09/03/13 – Kevin Gallagher – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
First up is Kevin Gallagher from FreeBarrettBrown.org.
FreeBarrettBrown.org.
Yes, Barrett has two T's at the end, FreeBarrettBrown.org, and his Twitter handle is FreeBarrett underscore.
Welcome to the show.
Kevin, how are you doing?
Good, thanks, Scott.
Thank you for having me on.
I know Barrett was a guest on the show.
Yeah, I did interview him a couple of times.
In fact, I think the first time, it was about what a great job Anonymous had done arming the revolutionaries in Tunisia with the tools that they needed to overthrow their government, some of the tools anyway, back in 2011.
Yeah, and the other time must have been about WikiLeaks.
Right.
All right, so, and I think there were some WikiLeaks in that one, too, since that was kind of the background to Tunisia and everything.
But anyway, yeah, everybody can go and listen to those at ScottHorton.org.
And now, so, just tell us real quick, who's Barrett Brown, and why is the government after him, and why has he got to be freed from where he's being held somewhere?
Barrett Brown is a freelance journalist and writer who has written for The Guardian, Huffington Post, and Vanity Fair.
Through the rise of Anonymous and WikiLeaks and these internet freedom movements, he got involved and associated himself.
And also through his crowdsourced Wiki project called Project PM, which was devoted to exposing and researching the private intelligence contracting industry, he became a target of the Feds.
And he was raided in March of last year.
They took all his computers and devices, but they didn't arrest him or charge him.
In September, he eventually spoke out about what was happening to him, about the investigation, and they arrested him for making those YouTube videos in which he was later indicted for threatening an agent.
Now, once they had arrested him, they then went and indicted him two more times on charges of pasting a link, which allegedly contained some credit card information, and concealing his laptops during the raid a year earlier.
It's a really interesting and complex case with such over-prosecution, 17 counts over three indictments happening.
The charges add up to a total of up to 105 years to be faced in prison, so I think everybody should be paying attention to this.
Okay, now, am I right that they argue that he's not a journalist, and so these are not journalistic behaviors that he was involved in, but instead he was co-conspiring, or is that not the case?
I don't think they've argued that he's not a journalist, but they've made no reference to the fact that he is, and they have tried to say that his outfit, Project PM, was actually a criminal organization rather than a legitimate journalistic enterprise.
Okay, now, the hackers, I think most people listening to this don't know much about it, not much more than me, and I don't know very much either, but was it the case that Barrett had put the guy that had hacked all those credit card numbers up to it or something in the first place, or was he simply reporting on something that had already happened, that someone else had done?
Not at all, he had no knowledge or involvement of the hacks, he only knew of the data after it came out, and he was using the leaked emails that were obtained by the hackers, both in the case of HP Gary and Stratfor, to conduct journalistic research into the activities of the private and telecontracting industry.
So I'm just coming up with that out of nowhere, I don't want anybody to misunderstand me like I think that or I read that somewhere or whatever, but I'm just going by what the government tried to claim about Manning and the WikiLeaks and all of that, right, was somehow this wasn't just a leak, and then some journalists reporting on a leak, this was the journalists had put the leaker up to it in the first place, which makes it not a leak, but a conspiracy to commit espionage or whatever.
So I'm just trying to explore possibilities that, well, in some way was he abandoning journalism and acting in a real criminal way here, or he was just reporting on things that they really didn't like him reporting on, and so they found excuses to persecute him under the color of law, which is, I think, you know, what you're going for here.
Well, yeah, I think it's the latter.
It's not really a factor here.
He's not accused of hacking.
He's not even accused of using the information that was hacked for his own gain, in a sense.
All he's accused of is pasting, literally copying and pasting a link to it.
And that is something that could set a awful precedent for Internet freedoms and for journalists to report about leaks and stuff like that.
And he was copying and pasting a link of what, just credit card information and from who to who?
It was essentially from one chat room to another, the anonymous chat room where, you know, someone else had provided the link.
He copied it into his Project PM chat room, which is where they do their research and they look into the emails.
And he's basically just pointing to it, you know, telling his fellow Project PM researchers, oh, here, look at this.
