"On Barrett, Jeremy and Internet Snitches: or, tl;dr a call for people to go the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture in grave concern of inhumane punishment for suspected information criminals"

Regardless of what one may think of the ethics of the acts that Barrett Brown has most recently been accused of, that is, hyperlinking a pastebin dump that contained stolen credit card data from the 2011 LulzXMas hack of Stratfor, the absurd length of the sentence he faces does not fit the bill for the alleged act. The same could be said for Jeremy Hammond's alleged act of performing the hack, but that will be addressed later in this post.

27 years for hyperlinking a post is a message being sent by the US Department of Justice not just to chill the speech of journalists and hacktivists alike, or to set precedent allowing for other similarly absurd “information crime” prosecutions, but also to cover up the FBI's own systemic criminal actions to engage would be criminals in honeypot entrapment actions with informants, in the pertinent cases here: the managing of honeypot carding forums, the use of government contractors such as HBGary in the realm of social engineering. and the use of Lulzsec hacker Sabu for nearly 9 months who engaged in the same dissemination of stolen information that Barrett and Jeremy are being accused of. As a result of the relentless assault on civil liberties and journalism at large that the US Government began right around the time of 9/11, USDOJ has had radically enhanced powers to obfuscate oversight over investigations, including but not limited to indefinite detention, and in general to fail to protect the public from unreasonable investigations and punishments, most notably in regards to intellectual property and data crimes.

To be fair, it seems in the past few years the FBI and DOJ have taken significant baby steps to enforce against civil rights violations and police misconduct, notably inside the NYPD finding a potential cannibal on the force. However, it is like firing a pea shooter at the larger problem, which is the murky world of unscrutinized contractors and lawyers that FBI and DOJ choose to engage with corrupt corporate forces. In the case of Team Themis, whom DOJ referred Paypal, Mastercard and Visa to Hunton and Williams, along with HBGary (social engineering, 0days, malware exploits), Berico (biometric databases for the military), Palantir and Endgame Systems – Team Themis was part of an operation to deprecate, discredit and dissolve for Wikileaks, supporters and most important and dangerously the discrediting of journalists reporting favorably for Wikileaks or the data leaked, in this instance most notably Glenn Greenwald, on behalf of the US Government and corporations with dirty laundry to air. This strikes at the very heart of the Freedom of the Press and is an assault on liberty and the 1st Amendment of the Constitution. We might expect such actions against journalists to be undertaken in Russia, but this is apparently not the case, and if these leaks have shown anything, it's that this sort of thing has been going on for quite a while.

Sabu, aka Hector Xavier Monsegur, plead guilty to hacking HBGary, along with numerous other international governments' websites, and credit card fraud on August 15th 2011, in absolute secrecy from the public. He had been facing up to 124 years in jail, but remains free until sentencing in February of 2013. During his time as secret informant to the FBI, from June of 2011 to March 6th, 2012, all of Sabu's communications and actions were purportedly monitored and approved of by the FBI.

A lot of stuff happened during that time.

After Sabu DM'd me on twitter one day telling me about riots in Austria nobody seemed to be reporting on, I asked him, what's the point of all of this going on?

His reply: "Revolution".

A lot of stuff had happened in Hector's life too. As a person of color who grew up in a family who fell into a cycle of marginalization, drug abuse and neglect by the system, he found himself radically opposed to the status quo of his reality as a teenager, and finding computers as his way of hackting out of it. He defaced Puerto Rican government websites in the 90s solidarity of protests to evict the Vieques Naval Bombing range, and found that his action brought more attention to the cause, which, eventually, was indeed successful, one he gained a reputation for.

What we don't know, however, is how considering the system of marginalization his family faced, how they didn't throw him in jail for an extended time, for credit card fraud and multiple marijuana busts over a pound. What the timeline does indicate though, is that after such a high profile hack of a government contractor, one that one might have considered damaging to national security as to require a brutally swift response, he lived as he would in the East Village of New York City, passing you or I on the subway for the next four months. What we do know, unquestionably, is that it was only when Jennifer Emick famedoxed him with his old dox that had already been out on the internet that the FBI went to his door at the Jacob Riis Houses on Avenue D, at which point, he was told he could work for them or face 124 years in jail. As legal guardian of his two nieces, whose parents were imprisoned, this was not even a choice for a Hector who did not want them to fall into this same cycle. Two months later, Hector pleads guilty in secret in the Southern District of New York courthouse, and for the month until he shows up on our twitter feeds and IRCs the morning of the first day of Occupy Wall Street, radio silence.

Keep in mind here, when Hector was doxed by Jen, in the whitehat frenzy to stop Lulzsec and to be the one who uncovered Sabu's identity, had two kids living with him at the apartment. When the court transcripts of the secret indictments and plea deals were finally made public, one of the primary reasons for the incredible amount of secrecy was the potential of death threats and swatting by people who found Sabu's dox. It wasn't clear any of this actually happened, but the idea was scary enough to convince everyone into a conspiracy of silence... or was it? The idea that the FBI couldn't house Sabu and his kids somewhere secretly safe in the city of New York without being swatted, or even have his cover blown, also, boggles my mind. What could it have possibly been? Could it have been she was subcontracted by HBGary for various social engineering work --- or better yet, 'paid trolling'?

