KAUFMAN COUNTY, Texas — 33-year-old Barrett Brown, a self-described advocate of hacktivist group Anonymous and free-lance journalist, was sentenced to 63 months in prison by U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay on Thursday stemming from a threat on an FBI agent and a cyber attack on Austin-based Stratfor.
KAUFMAN COUNTY, Texas — 33-year-old Barrett Brown, a self-described advocate of hacktivist group Anonymous and free-lance journalist, was sentenced to 63 months in prison by U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay on Thursday stemming from a threat on an FBI agent and a cyber attack on Austin-based Stratfor.
Brown, who has been held at the Kaufman County Jail since December 2014 when he was transferred from the Federal Correctional Institution in Seagoville, Texas, was arrested in 2012 after threatening a Federal Bureau of Investigations agent in a YouTube video. Months later, Brown was indicted on 12 charges of allegedly trafficking in stolen authentication features, access device fraud, and aggravated identity theft — facing 105 years in prison.
After a plea agreement last year, Brown of Dallas, Texas, faced eight and a half years in prison for reduced charges of transmitting a threat in interstate commerce by posting a YouTube video threatening an FBI agent, accessory after the fact in the unauthorized access to a protected computer, and inference with the execution of a search warrant and aid and abet after hiding his laptops before an FBI raid.
U.S. District Judge Lindsay sentenced Brown to 63 months in prison with time served, which has been 31 months, and ordered him to pay more than $890,000 in restitution and fines.
In 2012, Brown’s case drew international attention after he was indicted for posting a hyperlink in a chatroom to stolen data from an Anonymous hack on Stratfor.
“Brown transferred a hyperlink from an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel to an IRC channel under his control. That hyperlink provided access to data stolen from the company Stratfor Global Intelligence (Stratfor), which included more than 5,000 credit card account numbers, the card holders’ identification information and the authentication features for the credit cards, known as the Card Verification Values (CVV),” according to a U.S. Department of Justice release in 2012.
Jeremy Hammond, an Anonymous hacker who actually carried out the hack on Stratfor, was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Brown had offered to be an intermediary between Anonymous and Stratfor to redact sensitive information obtained from the hack.
Brown, who has previously written for the Guardian, Vanity Fair, Huffington Post and currently has a column in Dallas’ D Magazine, called the YouTube video “idiotic” and said he should not have hid his laptops prior to an FBI raid of his mother’s Dallas-area home.
“The fact that the government has still asked you to punish me for that link is proof, if any more were needed, that those of us who advocate against secrecy are to be pursued without regard for the rule of law, or even common decency,” Brown stated in a prepared sentencing statement to be read during today’s proceedings.