It was a subscriber or client list for Stratfor, which is, you know, a list of their clients who received intelligence.
And just by looking at that, you can you can see how well connected they are and who is interested in their intelligence, who's paying to receive it.
So it's definitely a journalistic significance.
Right.
It was of legitimate interest to a journalist, not just a list of credit card numbers to be stolen by a credit card number thief ring or something like that.
Right.
So now what's the charge, though?
What are they calling this copying and pasting?
Because there is no felony copying and pasting charge, I don't think.
Well, there's three counts that they're calling it traffic and stolen authentication features.
So by virtue of transferring the hyperlink, he made the stolen information available to others who could potentially use it, even though there's no proof or allegation that it was used.
And in fact, there was against the release of credit card information by hackers because he knew that could harm innocence and basically serve no purpose.
But the second count is access device fraud, which is another count that just relates to the possession of the credit card information.
And and finally, they're charging him with aggravated identity theft, which is just absurd.
Yeah.
In other words, they're just throwing as many books at him as they can trying to make something stick.
Right.
I think that's the strategy.
OK, now I remember reading that the judge had overreached on seizing his defense funds, which, man, is that some East German activity or what?
But then the judge had backed down on that part, correct?
Yeah, this was a request made by the prosecution at the time that Barrett still had a public defender.
And it was aimed at seizing the funds that me and my organization, Free Barrett Brown, had raised and basically giving it to their public defender, which in effect would have denied him private legal representation.
I think that move was outrageous.
It's just one in a long line of outrageous things they've done, including targeting his mother.
Well, go ahead, you know, tell us more about this, the process of the hearing.
He's still in pre-trial hearings time right now.
Yeah, well, there's there's a hearing tomorrow on this media gag issue, which is another request the prosecution made for Brown and his attorneys not to make statements to the media.
So they, in essence, want to silence him now.
And the court will be making a ruling on that tomorrow in Dallas at 10 a.m.
Yeah.
And and now this is really important here, too, because they're the prosecution you've written on your blog here at Free Barrett Brown dot org that the prosecution is trying to cite this Web site, which is an independent thing, which is not a project of his lawyers as somehow why he needs to be gagged.
Him and his lawyers need to be gagged because independent journalism is taking place on this subject matter.
Really?
Yeah, essentially, they're not happy with all the interest from journalists into the case, they're not happy with the support efforts that we do.
And they did end up naming a bunch of things that I have done in the filings, kind of complaining about it.
Even though we're completely independent, we don't speak for Barrett or his lawyers and we have First Amendment rights.
And now.
Well, so what is your interest in this?
Well, I'm just a person who, you know, over the last few years observed the attack on Internet freedoms, and I was very interested in WikiLeaks Anonymous and actually had the opportunity to meet Barrett last last summer.
And before that, I was already very interested in his writing and his work for Project PM.
So as soon as he was arrested, I sensed that it would be important for someone to go up someone to go up with some kind of prisoner support, like we've seen in these other cases, Bradley with Bradley Manning and Jeremy Hammond and the investigation, the WikiLeaks.
These prosecutions get really out of control.
And what Aaron Schwartz as well.
So it's important for us to do whatever we can do to defend the people who are being persecuted.
Yeah, absolutely.
And then so your focus mostly on raising funds that you then transfer over to his lawyers, is that correct?
That's correct.
She is an excellent legal team with Amit Gopal and Shirley Swift, two guys who have defended the disconnecting Guantanamo.
And we're trying to raise up to a hundred up to two hundred thousand dollars.
And we've got about 20, 25 percent of that so far.
So I urge anybody listening to donate if they're interested.
Yeah, I mean, this is really something else what they're doing here and the way that they're going after him.
But as long as we're talking about the money here, tell us how people at the Web site can can be assured that their money is going where you say it's going to his directly to his lawyers, because, you know, people are about giving their money up.
Yeah, well, later this year, I will be releasing a transparency report of our all our expenses.
It's basically attorney fees.
They need to hire experts.
They need to pay for travel and transportation and lodging for the attorneys and so on.
And the potential donors can go through free.
Barrett Brown, federal or donate.
It's the one and only Barrett Brown Legal Defense Fund.
