A federal judge's five-year prison sentence for a freelance journalist who linked to documents obtained by hackers is raising questions about the roles of and protections for journalists in a digital age.

Barrett Brown was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Dallas to 63 months in prison and ordered to pay about $900,000 in restitution Thursday on charges stemming from the incident, in which he posted a hyperlink in his reporting to information obtained by the Anonymous collective in a 2011 hack of intelligence contractor Stratfor.

Brown pleaded guilty in April to a federal charge of assisting the hackers after the fact, along with two other charges that resulted from his subsequently obstructing the execution of a search warrant and threatening an FBI agent on YouTube. Arrested in September 2012, Brown has been jailed already for two years and will have that time deducted from his term.

But critics of the sentence, including Brown himself, say he has done nothing that many mainstream journalists haven't also done in their work and that he is being persecuted because he does not have the protection of a large media organization. Reporters for outlets like the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Guardian, for example, have not faced the same prosecution efforts from the government for their part in publishing documents stolen from the National Security Agency by former contractor Edward Snowden.

“The government asserts that I am not a journalist and thus unable to claim the First Amendment protections guaranteed to those engaged in information-gathering activities,” Brown wrote in a prepared statement he planned to deliver before the judge at his sentencing. “If I am not a journalist, then there are many, many people out there who are also not journalists, without being aware of it, and who are thus as much at risk as I am.”

The government's charges suggested that Brown, often described as an advocate for Anonymous, went further than simply collect information, accusing him in court papers of working to "conceal the involvement and the identity" of the hacker, to "create confusion" about what had been done and of communicating with the company that had been targeted in a manner that "diverted attention away from the hacker." Anonymous, a collective of loosely connected groups, engages in activities ranging from online protest against big business to stealing and disclosing data. Some members of the collective have been jailed for cybersecurity violations.

Brown’s five-year sentence also places a spotlight on new criminal statutes being drafted for cybersecurity. President Barack Obama has promised to support cybersecurity reform that would both expand authority to prosecute online crimes and adjust penalties for computer crimes to ensure “insignificant conduct does not fall within the scope of the statute.”

Penalties for hacker crime outlined by the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act have been criticized by members of Congress, including Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who has called for reform of the law. The charges against Brown, for instance, could have resulted in more than 100 years in prison.

The ruling also comes after Obama’s recently called for police to stop “arresting journalists who are just trying to do their jobs” — comments made in the wake of complaints that authorities harassed journalists reporting on protests in Ferguson, Missouri.

During the past two years press freedom groups, including the Committee to Protect Journalists, have called Brown's case a dangerous precedent for online reporting.