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?
