendants.
So you'll threaten somebody with either 100 years behind jail or you'll tell them, hey, you know what, save me the work and the effort and I'll just put you behind for five and you'll plead guilty and I'll save us a whole bunch of trouble.
So the fact that he's facing 100 years behind bars doesn't necessarily translate to him serving a draconian sentence in America's gulag system, but it does in itself speak volumes about how the criminal justice system operates and exactly the type of outcomes that the government is seeking when they're levying these charges.
Yeah, Swartz isn't the only one who killed himself in those circumstances.
He is just the most notable one recently, that's all.
All right, so now this PM Wiki project, you've got to speak at my level, which is maybe a level two computer dork or something.
I don't understand this stuff, but what I think I understand from your journalism here, Christian, is that this was already in the public domain.
Somebody else hacked HBGary, this corporation, got all their emails, et cetera, et cetera, and what Barrett Brown, what they're going after him for, is something that basically he was just figuring out a way to organize it so that he and other journalists could use the information effectively, basically, sift through it.
And so they don't have any charges for that, correct?
Yeah, I mean, I think we can infer that this is why they went after him.
Obviously, I've been listening to your show for quite a while and I think the onus should be on the government to explain why they're going after him in terms of all the work he's done and exactly how they came about him as an activist.
But that being said, it is fair to note that the government itself is charging him with certain crimes and in particular the posting of a link in a chat room to all this personal data of Stratfor clients is the specific crime that they're charging him for.
They're not charging him under any sort of his journalistic work, because as you mentioned, they can't.
So the Project PM work itself is based on this cache of emails, 75,000 plus, hacked from HBGary Federal and its parent company, HBGary, and the emails are particular to Aaron Barr, the CEO.
Now, as most email chains that you would imagine, even yours or mine, that are pilfered, they're not exactly easy to put in context.
Things are referred to haphazardly.
There's no linear connection between events necessarily.
As you mentioned, these data dumps basically were just that.
They were giant dumps of data that no one could parse through, almost like the State Department cables.
Now, if you remember, the State Department cables released by WikiLeaks, allegedly leaked to them by Bradley Manning, they were not categorized in any fashion, at least not in the status in which they were dumped to WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks spent a whole long amount of time parsing those and categorizing them on their website so you could zoom in, and a number of actually other publications did this, I think The Guardian did as well, where you could click on a country and then see all the cables from a certain amount of time from that ambassador back to Foggy Bottom and the correspondence between them.
So in a similar manner, Project PM sought to identify which emails were going to whom, which emails received responses, and from there map out relationships between those two people, between those two companies, and discovering exactly what initiatives were underway in the emails.
And in the emails were a number of shady, if not illegal, I want to say initiatives, because they were initially pitches between HBGary Federal and a number of other cybersecurity firms to a law firm, Hunton & Williams, which had on its clientele a number of other huge corporate actors, in the case of the most well-known example from the HBGary hack, the Chamber of Commerce and the Bank of America were the two main solicitors of this help from Hunton & Williams, who in turn asked for these three cybersecurity firms to pitch to them a campaign to basically work public relations for the Chamber of Commerce and for Bank of America, and as part of the plan they were pitching was a sophisticated, basically sabotage campaign, sabotage and disinformation campaign against critics of the Chamber and of Bank of America.
Now both of these included Salon's Glenn Greenwald and Brad Freeman of the Brad Blog.
Now these were probably the most well-known releases from the email hack, but in there is really just a trove of information about not just HBGary Federal and its doings, but a whole constellation of private contractors across a number of fields that collaborate in ways like the one I just mentioned and in other ways in terms of competing for government contracts that engage in some really shady stuff.
Now is it necessarily all legal?
I don't know.
I don't think so.
The truth is that in terms of proving conspiracy as a criminal standard, you need to prove that there was at least one step in the plan completed of prior.
So even if it's just its most basic organizational phase, I don't think that's cause enough for any sort of legal action against the firms, but the truth is, and I think this will come as no surprise to you and your listeners, the federal government had no real interest in pursuing those from those who were mentioned in the hack largely because one, they're huge federal government contractors, and two, because the work that they're doing in this new internet age is basically the type of work that the federal government wants them to do and is largely a part of why there's been a huge outsourcing bonanza in the past decade for the government to be able to more or less use cutouts, private corporations to do their dirty work.
