Former Anonymous ‘spokesman’ and journalist Barrett Brown was handed a 63-month federal jail term on Thursday for threatening an FBI agent and two other offences.
Brown, who has written for the Guardian, Vanity Fair and the Huffington Post, will also need to pay $890,000 in restitution fees after a Dallas judge threw the book at him, despite the fact he has already spent nearly three years in prison.
The journalist founded Project PM, a wiki designed to crowdsource the analysis of ‘intelligence contracting’, cybersecurity and surveillance industries.
In 2012, Brown posted a series of YouTube videos and tweets allegedly threatening an FBI agent investigating the 2011 Stratfor hack, for which he was arrested and charged.
Months later, he was indicted on new charges which effectively amounted to him sharing a link to the hacked Stratfor records that had been posted online.
Although the authorities eventually dismissed 11 of the 12 charges based on hyperlinking, in March 2014 he ultimately signed a plea agreement.
This involved him pleading guilty to three crimes: hiding a laptop, which interfered with the execution of a search warrant; threatening an FBI agent; and being an accessory after the fact to unauthorized access to Stratfor’s computers.
Some 48 of the total 63-month sentence was handed down for the FBI threats Brown made, which he has already admitted was a mistake and the result of withdrawing from prescription medication.
Rights group the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) claimed that the threats were also forced by “an extensive government investigation that turned out to be resolved with a relatively light sentence compared to the prison time Brown was facing for the underlying charges related to the Stratfor hack brought by the government.”
“In other words, the substantive criminal charges that brought the force of the federal criminal justice system on Brown ended up being less serious than the charges based on Brown’s reaction to the scrutiny,” it added in a blog post.
“While we're disappointed with the sentence Brown received, we hope everyone takes this sentencing as a clarion call to not only continue the fight for government transparency and press freedom that Brown’s work represents, but to make clear that increasing the criminal penalties and devastating consequences that come with a federal criminal indictment is a bad idea.”
For his part, Brown posted a sarcasm-laden response to the sentencing.
“For the next 35 months, I’ll be provided with free food, clothes, and housing as I seek to expose wrongdoing by Bureau of Prisons officials and staff and otherwise report on news and culture in the world’s greatest prison system,” he said.
“I want to thank the Department of Justice for having put so much time and energy into advocating on my behalf; rather than holding a grudge against me for the two years of work I put into in bringing attention to a DOJ-linked campaign to harass and discredit journalists like Glenn Greenwald, the agency instead labored tirelessly to ensure that I received this very prestigious assignment. Wish me luck!”