On Friday, a federal grand jury in Dallas indicted Barrett Brown, a former self-proclaimed Anonymous spokesperson, for trafficking “stolen authentication features,” as well as "access device fraud" and “aggravated identity theft.” Brown has been detained since he was arrested in September for allegedly threatening a federal agent.

10 counts of the 12 count indictment concern the aggravated identity theft charge (the indictment references 10 people from whom Brown is alleged to have stolen information), but the most interesting charge is probably the first; a single count saying Brown, “did knowingly traffic in more than five authentication features knowing that such features were stolen and produced without lawful authority.” But rather than a physical back-alley hand-off, this alleged trafficking happened online when Barrett transferred a hyperlink, “from the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel called '#Anonops' to an IRC channel under Brown's control, called '#ProjectPM.'”

That hyperlink happened to include over 5,000 credit card numbers, associating Ids, and Card Verification Values (CVVs) from the Stratfor Global Intelligence database.

Brown acted as the public face of Anonymous during its rise to fame, but he left the group in May 2011, telling Ars, “There's little quality control in a movement like that, which was not a huge problem when the emphasis was on assisting with North African revolutions and those who came on board thus tended to be of a certain sort. But as things like OpSony [a May 2011 hack of Sony's PlayStation Network] arise, you attract a lot of people whose interest is in fucking with video game companies.”

In September, Brown was arrested by FBI just hours after he posted a YouTube video called “Why I'm Going to Destroy FBI Agent Robert Smith.” If convicted of these latest charges, the US Attorney's Office in the Northern District of Texas says that Brown faces maximum sentences of 15 years for the trafficking charge, 10 years for the device fraud charge, and a 2 year sentence for each of the identity theft counts, "in addition to any sentence imposed on the trafficking count."