Certainly, something is going on here. And whoever was running this investigation, really doesn't want it to be known Jen Emick (then @fakegregghoush) played a role in doxing someone while recklessly putting kids in danger of a swatting, while being paid by a FBI contractor to do so. The day after Hector's arrest and subsequent flipping informant, @Lulzsec tweeted “Sup Jen Emick this is Sabu. FAILDOX IS FAIL” yet this tweet had been deleted quietly in the 5-6 months prior to my writing this publication. @Lulzsec, which ended with 1333 tweets as a tribute to rapper @Beast1333, now has 1328, missing 5 tweets, at least one was the aforementioned to Jen via the @Lulzsec handle, now closed, presumably either in the hands of the FBI or someone with a 0day exploit to go in there.

Stanley Cohen, at the premiere of We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists, mentioned he saw Hector's aunt some time after Hector's arrest, whom he represented years ago, down in Alphabet City. She asked him: “WHAT IS THIS ANONYMOUS SHIT?!”. This becomes important later, as Stanley is facing the good ol' trumped up tax evasion charge, historically thrown at people the feds don't like but whom have absolutely no other way to silence, as Stanley, who represents Hamas pro bono, whose flag Sabu sported as an avatar for some time, both share the same views that Hamas was the democratically elected government of Gaza in elections that both America and Israel sanctioned in 2006.

There was also a Facebook group called EPIC., which held priceless screenshots of informant Sabu as @Lulzsec trolling Jen Emick, along with Google street view photos of Aaron Barr's house across the street from CIA Headquarters in Langley, the group, which, a priceless repository of evidence and history of memes, just removed from the net without any explanation.

Right about the time Jen Emick doxes Sabu, he decides he is going to restart the old Antisec. Back in the 90s, Anti-Security was a group whose ethics revolved around the nondisclosure of web exploits. Most people who aren't drowning in computers and code and the community that surrounds it haven't been around this long to remember this; the new Anti-Security/Antisec, lead by FBI informant Sabu, disclosed and promoted seemingly as much of police & contractors restricted information as humanly possible, zining entire police departments, and dropping mail spools every #FuckFBIFriday.

I knew something weird was going on when Sabu started promoting these hacks. Like, they still haven't caught this guy? LOL! His twitter vernacular, though, screamed that he was from somewhere in the NYC. I was meandering around in #antisec a few days just to see what the hell it was about, then left.

Then one day that July, right when I started getting really interested in ProjectPM having made real headway in promoting awareness of human rights issues in the Middle East in part being propagated by a callous foreign policy arming dictators with weapons, I get a twitter DM from him, Hamas flag logo: “sup, I saw you on IRC”.

Oh shit.

I had really no idea what I was getting myself into, but someone had to try to try to figure it out. Red pill, obviously. Not even a thought.

Something kept telling me fed. He had to be, right? No way this guy could be that feared, and get away with the hacks he was involved in, and no way actual hackers doing these things would publicly associated with him without being found out, but I guess I was wrong. Maybe this is what “they” wanted. Maybe I also briefly entertained the notion Sabu was actually Barack Obama, trolling the internet with executive impunity while he was in the Oval Office, because there was no way he could do this without being on someone's leash. It was funny how much skiddies looked up to him like a god, but there was way more than meets the eye of this puzzle.

Barrett, as public spokesperson for Anonymous and intrepid journalist, did not come off as fed either, but rather a caricature of the a trailblazer of gonzo journalism, not being afraid in any situation to piss anybody off, or spoil a military contractor's well-laid plans in the best interests of the public. Having not having any prior interactions with Barrett, I found it so absolutely fascinating the disdain people had for him, both in and out of Anonymous. I would learn this in person at the We Are Legion movie premiere when Barrett got the most vicious hisses and boos than anyone in the movie. Barrett, like Hector, had a family who had been subjected to quite a bit of harassment by the FBI, after having lived in a far flung locale like Tanzania. It's still not clear to me exactly what the subject of of the harassment prior to Barrett's involvement in creating ProjectPM, though after the March 2012 raid at Barrett's apartment, which occurred immediately after Sabu's outing as a federal informant and Jeremy Hammond's arrest, that Barrett's mother had been subject to some degree of treatment by the FBI that Barrett took great offense to, in addition to having his computers and hard drives taken for an indefinite period of time which kept him from working on his Anonymous book with Gregg Housh. In the time since the raid, the FBI has not made it known exactly what they were looking for other than records pertaining to many of the companies that ProjectPM was seeking to investigate.