And in this sense, it was totally ruining the reputations, or well, potentially ruining the reputations of critics of their clients.
Right, and of course, it even went as far as, and this is notable, and probably also not a surprise to this audience, sabotaging dissidents in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain.
Yeah, we love the Arab Spring in Libya and in Syria, but in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, America backs the dictators there.
And you're right, that's probably not illegal either, right?
They're working for somebody in D.C. on that.
Yeah, certainly.
Well, the company they're working for on that front is called Corvus Communications, K-O-R-V-I-S.
They're mentioned, unfortunately, if you're going through my article, I posted links to a number of sections within Project PM, but Project PM itself is down for unknown reasons, although it doesn't seem hard to speculate exactly why it's down.
And Corvus Communications in particular is just your pretty run-of-the-mill PR firm, and they're hired by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain to discredit, and Yemen as well, to discredit a number of activists who had gone on speaking tour and were doing events in the United States, largely because they know that the only audience that really matters in the world is the United States domestic audience in terms of affecting U.S. policy in those regions.
So these autocrats were desperate to mitigate any sort of damage that could have came from these activists speaking out, particularly to American audiences.
I know one woman in particular, the head of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, Mariam Al-Khawaja, she was targeted by Corvus Communications in a PR effort to basically call her a liar and to otherwise sway the audiences to which she was speaking.
Now these sound nefarious in the way I'm detailing them.
They ought to sound that way, because I think they are.
But that being said, they're not really any sort of new tactic that we would think of.
These aren't the White House plumbers breaking into her psychiatrist's office to get blackmailable material on her.
These are often stock puppet online accounts, social media accounts, that barrage her Twitter account saying she's a liar and create discord within common threads below pieces she's written.
These are often really basic PR operations, online PR operations, that are pretty run-of-the-mill nowadays for almost any organization.
I don't want to say that most organizations engage in disinformation against their competitors, but the notion of commenting or making a negative comment against someone with whom you disagree, whether it's for business reasons or personal, isn't too egregious.
What really is egregious, though, is the fact that a lot of these companies, Corvus itself excluded, because it's not particularly a technical firm.
The other companies, though, H.P. Gary, Federal, Palantir Technologies, and Berico, which were involved in the Bank of America and Chamber of Commerce conspiracies, these are extremely sophisticated cybersecurity firms.
They have some of the most talented hackers, former hackers on staff.
They develop cybersecurity software, and the way to develop cybersecurity software is to be able to break through other cybersecurity software, determine its holes, and then from there fix it up and figure out a better way to secure your networks.
So these companies have access to the talent required, the talent and material required, to engage in the types of invasive hacks against bloggers like Glenn Greenwald, like Brad Freeman, in which they can hack into their personal e-mail accounts, find personal information that might otherwise be embarrassing, and then use it potentially, this is all potentially, as blackmailable material against them as part of their broader PR effort.
It almost sounds like it was lucky for them that they got hacked when they did, before they had a chance to act on a lot of these things that they were planning.
I mean, yeah, I think that's certainly one of the takeaways from what I gather.
They were way in the planning stages.
The culpability of the firms on the receiving end, or excuse me, not on the receiving end, on those who asked for it in terms of Bank of America and the Chamber of Commerce, they were able to issue pretty stern denials at the time, once they're sticking through, that they found the ideas proposed in the e-mails to be odious, that they had no interest in soliciting them.
The only problem is that, of course, that was always going to be their statement, and that's exactly why they went through Hunt & Williams, and that's exactly what a firm like Hunt & Williams exists for, is to operate as a cutout between a firm that wants certain business done and getting that business done.
So they're able to deny, quite plausibly, any involvement in it, but really the culpability of it all is tied into these technological firms that offered the idea to Hunt & Williams, and then Hunt & Williams itself has just remained silent on the entire matter.
Yeah, well, and as you said, because these firms are all so closely tied with the state, they won't have to do any better than that anyway.
They can just stay silent and just move on.
Nobody's even looking at them.
