From The Hacker News (not to be confused with Hacker News ;) ):
Barrett Brown, a journalist [who] formerly served as an unofficial spokesman for the hacktivist collective Anonymous, was sentenced Thursday to over five years in prison, after pleading guilty to federal charges of "transmitting a threat in interstate commerce," "for interfering with the execution of a search warrant," and to being "accessory after the fact in the unauthorized access to a protected computer."
Brown was arrested in 2012 and nailed with 12 cyber crime charges, including a fraud charge for spreading around the hyperlink to an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel where Anonymous members were distributing stolen information from the hack, including credit card details.
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Barrett Brown Sentenced to 5 Years in Prison for 'Re-Sharing Link to Hacked Material'
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @08:32AM
Seems like nearly all of the articles covering this guy's conviction have been heavily slanted towards making it look like he was convicted for being part of Anonymous or actually hacking. This is the first article I've seen that didn't lead with a biased headline along those lines, for example:
Time - Activist Defiant After Sentencing Over Stratfor Hacking [time.com]
Dallas Morning News - Hacking conspirator Barrett Brown gives ‘thanks’ for prison term [dallasnews.com]
Gizmodo - Barrett Brown Will Spend 5 Years In Jail for Hacking-Related Offenses [gizmodo.com]
Ars Technica - Barrett Brown, formerly of Anonymous, sentenced to 63 months [arstechnica.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Sunday January 25 2015, @10:41AM
Rolling Stone got it right, headline and subtitle:
Barrett Brown Faces 105 Years in Jail: But no one can figure out what law he broke. Introducing America's least likely political prisoner
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/barrett-brown-faces-105-years-in-jail-20130905 [rollingstone.com]
(Score: 2) by cyrano on Sunday January 25 2015, @03:05PM
Even the title here on Soylent is wrong, since the eleven charges that were dropped included the one for "sharing the link" and some others they clearly couldn't make stick anyways.
The sentence he got was mainly for "conspiring to oust FBI operatives" and some other very flexible charges.
The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear. - Kali [kali.org]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @08:45AM
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
--Anatole France
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @09:09AM
I thought he was convicted of a number of crimes. What are cyber crimes? Are they different? Is it cyber ID theft if you get someone's email password, but ID theft if you take their driver's licence?
Maybe people should stop putting the word "cyber" in everywhere.
(Score: 4, Informative) by hemocyanin on Sunday January 25 2015, @10:56AM
Effectively, he was convicted of posting a link to material, something that as a journalist should be protected by the 1st Amendment (BB is a writer, not a hacker). Technically, he was convicted of some of the uncountable Federal crimes, and if it hadn't been those that they stuck him with, it would have been something else (*). What brought him to the attention of the Feds however, was his pre-Snowden forays into surveillance state issues. So they charged him up the yin yang (105 years worth) and he settled for 6 years and $900,000 in restitution for some hacking he didn't do and didn't even have the skills to begin doing.
(*) Note the perfect recipe for tyranny here. The Federal criminal code base is so vast that nobody can even count the number of crimes, let alone know the content of them all. Yet of course, excepting cops, ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it:
Many Failed Efforts to Count Nation's Federal Criminal Laws [wsj.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by TheB on Sunday January 25 2015, @11:57AM
Still better than what happened to Michael Hastings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hastings_(journalist) [wikipedia.org]
His final story that Rolling Stones promised to publish postmortem has disappeared from public memory.
(Score: 1) by ItisBE on Monday January 26 2015, @06:32PM
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday January 25 2015, @12:54PM
Even more so as cybernetics [wikipedia.org] (the root of cyber-) has little to do with computers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @03:20PM
> What are cyber crimes? Are they different?
They are crimes involving communications over the internet.
Don't be that guy. You know, that guy with an autistic insistence that your personal language style is the only valid usage of language.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 25 2015, @01:02PM
what an outrage!
*beep* keyword "outrage" on news website combined with keyword "Barrett Brown" has triggered a en-es-ah quantifier.
*beep* ip address has been logged and further traffic will logged for the next 24 hours.
*beep* end-of-line
-
to wit: don't get too upset : )