There's no other one.
It's been it's been active for over a year and we have the blessing Barrett.
We obviously work with his and his family and we obviously work with his attorneys so they can choose one of four methods.
We have we pay PayPal and Bitcoin or you can send a check in money order if you want to be a little more anonymous.
Right.
And you also have a link here at free Barrett Brown or to the legal team.
So if people, especially if they're interested in making a substantial donation, they can call those lawyers and verify that this is how they like to do it.
Oh, yeah.
And if they're interested in making a large donation, we would certainly want to talk to them and, you know, see what we can do.
Yeah, there you go.
Cool.
I just figure, you know, put those kind of questions out of the way of if those are the kinds of questions that people have.
It should be, you know, tripping.
Same thing for the Bradley Manning thing, you know.
Yeah, we're a registered nonprofit corporation in Massachusetts doing advocacy and legal defense fund for Barrett.
All right.
Now, did I hear you right that you did you say that he's facing two hundred and five years in prison because that's a long time.
It's a hundred five years.
Oh, one hundred.
Oh, OK.
That's not a deal.
Wait a minute.
That's still a lot.
Yeah.
One hundred five.
If you add up the maximum of all the charges included and the center, the really central point of the case is that Lincoln charge is the one that carries the most time and the most penalties with it.
The other charges are not really consequential for in terms of what he could be facing.
I think, in fact, she's already served enough time in the last year to cover that stuff.
Mm hmm.
Well, and I think one indication of what an outrage this prosecution is, is the legal team that signed up to help support and they look at this as a line in the sand being crossed here when it comes to the First Amendment.
Yeah, that's right.
The limited comments they've made about the case indicates that this is something that will set precedence with regard to the First Amendment.
Right.
I mean, one of these guys is the guy that won the Hamdan case, or was it the Bomedian case against Rumsfeld?
Yeah, Hamdan versus Rumsfeld, that's Charlie Swift.
He was on the team that defended Osama bin Laden's driver and took that to the Supreme Court and it resulted in a victory.
It's an extremely important victory that's, you know, regarding indefinite detention and president invented law and all kinds of stuff like that.
So, yeah, that's a big deal.
And I think a strong indication of how important it is that the government lose.
They don't have anything real on him, I guess, beyond is it even really a criminal thing, hiding his laptop and not telling them where it was when they searched his house?
I mean, if they if they search your house and they don't find something that's obstruction of justice on your part, is that really a thing?
Well, I mean, that's actually a First Amendment issue, what's called reporter's privilege, which is recognized in and it's not in the Constitution or anything, but it's recognized by a lot of district courts, which is the right to protect your sources as a journalist.
The laptops he is charged for concealing contained a book in progress, notes and conversations with sources, you know, all his work product, essentially.
So it's understandable that you wouldn't want that to fall into the hands of the feds.
Right.
But so I guess you're saying for a regular person, though, that might be a thing, not telling them where's the laptop if they're screaming, where's the laptop?
But in his case, he was within his right to preserve it due to journalistic sources.
Yeah, I believe so.
He was exercising his right to protect his sources.
All right.
And then so I guess you said there's the gag order hearing is next.
But then what's the timeline on the trial?
Do you know?
Yeah, there's going to be two trials.
They're charging the first indictment separate from the other two.
And those are scheduled to happen in April and May of next year.
OK.
So that's still time for this thing to fall apart, I guess.
There's got to be good chances somewhere.
I don't know.
Some double digit percent chance, at least, that they're just going to let this thing go.
Right.
I mean, look what they did to Drake.
I don't know.
Drake and some of the whistleblowers, they at least were former government guys, former members of the gang.
So maybe that's different.
But they you know, they persecuted that guy forever and ever.
And then they finally just let him go.
Yeah, I would hope so.
And I think, you know, the longer this prosecution continues, the more and more the public public interest comes into play, where a lot of people are a lot of there's a lot of concerned citizens and a lot of people who are against it.
So.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your efforts on his behalf.
I think that's great of you.
And I appreciate your time on the show.
Thanks a lot.
That's Kevin Gallagher.
And the website is free Barrett Brown dot org on Twitter.
He's free Barrett underscore.
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