The Justice Department isn't looking at them based on anything that came out in the leak, you said, right?
Mm-hmm.
All right, and now, so to bring this back to the case of poor Barrett Brown there, locked in a cage, is, first of all, really what I think, as you say in the article, all he did was he posted a link in a chat room to where someone else had already published these e-mails, and then somewhere in there, which was I don't know how many thousands of pages of e-mails, was credit card information of Stratfor's customers, and then that was the charge.
And I just wonder, do you know, is there legal precedent for prosecuting someone for something, like posting a link to something?
I mean, assuming that it's criminal for someone to post the e-mails they hacked in the first place under whatever technicality, is posting a link to that, is there any precedent for that being a criminal offense in itself, do you know?
No, I don't know offhand, so I don't want to speak with any certainty to that.
But I do know that the releases themselves were segmented, so the entire hack comprised about 75,000 e-mails and all sorts of different information from about, I think it was a terabyte of data from HBGary servers in general.
And the link that he sent out for which they're prosecuting him is a link to a specific cachet of documents.
That is to say, it wasn't the entire one, but it was a subsection of the entire cachet, which itself was very broad and within it contained a number of Stratfor's clientele, their credit card information.
So there's no historical precedent to my knowledge.
That being said, that wasn't exactly something I was researching.
I was researching, I was more concerned with Barrett Brown, the person, and his personal narrative, just because I thought it was rather fascinating.
But he...
I just wonder whether you think, whether the lawyers have said, oh yeah, he's in trouble for posting that link, buddy, or, wow, that's kind of surprising, they would charge him with posting a link, or, you know what I mean?
What's the conventional wisdom from the experts, do you know?
Well, the conventional wisdom that I've received when speaking to lawyers is that it's pretty, it's not odd, it's just outrageous in terms of the employment of saying that he was trafficking in information like this.
It's just, it's like the government is throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Okay, good.
See, that's what I thought.
You can't charge somebody for posting a link to something else that somebody else published.
That doesn't make sense, I don't think.
Yeah, I mean, you can, and a lot of these charges, unfortunately, stem from the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and for those familiar with the Iron Swords prosecution as well, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is such a wildly vague document in its own that it essentially criminalizes, I don't want to say everything, but nearly everything everyone does on the Internet, and that way it can be selectively enforced against those that the government really has true ire for, people like Aaron Swartz or Barrett Brown.
Right.
And now, on the, I don't know about the obstruction thing, but the threat against the FBI agent, you know, I re-watched that YouTube, and it's clear, you know, as he talks about in the video, he's got a drug problem, and it seems like in the video maybe he's acting out a little bit of his drug problem, and he went a little bit overboard.
I would have advised against what he said about the federal agent and how, you know, now I'm out to get you and whatever.
It was vague enough, it seemed like, but still, pick a fight with the FBI, you're bound to get raided kind of a thing.
But so, in your article, you explain, or you cite, I guess, a couple of different examples of other people who had threatened FBI agents and the kind of time that they're facing, you know, as a comparison, because, you know, even if he said something stupid into a YouTube camera, that doesn't amount to, you know, the rest of your life in a cage, or it shouldn't.
Yeah, I mean, there's a number of other cases, and these were just cited to give example, as you mentioned, to how these sorts of things come about in the government's radar and show exactly how they can selectively prosecute them.
Now, there was a Houston man who received about 42 months for threatening to blow up FBI headquarters in Washington.
This comes from, at least to my knowledge, a U.S. Attorney's Office press release for the Southern District of Texas on June 2, 2010, which is the time in which the alleged conspiracy was going on in the H.P. Gary emails, the conspiracy between H.P. Gary and Huntman Williams.
And here, I'm just going to read you from the press release a little bit.
Jeff Henry Williamson, 45, was convicted of threatening to blow up the J. Edgar Hoover FBI building in Washington, D.C., and has been sentenced to prison.
The United States Attorney, blah, blah, blah, announces today.
And Williamson was found guilty after a four-day trial of sending a threatening communication in interstate commerce.
And all he received was 42 months.
An actual threat through the mail that denotes he is going to blow up the J. Edgar Hoover building.
