You're probably not familiar with Barrett Brown.
As news coverage of surveillance, internet intrusion and the government's intense battle against privacy and privileged communications seeps into the public consciousness, Julian Assange, Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning and Edward Snowden are almost household terms. But Brown's case and the implications that flow from it are seldom reported and, as a result, not well known.
That is itself a crime. The Texas-based journalist is sitting in jail awaiting trial on three different indictments and facing a sentence of over a century if convicted in a case that is so outrageous and frightening that it rivals the cases and plights of those better-known information distributors.
Brown is being charged, essentially, with doing something everyone (including myself right now) does on the Internet: he posted a link [1].
The Brown case raises all kinds of issues around freedom of expression and information but, perhaps most importantly, it uncovers a deeper and more dangerous aspect of the Obama Administration's information policy. Brown's case illustrates that, in addition to targeting the use of the Internet for spreading information, it is targeting the very act of information distribution. That includes the work that journalists routinely do but it also includes the information sharing you and I do on the Internet almost as a reflex.
It also reveals a world the government definitely doesn't want you to know about: the murky, possibly sometimes illegal, world of inter-connection between the government and a network of secretive information and cyber-security companies. That was the world Brown broke into and that, in the end, is probably his "crime". Full story...
Related posts:
As news coverage of surveillance, internet intrusion and the government's intense battle against privacy and privileged communications seeps into the public consciousness, Julian Assange, Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning and Edward Snowden are almost household terms. But Brown's case and the implications that flow from it are seldom reported and, as a result, not well known.
That is itself a crime. The Texas-based journalist is sitting in jail awaiting trial on three different indictments and facing a sentence of over a century if convicted in a case that is so outrageous and frightening that it rivals the cases and plights of those better-known information distributors.
Brown is being charged, essentially, with doing something everyone (including myself right now) does on the Internet: he posted a link [1].
The Brown case raises all kinds of issues around freedom of expression and information but, perhaps most importantly, it uncovers a deeper and more dangerous aspect of the Obama Administration's information policy. Brown's case illustrates that, in addition to targeting the use of the Internet for spreading information, it is targeting the very act of information distribution. That includes the work that journalists routinely do but it also includes the information sharing you and I do on the Internet almost as a reflex.
It also reveals a world the government definitely doesn't want you to know about: the murky, possibly sometimes illegal, world of inter-connection between the government and a network of secretive information and cyber-security companies. That was the world Brown broke into and that, in the end, is probably his "crime". Full story...
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