A federal judge put a gag order on jailed journalist Barrett Brown and his lawyers to stop his articles and criticism of the “cyber-industrial complex. ” Brown is charged with threatening an FBI agent, obstructing justice and trafficking in stolen card information. He was arrested last September after an investigation into his reports about e-mails hacked by Anonymous from the private security firm HB Gary and published on Wikileaks. It was the U.S. attorney’s contention that part of the hacked documents were credit-card numbers which under the law is illegal to “possess with intent to use unlawfully or transfer unlawfully.” (Daily Caller, September 4, 2013, by Brendan Bordelon)
Geoffrey King of the Committee to Protect Journalists, September 3, 2013, thinks that the government has overstepped in the case, “By the U.S. government’s theory, journalists can be held criminally liable merely for linking to a publicly-available file that contains sensitive information, whether or not they had any part in actually obtaining the data in the first place. This theory threatens the nature of the Web, as well as the ethical duty of journalists to verify and report the truth.”
Mathew Ingram of GigaOM, September 4, 2013, also thinks it’s an outrage for someone to face extended prison time for posting a link of information already in the public domain. He argues that a link does not constitute possession or illegal transfer.
David Carr, The New York Times, September 9, 2013, thinks that the charges against Brown that could result in over a 100 years jail time reflect the Obama administration’s determination to maintain secrecy whatever it takes. “In public statements since his arrest, Mr. Brown has acknowledged that he made some bad choices [including threatening an FBI agent and his children]. But punishment needs to fit the crime and in this instance, much of what has Mr. Brown staring at a century behind bars seems on the right side of the law, beginning with the First Amendment of the Constitution,” wrote Carr.