Now, along came Jeremy Hammond, accused of being the hacker of Stratfor, was the one who allegedly went to Sabu first about being “knee-deep” in it. Rather than immediately notify Stratfor to take their servers offline to stop the intrusion, the FBI while using Sabu (because they said that every post and communication of Hector's was monitored) decide to allow the hack to continue unabated, as informant Sabu provided hosting services to store Stratfor's stolen data, which ended up in the hands of Wikileaks amazingly enough. By either utter gross incompetence or their design, the FBI failed to stop one of the biggest hacks and leaks in history when they had the opportunity to do so, and the news of the hack is so newsworthy that Barrett Brown goes and reports the matter to the world by posting a hyperlink to text that just happened to contain credit cards stored in plaintext, in violation of credit card industry regulations, and email addresses of thousands of individuals who used the Stratfor service including very prominent and powerful people. So now, instead of just a failed hack with one singular entity as victim, the FBI can claim thousands of victims in this hack by virtue of the fact that their emails or card numbers were posted, as the Department of Justice successfully argued in USA v. Andrew Auernheimer that weev of Goatse Security made victims of hundreds of thousands of people simply by publishing email addresses from a public server. Even from the Stratfor email hack itself, there are troves of correspondence between Stratfor and the FBI, including Fred Burton himself having a talk to pimp his book Chasing Ghosts to Infragard San Antonio. Conflict of interest, or shameless propagandizing, perhaps?

While the hack of Stratfor is indeed ethically indefensible, and I challenge the reader to assert otherwise if they can, the punishments that Barrett Brown and Jeremy Hammond are facing for their involvement in the Stratfor hack – 27 and 39 to life, respectively -- are even more ethically indefensible as violent criminals, rapists, pedophiles, murderers, banker thieves and war criminals routinely face less time or no prosecution at all for their actions – to say nothing of the sentences Mercedes Haefer, Josh Covelli and others are facing for their alleged DDoS of Paypal. The punishments being considered are also ethically indefensible, as if the FBI had done their job properly, these sentences would never had to have even been considered in the first place. Even more indefensible was the very public use of Sabu as a federal informant, whom like so many other federal informants, engaged in behavior to incite crimes, from simple real world vandalism to fighting back against police officers “using any means necessary”, or going to war with .il (Israel) while sporting a Hamas flag. It was also no coincidence that the moment Sabu reappeared on twitter and IRC chats from his monthlong post-secret-guilty-plea absence the morning of September 17th, 2011 that IRC chans from Indymedia, ProjectPM, Anonops and several others were merged into one large room numbering in the hundreds to begin work on Occupy Wall Street.

Not surprisingly, the FBI refused all FOIAs related to their involvement in Occupy Wall Street, on “National Security grounds”.

The problem is pretty clear for those who have been paying attention: for years our law enforcement authorities, and most specifically the FBI, have largely been held unaccountable in their use of informants, which have shown a clear pattern to create criminals out of people who would not have otherwise chosen to engage in crime. Whether it the use of an informant to pressure anarchist protesters to make molotov cocktails at the 2008 Republican National Convention, or convincing some Muslims who were not all there psychologically to attempt to bomb a synagogue, or to set up carding forums, or having Neonazi informants spew hate on talk radio, they have created crimes to prosecute and much more problems for which people will still scream Fuck The FBI when they hear of them.

Even more dangerous, in this pursuit of justice, which seems to trace back to the government's obsessive handling of Bradley Manning and Wikileaks, the Justice Department's seeking of precedent to make it easy to convict dissidents and anybody they so please through the publishing of emails or hyperlinking to stolen information. Contrast this with Justice Department's willingness to allow banks like Wells Fargo and HSBC to negotiate their terms of punishment for laundering billions of dollars for murderous drug cartels and it is pretty obvious something is very, very wrong here. Not to give them any ideas, but any journalist should be rightfully concerned that viewing or linking to a Wikileaks Cable could possibly subject them to criminal prosecution, rendition or indefinite detention at the hands of our government.

The madness must stop. It might be too much to ask, but to demand the Justice Department's Inspector General to have a glasnost of sorts to bring light to the nature of the use of informants – in particular, Sabu – social engineering, hacking and the ubiquitous surveillance state to bring accountability to the enforcement of a just rule of law is the least I can ask for. But for Jeremy and Barrett, who face nearly a lifetime in jail for alleged computer crimes, they do so while far worse actors face less time. I am also urgently calling on the United Nations Human Rights Special Rapporteur on Torture to fully examine the United States' actions in their pursuance of the prosecution of computer crimes and the incredible punishments being discussed for Barrett Brown and Jeremy Hammond, in the scope of the torturous pretrial punishment that Bradley Manning has had to endure for allegations of the same scope and nature. In particular for Barrett Brown, as his research and activism has been invaluable to uncovering systematic human rights abuses around the globe perpetrated in the name of weapons manufacturers and public relations companies from United States to regimes with deep pockets in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, amongst many others. The wildly vindictive prosecutions and punishments proposed for Barrett Brown and Jeremy Hammond, if gone unaddressed, will cast a pall on journalism and information activism the world over for decades to come.

Happy 12.21.12! 13.0.0.0 from #ProjectPM!