Headquarters.
Yes, exactly.
So, I mean, there is something that you would consider much more egregious.
Whether or not he had the means or enough intent to actually complete it is upper speculation, something that, you know, I'm unfortunately not too familiar with.
But that being said, the case that Brown makes, and I encourage all your listeners to read my article at whowhatwhy.com and follow the link to that video, is to note that it's pretty clear, as you mentioned, it's big enough that you would advise against it.
But it's also not in the realm of any sort of, any particular criminal advocacy.
He's not advocating committing a crime against FBI agent Robert Smith.
He's just basically saying, at worst, and obviously he speaks in an amount of code, so this is what the listener has to infer from it.
But he essentially, at worst, proposes to dox FBI agent Robert Smith.
And dox, D-O-X, refers to, or doxing someone, which has become common these days, in particular in conjunction with these hacker cases, is when you take the personal information of somebody and release it on the Internet, whatever personal information you can obtain.
And in the video, Brown said he's going to look into it so he can dox the FBI agent and also look into his family and into his kids.
Now, this is an extremely different type of threat.
It's still a threat, but it's a different type of threat than threatening to blow up FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C.
And his language, he gets carried away and says, I'm going to kill you, man, or something.
But then he says, oh, I don't mean in a physical way.
He explicitly backs down from any actual threat and says, I'm just going to get you with my keyboard.
Yeah, precisely.
I don't think there's enough evidence to display that he actually had it out in terms of advocating physical violence or any sort of physical harm being committed against the FBI agent in question.
And I hope I quoted him right.
He does say that, right, that I'm going to kill you.
But then he immediately says, oh, I don't mean kill like kill.
Yeah, I'm not exactly sure if that's the exactly right quote.
Or maybe he says, you're dead.
That's what he says, you're dead.
Oh, I don't mean that I'm going to harm you.
You're exactly right in the manner in which you're describing his quote.
He essentially says something that sounds very threatening, that's very jarring.
It's either along the lines of I'm going to kill you or you're dead.
And then immediately retracts afterwards and says, you know, I don't mean this in that manner.
I mean this as a euphemism.
Oh, here it is.
His life is over.
Now that I've screwed up the quote twice, Christian, I'm sorry.
It's his life is over.
His life is over.
He's even speaking in a passive voice like that.
And then he says, oh, I'm not saying I'm going to kill him.
I'm just going to ruin his life.
Yeah, precisely.
So he's – and also from that it's only after that that he mentioned the FBI agent's children and family.
So it's hard to see that, again, the government has much to stand on in terms of actually fearing for safety of this FBI agent.
You have to remember this is initially what got him arrested.
So he is raided in March of 2012 in relation to the Stratfor hack.
And listed on the search warrant for that night is a number of entities that Project PM was working on, a number of these private corporations.
On the search warrant it says, you know, we're looking for information related to Project PM, related to HBGary, related to et cetera, et cetera.
So the feds come across him in that manner.
Then they don't find anything, but they confiscate his laptop.
They threaten his mother with obstruction of justice charges because he hit at his mother's during the initial raid, having received a tip the day before.
So when they're threatening his mother, he records this video.
This is in September 2012, a number of months after the initial raid.
He records this video, and the FBI agents are surveilling him online as he's committing the video, or at least immediately after he posted it.
And they see the video, and then he's in a chat session with a number of other activists and friends afterward.
And during that session, the FBI raids the apartment.
In fact, I link to that as well in my piece because that's caught on camera and now immortalized on YouTube as well, that the FBI raids his apartment and detains him without even mustering a charge.
They detained him under the idea that he was a threat to a federal officer's safety, and, you know, he needed to be immediately detained.
It's only a few weeks after that arrest in September 2012, a few weeks later in early October, where he's indicted on the threats to a federal officer.
And then a few months after that, in December, he is further indicted, this time for the posting of the link.
And then after that, a month later, he is indicted even further on obstruction of justice charges for that initial raid back in March for supposedly concealing a laptop.
So his entire saga with the feds begins with a search warrant in which all the entities listed are stuff pertaining to his journalistic work.
And then they basically are able to latch on to these really unfortunate mistakes that he makes in the ensuing months as a cause for further arresting, prosecuting him.
