U.S. prosecutors decided Wednesday not to pursue crucial criminal charges against journalist and activist Barrett Brown, specifically, accusations that Brown pasted a hyperlink containing hacked information into a chat room.
Brown, 32, had faced potentially 100 years in prison after his September 2012 arrest on charges related to threatening an FBI agent, obstructing justice and hyperlinking to stolen information online. On Wednesday, federal prosecutor Sarah R. Saldaña filed a motion to dismiss 11 of the 17 charges against Brown, which related to hyperlinking.
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The controversial linking charges came after a highly publicized operation by hacktivist group Anonymous. In late 2011, Anonymous hacked Strategic Forecasting, Inc., better known as Stratfor, and stole thousands of consumers' credit card information.
Brown, a known associate of Anonymous, allegedly copied a hyperlink to a webpage containing the stolen data from an "#Anonops" chat room and posted it in another chat room for Project PM, a wiki Brown founded for reporting and publishing information on the intelligence contracting industry. The government charged Brown with trafficking stolen credit card information and multiple counts of aggravated identity theft, though it did not accuse Brown of actually stealing the data.
"I haven't seen anything quite like this, and that's what made it really troublesome," Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Mashable.
Though Brown was known as an activist and a rumored provocateur, Fakhoury said that in the context of the criminal hyperlinking allegations, Brown was "pretty clearly a journalist and was clearly doing political reporting."
"The government's theory was very, very dangerous to any sort of collaborative journalism or sharing of information, generally," Geoffrey King, Internet advocacy coordinator for the Society to Protect Journalists, told Mashable. "It's a welcome development that they dismissed those counts."
King has previously argued that the linking charges against Brown threatened both the fabric of the web and the "ethical duty of journalists to verify and report the truth."
Brown's case has been a hot-button issue among Internet activists. It even earned a shoutout in season two of House of Cards, when a character playing a hacker tried to strong-arm an FBI agent into dropping charges against Brown.
The government filed its motion to dismiss the charges just after Brown's defense team filed its own motion to dismiss Wednesday, arguing the government's charges related to the link-sharing are unconstitutionally broad and "in violation of the First Amendment."
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas in Dallas, where Brown is being held, declined to comment further on the government's decision to drop the charges.
The development will knock 35 years off Brown's possible maximum sentence, but he still faces up to 70 years in prison. Brown has two trials scheduled for April 28 and May 19, respectively.
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