In case you haven’t heard, journalist Barrett Brown is facing over 100 years in jail for alleged crimes relating to his investigation into the world of private intelligence contractors for the US government.Please read the rest of ysd's post. It is sobering to contemplate what our government is doing to journalists to punish them for doing their jobs.
Forty-five years of that potential maximum jail sentence is for copying and pasting a link into a chat room. Along with valuable emails exposing the machinations inside the lair of private spies in the service of government, the link Barrett Brown posted also included private credit card information stored on contractor’s servers.
By contrast, LulzSec hacker Jeremy Hammond, accused of actually stealing the files from Stratfor (aided by government informer Sabu), faces only 10 years.
Government overreach on the charges against Brown apparently isn’t enough. In a motion filed August 7, the prosecution requested that the Judge order restrictions against parties contacting the media. The government is seeking a Gag Order to prevent Barrett Brown from speaking with reporters.
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Telling a journalist not to talk to people is like telling a truck driver not to use the highway system. And charging anyone with a 45-year offense for copy-pasting a single link... "copy-pasting" presumably means the link was already on the web somewhere... sounds like something that would have happened in the various countries whose government we were privileged to call totalitarian, back before the "world's greatest democracy" (heh) started doing the same shit.
A word to Obama and company: jailing, intimidating, assaulting, "disappearing," and killing journalists are things only dictators do. Is that what you are now? How soon before you start jailing bloggers... including Democrats critical of your administration's suppression of the mainstream press and media?
Most terrifying Steve! Outrageous!
ReplyDeleteHow did the world come there!
Enfant, we're seeing reminders of the days of the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The context was a little different in Hoover's day (e.g., it wasn't always journalists but alleged Communist Party members), and the parts of the government perpetrating the persecution were different (then, it was the FBI; now, it's the Obama administration's Department of Justice), but unfortunately the notion of using judicial persecution to target one's political adversaries is old and as American as apple pie. (I always thought apple pie was German, but that's the cliché.) America never really recovered from the Hoover era, and when someone as unapologetically hardnosed as Obama picks up the thread, that's frightening news.
DeleteThis is McCarthyism!
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