And he's been in custody since that first arrest in September.
So he has not seen the outside of a cage since September 2012.
And that's particularly why I thought this story was so pertinent, because they're really treating him, albeit it's a completely different situation, with different degrees of criminality and everything else.
They're really treating him in a Bradley Manning-style way.
They're completely keeping him segregated from the public.
I mean, he's in the U.S., so he's entitled to lawyer protections, and he's not being tortured, as I can imagine Bradley Manning was during his initial incarceration.
But he's basically just been in the government's custody since September, and they've been piling on charge upon charge upon charge.
And I think they're rather spurious, to be honest.
Yeah, I mean, people have got to realize, even if you're just as law and order as hell out there, and you're a terrible crime victim yourself, and you don't put up with any nonsense, this guy wasn't a hacker.
He didn't go digging up people's credit card information and putting it online.
He just was a journalist, and that was what he had to do with an honest.
He wasn't the mob boss of this hacker group in any sense.
He was just the reporter.
When I talked to him, he said, well, you know, I'm not really a spokesman.
I just sort of kind of know them, and I'll talk to you.
You know, that was how he defined it.
That's actually a perfect summary for what I've come to understand his relationship to Anonymous was.
The only problem is he embodied it a little too much.
He was a little too into it himself, I think.
If you notice in a number of his later written pieces, one for The Guardian in particular, he says things like after the CEO of HBGary Federal said that he had discovered members of Anonymous in a press release, we hacked his servers.
We did this.
We did that.
Now he is relying on the notion of Anonymous being this amorphous entity where, you know, saying we doesn't mean anything.
So for people who understand it, it makes sense.
Tell that to the U.S. attorney.
Yeah, precisely.
Tell that to the U.S. attorney or to the American people who, when you are embodying this untouchable hacker ethos that you're not actually the member of this organization, which they've deemed a threat and, I mean, hacktivist organizations in general are receiving a huge amount of trouble from the government, and it's only increasing with the daily scares of cyber-attack, cyber-war, and cyber-espionage.
I'm sure your listeners, or I hope your listeners are familiar with the recent announcement of a Chinese army unit pioneering cyber-espionage actions against U.S. corporations and American industry, trying to steal trade secrets and IP and all sorts of information pertaining to that.
Now, that is and seems like a threat worthy of some sort of defense mechanism against it, but the problem is in the administration's strategy, which they released their written strategy for combating trade secrets, they list hacktivist groups including Anonymous, Wikileaks, and LulzSec, which is an offshoot of Anonymous, again, hard to describe, kind of diffused, but for that we'll just stick with offshoot for Anonymous now.
But they list them as potential enemies because they could facilitate the leaking of industrial trade secrets from these companies to them.
Now, what's interesting about that formulation is that it doesn't take into account that organizations like Wikileaks are designed to take that information, vet it, redact potentially damaging things, and then release it to the American people in an effort to promote transparency and to correct fraud, waste, abuse, or illegality.
And the U.S. government is specifically listing organizations like this as a threat in the same vein as Chinese hackers who are stealing this technology, obviously, for their own industrial gain as they're listing them as a similar threat as hacktivist groups who have the only interest in releasing such information to the American public for the purposes of accountability, which I find really ominous and something that could have huge ramifications for journalism and for any sort of document transfer in the future.
Well, and contrary to how you were saying it should be in the beginning about the burden of proof being on them to be able to do all these things to this guy, the fact that they're seeking 100 years against him is almost all the proof they need that he deserves it in a way, in the way that the court understands it.
Assuming he ever got a jury trial or it ever even went that far, certainly that would be the way the judge sees it, is that, wow, you must really be an enemy of the state if the government wants you this bad.
And that's basically the end of that.
They can call it whatever they want.
They can call it wire fraud or anything that they want if they want.
Yeah, I mean, sadly, there tends to be a tendency of the media to immediately side with the government in these cases or at least display the information in their articles in a manner which makes it seem as if the government indictments are foolproof.
