07/10/14 – Christian Stork – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, our next guest on the show today is our friend Christian Stork from WhoWhatWhy.com.
Welcome back to the show, Christian.
How are you doing?
Good, thanks.
Thanks for having me.
Well, good.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
Hey, listen, so there's a really important story that not very many people are covering, but it seems like if everything else could be equal for just a minute, this would be the top of the news cycle, a giant scandal, a huge deal.
There's an American reporter in jail now.
I'm not sure why he's not out on bail, and he's facing decades, if not still 100 years in prison for doing journalism in the United States of America.
Could that possibly be right, my twisted oversimplification of this issue?
What is Barrett Brown doing in jail?
Well, it wasn't a twisted oversimplification, because that was the case.
That's the amount of years he was facing, and it was a really egregious case, and it did all sorts of coverage, even from the New York Times to the Guardian, Glenn Greenwald.
But now, currently, he has actually accepted a plea deal, and the maximum total sentence he faces is 8 1⁄2 years, and the government has dropped its more egregious charges, the ones that seem to implicate journalism writ large, or potentially implicate journalism writ large.
So a lot of the dangerous path that this case could have taken have luckily been preempted, and he is now, instead, facing just 8 1⁄2 years, which is certainly no small time in a federal correction facility in the United States, as we know, but it's certainly not as bad as it could have been.
Well, that's good.
They were threatening him with 100 years, right?
Yeah, that's correct.
So he was originally charged with three different counts, the most important one for your listeners to know, and all of this can be recapped if you go to read my articles at whowhatwhy.com.
We've done a whole series of investigations on Brown, but the most egregious charge against him was they were claiming that he was trafficking in credit card data by sharing a link to a stolen cache of emails, emails that had been hacked by the group Anonymous, and he, as a journalist, was investigating those emails.
They were emails belonging to a private security company known as HBGary Federal, or excuse me, rather, his research effort was investigating a whole number of private security companies, but the one that they charged him with was the company Stratfor.
If your listeners are familiar with the whole hacktivist community, that's the private intelligence firm out of Austin, Texas, that Jeremy Hammond is now serving 10 years in prison for hacking.
And Barrett Brown and his research effort known as Project PM were intending to incorporate emails from the Stratfor hack into their general field, and over the course of that, he basically copied and pasted a link between chat rooms, and the government was claiming that by copying and pasting that, he was trafficking in stolen credit card information because there was some credit card data within the cache of emails.
So luckily, the government dropped those charges after a huge media outcry.
Also, they did it a couple of days before the Electronic Frontier Foundation was about to file an amicus brief in his case, so they were really trying to get away from all this bad press, and luckily, it's worked out in Barrett's favor since he's now accepted a plea deal.
Yeah, well, does he still have his good lawyers that people had rallied to make sure he had while he was facing the more controversial charges here?
Yeah, he does.
So he originally had a public defender, but he was then picked up by Ahmed Kapoor and Charles Swift.
Your listeners might be familiar with Charles Swift because he used to represent Guantanamo Bay defendants.
So he's a very competent lawyer, and obviously, they gave him the best representation they could, and they thought in light of the charges against him that the plea deal with a maximum sentence of eight and a half years was probably the best he could hope for.
And so he's currently awaiting sentencing, it was supposed to take place in August, but now it's been moved to October, and he's just sitting in the Segoeville Federal Correctional Institute in Texas currently.
All right.
And by the way, what's the magazine that he writes for?
He sure publishes some hilarious articles from in there.
Yeah, so if your listeners are interested, they can go to D Magazine, it's an online Dallas-based news publication, and he writes a column for them regularly called the Barrett Brown Letter of Review in Arts and Jail.
And he has such a great sense of humor, really dry wit, and it's a real pleasure to read.
Unfortunately, though, his last dispatch was on July 1st.
He has since been moved into...or actually, he wrote that wall in solitary, but it's been his last one because they've moved him to the secure housing unit, the SHU, which is basically the whole solitary confinement.
He hasn't told any of his readers exactly why yet, he just claims it's been...there was a disturbance of sorts at the jail that he's been implicated in, and so while the prison authorities are investigating that, he's currently in solitary confinement, and we're all awaiting his next piece.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, I got so much...so many different things going on here, I may have been distracted.
