The lawyer for Barrett Brown, the activist-journalist in jail in Texas on charges related to his involvement with computer hackers, has called for an overhaul in the way technology cases are handled by the criminal justice system to counteract potential abuses and excessive prosecutorial aggression on the part of the US government.



In his first substantive comments since a gagging order on Brown and his legal team was lifted last week, Ahmed Ghappour told the Guardian that in his opinion, the US government had tried to "kill a fly with a sledgehammer”. He accused prosecutors of imposing overly broad charges that had put unnecessary strain on the system, had profound personal implications for Brown who has been in custody for more than 500 days, and sent a chill across public debate.

“There needs to be discussion about how we avoid this kind of prosecutorial overreach in future. Prosecutors need to be more cautious in how they deal with complex cases like these to make sure the charges better reflect the conduct described, otherwise the effect is chilling to free speech,” Ghappour said.

He added: “The government’s original allegations did not fit the evidence, or the conduct, character or reputation of Barrett Brown.”

Last month the US government dropped 11 of the 17 counts it had brought against Brown, who faces three separate indictments. The dismissed allegations all related to a breach of the website of the private intelligence firm Stratfor that was carried out in 2011 by the hacking collective Anonymous.

The main instigator of the hack, Jeremy Hammond, was sentenced to 10 years in prison last November.

Brown was charged, most notoriously, with transferring stolen property, because he had posted a hyperlink on his own personal chat room, Project PM, to a website containing the hacked Stratfor material. Technology commentators warned that such a prosecution posed a threat to free speech on the internet because it raised a barrier to linking across sites on which so much of the culture of the web is based.

A day after Ghappour and the defence team filed a motion to dismiss those charges, the prosecution rolled over without explanation and dropped them.

“The government had no choice to drop the charges because they contained errors that were so wide of the mark they could not be put right by re-indicting him,” Ghappour said.

In a document released after the gagging order was lifted, the precise nature of Brown’s involvement with Anonymous over the Stratfor hack has been revealed. Paradoxically, far from attempting to commit fraud or to profit personally from the computer breach, Brown offered to contact the CEO of Stratfor to ask him whether the company wanted any redactions to be made in the hacked material before it was posted.

The document, which signed by both Brown and US attorney Sarah Saldana as a truthful account of events, quotes from internet chats between the journalist and the Anonymous hacker who carried out the Stratfor breach, named only as “O”. Brown writes to the hacker: “It occurred to me that it might be a good idea to tell Stratfor that you guys will consider making any reasonable redactions to emails that might endanger, say, activists living under dictatorships with whom they might have spoken… If they fail to cooperate, it will be on them if any claims are made about this yield endangering anyone”.

Ghappour told the Guardian that he found it ironic that the government had accused Brown of something so vastly different from what he actually did. “The government charged Brown with criminally transferring credit card information, when in fact what he did was to offer to redact sensitive material.”

The lawyer, a former computer engineer with considerable experience in super-computers, and who now teaches at the University of Texas law school, said hacking cases and other prosecutions involving new technology were so complex that grand juries and attorneys alike were often bamboozled by the evidence. “That makes the potential for abuse by the government much greater, so safeguards have to be better established.”

Brown will appear on court on Tuesday to plead guilty to all the remaining charges against him. The charges include: acting as an accessory after the fact to the Stratfor hack, threatening an FBI agent in a YouTube video, and interfering with a law enforcement officer serving a warrant on him.

The charges carry a maximum punishment of more than eight years, but Brown’s legal team will argue that the sentences should run concurrently and that given the insubstantial damage caused by the YouTube video, he should be released on time served. “Barrett expresses deep regret for what he did in making the threat, which he did impulsively at a time when he felt cornered and was unable to make rational decisions,” Ghappour said.