I obviously tried to rectify that in my own piece because I thought the facts were so clear that Barrett himself if he's innocent of anything, he's innocent of the charges that they're levying against him, that these charges, while there is some criminality or there might be some criminality inherent in some of the actions he committed, such as that vague threat, it wouldn't surprise me if someone insulting a police officer on the side of the road could just as easily be thrown in jail.
I mean, there's a question of whether that will be turned over on appeal or not, but the fact that they're launching these sorts of investigations and levying these charges isn't that surprising on its own right.
It's just, as you mentioned, how much they're being leveled on top of each other, what the eventual time he's facing is how that transfers into his eventual acceptance of a plea bargain, and then again what the broader ramifications are for people who do work like his.
Now, his site is currently down, as I mentioned.
I've received no indication as to why that is, although it was up while I was researching my article.
So for the past few months it was up and completely accessible.
Now it's not, and a number of other mirror sites, which I also link to in the piece, experience frequent DDoS attacks and themselves are hard to access.
So I don't want to point any fingers and suggest necessarily where these attacks are coming from, but qui bono who benefits what exactly has been occurring since Barry Brown has been arrested and has been incarcerated, and it's the demobilization of a number of researchers for Project PM and the fact that the site has gone under.
In my mind, I don't think there's a small correlation there between his arrest and the site going down and the government getting what it's wanted.
Yeah, and you talk in your article about the chilling effect of all the snitches, the guy Sabu, I guess, who had turned federal informant and the chilling effect of all that, but this has got to terrify the anon activists out there.
I mean, I'm not trying to encourage them to be terrified.
I'm just saying if I was one, I would be, that they're threatening him with 100 years, and, of course, that's the point, 100 years in prison.
Die in prison for crossing us.
That's a pretty severe threat from a lot of people who can carry it out and, you know, really mean it.
It's terrifying.
It's crazy.
It sounds like something from somebody else's terrible country, not ours.
Yeah, I mean, I wish that were the case for our country.
So Anonymous itself, I think, is unrelated to Barrett Brown in this case, largely just because Barrett Brown has, as you mentioned, is doing his work as a journalist.
I mean, he's not even any of the hackers in this case.
The only problem is I can't, for the life of me, figure out why journalists in this regard would have to be themselves extremely scared, as you imply, but they—I'm sorry, someone just showed up at my door with a delivery order.
It's okay.
I know you've got to go.
I'll just end with, you know, there's a piece in The New Yorker saying, hey, can they kill us, journalists with drone strikes?
Because what if we were going to publish something classified?
This is a real discussion going on in The New Yorker magazine right now, and this is America right now.
I mean, it sounds like an episode of The Outer Limits, but it's real.
So we're screwed.
All right, thank you.
This is such great journalism, Christian.
Nice to meet you.
Thanks for doing the show, and I'll urge everybody to go and check out whowhatwhy.com.
Whowhatwhy.com.
The article is The Saga of Barrett Brown, Inside Anonymous, and the War on Secrecy.
Thanks so much for your time.
Thank you very much.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
First of all, thanks to the show's sponsors and donors who make it possible for me to do this.
Secondly, I need more sponsors and more donors if the show is to continue.
ScottHorton.org has all the links to use PayPal, Give.org, Google Wallet, WePay.com, and even Bitcoins to make a donation in any amount.
You can also sign up for monthly donations of small and medium-sized amounts through PayPal and Give.org.
Again, that's ScottHorton.org for all the links.
To advertise on the site or the show, email me, Scott at ScottHorton.org.
And thanks.
Hey, everybody, Scott Horton here, inviting you to check out the Future Freedom Foundation at FFF.org.
They've got a brand-new website with new and improved access to more than 20 years' worth of essays promoting the cause of liberty.
And FFF's writers, including Jacob Hornberger, Jim Bovard, Sheldon Richman, Anthony Gregory, Wendy McElroy, and more, aren't just good.
They're the best at opposing and discrediting our corrupt overlords in Washington and their warfare-welfare regulatory police state.
That's the Future Freedom Foundation's new and improved site at FFF.org.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here, inviting you to check out WallStreetWindow.com.
It's a financial blog written by former hedge fund manager Mike Swanson, who's investing in commodities, mining stocks, and European markets.
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See what happens at WallStreetWindow.com.
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