Did I give you a chance to answer why he's not out on bail right now?
Oh, he's already pled, but why wasn't he out on bail the whole time before that?
Yeah, it's a really interesting story.
So he was originally arrested without charge.
He was arrested back in 2012 for making a YouTube video in which he allegedly threatened an FBI agent.
People watch the video, he's very angry and, you know...
He's threatening basically to dox the guy, which means Google the hell out of him and post all his private information online where people can look at it, and that's all.
That's exactly right, but unfortunately he chose to use language that could sometimes be construed, or may be construed, and certainly was construed by the authorities to have implied physical violence, although anybody who knows anything about Barrett and knows about what exactly he was threatening knew it was a pretty specious charge.
So he was arrested for that, and they were holding him without bail under the assumption that he was a physical threat to this FBI agent.
I can't explain exactly why they continued to hold him, except to say that he clearly has been facing all sorts of ridiculous charges and punitive treatment from the federal government, so it seems to just fall in line with that.
Alright, and now on the eight years, is anybody given odds that he could get less time than that?
Anybody important writing an amicus brief or anything trying to get him a better deal than eight years?
I mean, it remains hard to tell.
So it really basically is all up to the judges.
He's already signed the plea deal with the prosecution, and the three charges that he pled guilty to were transmitting a threat in interstate commerce, accessory after the fact in the unauthorized access of a protected computer, and interference with the execution of a search warrant, and aiding and abetting.
So he faces a maximum of 8.5 years, and it's really up to the judge to determine whether or not he'll receive that.
And now, is there going to be, or is there already, has there already been a sentencing hearing or something like that, where they'll get to make sort of a case, or is that already built into the process?
Yeah, so the sentencing hearing, to my knowledge, was scheduled to be in August, it's since been moved to October.
I don't have any other further information from that.
His lawyers and his support network have been kind of mums since the plea deal was signed.
I mean, not entirely.
You can follow the Twitter, it's at FreeBarrett, it stands for FreeBarrettBrown, there's also the website FreeBarrettBrown.org, where they keep regular updates on his conditions and his work.
But he, to my knowledge, hasn't had a chance to argue exactly why he should receive less than 8.5 years.
I think in light of the potential sentence he was going to receive, 100 years, as you had mentioned, this is sort of, he's been breathing pretty easy since.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, I mean, the relative terms there are important, I guess, but still 8 years is a hell of a long time, too.
And especially when, as I think I understand you right, the charges now all stem from his reaction to the original bogus charges, which have since been dropped.
Right.
So the original bogus charge against him was that threatening a federal official.
Then that's been bumped down to transmitting a threat in interstate commerce.
The interesting charge after that, accessory after the fact to the unauthorized access of a protected computer, that has to deal with the Stratfor hack.
Now he was contacted by Jeremy Hammond about incorporating those emails into his research effort, and he offered to communicate with Stratfor about redacting some of the names in the emails prior to releasing them.
But in the course of that communication, he concealed the identity of the criminal, in this case, Jeremy Hammond.
And essentially, he didn't rat out Jeremy Hammond to Stratfor, so they considered him an accessory to the crime after the fact.
And the third charge stems from an earlier raid on his apartment and on his mother's place, in which they claimed that he was hiding laptops from the FBI, even though, according to sources I've spoken to who are extremely close to Barrett's mother, she had basically just placed laptops in a kitchen cabinet.
And they claimed that that was somehow trying to interfere with the execution of a search warrant, whereas I think anybody else might see that as a pretty understandable, if lamentable, occurrence.
Yep.
Alright, well, I've already kept you over time, I know you gotta go, but thank you very much for your time on the show today, Christian, I really appreciate it.
No problem.
And thanks for working on this story, it's important.
Definitely.
Take care.
Alright, that is Christian Stork, whowhatwhy.com, whowhatwhy.com, the case of Barrett Brown.
And the audio is terrible, but if you want to hear my interviews with Barrett Brown, they're at scotthorton.org.
And we'll be right back.
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