A Journalist-Agitator Facing Prison Over a Link

No, it would not have been, and no, it didn't.

A constructionist view of the Constitution is that "press" is short for "printing press". Ben Franklin is probably rolling in his grave at this cheap attempt to limit expression to a few "legitimate" journalists.

I suggest representing "dangerous links" as numbers. use goo.gl or bitly, get the URL. turn it into a hex, turn it into one long integer. turn that integer into a series of simple mathematical equations involving additional and multiplication. one day the government is going to have to outlaw even simple numbers if they want to restrict information.

>Manning never faced the death penalty. Not for a single day.

Yes. He did. He was charged with the capital offense of aiding the enemy. And yes. I know that the prosecution declined to seek the death penalty. And that the trial did not begin with the required paperwork to do so.

>This goes back to what I was saying about advocates being near to dishonesty, by the way. You probably read at some point Manning was facing the death penalty, and despite having years and years to correct your initial misperception, you continue to not only remember that incorrectly, but to parrot it as truth.

The prosecution declined to seek the death penalty. Instead, they ultimately asked for 60 years. Now, the distinction between being lethally injected and left to rot for 60 years is minimal in my mind (and the injection seems almost preferable), but there's nothing dishonest or near dishonest about the fact that Manning faced the death penalty. It was the (surely merciful) prosecution that had the choice and declined to fill out the necessary paper work. Every day prior to their decision to merely seek an effectively life-long prison sentence, rather than an immediate execution, was a day Manning spent uncertain even of whether he would be executed or not, much less whether he'd spend the remainder of his life in a six by eight foot cage.

I am not remembering anything incorrectly. I'm merely refusing to let misconceptions spawned from paralegal pedantry trump justice.

>When Barrett pasted that link, was that information already publically available?

Yes. The entire debacle was already blowing up between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day on 2011. Stratfor itself was aware of the problem on Christmas Eve and alerting its subscriber base to the breach and what they were doing about it. Dozens of people were reporting about this "on or about December 25 2011" as the indictment describes, when it lists "http://wikisend.com/download/597646/stratfor_full_b.txt.gz" as the link that got Brown in trouble when he copy-pasted it from #AnonOps to #projectpm and in so doing, in the eyes of the indictment, became guilty of aiding and abetting in charges relating to "Traffic in Stolen Authentication Features," "Access Device Fraud," and "Aggravated Indentity Theft." (indictment: http://freebarrettbrown.org/files/bb_indictment2.pdf). Take a look at the various reports from December 24 2011 to December 25 2011 to the query "stratfor hack" on Google:

(google query: http://www.google.com/search?q=stratfor+hack&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Cc...)

>did all the others in that IRC chat room already have that data, or did they not?

>But if that data were 'news' to the rest of the chat room then it seems that 'hacking and pilfering' would apply, except that no hacking was needed in this case.

How so? The standard is not whether it's "news" to whoever is listening, be they readers of a newspaper or users in an IRC channel. That's like saying that I'm aiding and abetting Snowden's release of the NSA files because, before Snowden, Greenwald, Poitras et alia released the materials, I was unaware of their existence.

>But either way involvement in criminal enterprises has always been itself a crime, to avoid diversion of responsibility in the way you would allow.

There is no "diversion of responsibility" taking place here. Those responsible for the initial hack into stratfor have already been tried and convicted. Hammond was also involved in utilizing the credit card data to lodge donations to various entities, along with other "co-conspirators" that the FBI presumably has yet to identify. And are we also forgetting that the FBI was complicit in this whole charade with Stratfor? Sabu was already their man at this point, and when Hammond approached Sabu about vulnerabilities in Stratfor's infrastructure, the FBI set up their own servers with which to store the information that was to be exfiltrated! Hell, according to the FBI's own press release, Hammond and Co. were responsible for the initial leak of information:

"HAMMOND and his co-conspirators also publicly disclosed some of the confidential information they had stolen."

(press release: http://www.fbi.gov/newyork/press-releases/2012/six-hackers-i...)

Is Brown to be considered a co-conspirator for talking about something that dozens if not hundreds or even thousands of others were also talking about at the same time? The indictment's line of reasoning swallows itself whole: who's going to indict those responsible for listing the link in the indictment? Or those who link to the indictment? Or host it? Is anyone going to go after the FBI for knowingly and willingly permitting the breach and release of materials belonging to a protected corporation of the United States that thereby caused undue economic distress to said corporation?

Yeah, that's one of the things that would make pasting a link just fine in my opinion/analysis, is if that data were already publically-known (and not otherwise legally restricted somehow). I'm not diving into 40 pages of indictments to research again, court PDFs are driving me batty, but to the extent that information was already out there somehow I don't see justification for charging Barrett for simply pointing that out.