Barret Brown Sentenced to 63 Months In Prison For a Link

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Re: Barret Brown Sentenced to 63 Months In Prison For a Link

Postby Luther Blissett » Fri Oct 28, 2016 11:30 am

This is awesome and I've been meaning to post it.

THE BARRETT BROWN REVIEW OF ARTS AND LETTERS AND PRISON
I Am Fully Capable of Entertaining Myself in Prison for Decades If Need Be


Barrett Brown
October 16 2016, 7:00 a.m.
I NEVER REALLY got a chance to play any pen-and-paper role-playing games growing up, so being thrown into a prison system in which such things as Dungeons and Dragons are relatively common constituted one of the silver linings of my 2012 arrest, along with not having to deal with an infestation of those little German roaches that had colonized my kitchen or having to see “World War Z.”

As it happens, I’d actually learned about the prevalence of tabletop games among inmates a few months before my own incarceration, in the days after the FBI first raided both my apartment and my mother’s home in March 2012 and seized laptops and papers without yet making an arrest. As they themselves noted in the search warrant, which the late Michael Hastings published at BuzzFeed, the focus of the investigation was my collaborative journalism outfit Project PM as well as echelon2.org, the online repository where we posted our ongoing findings on the still-mysterious “intelligence contracting” sector (which has since been moved here). The warrant listed HBGary Federal and Endgame Systems — two firms on which we’d focused particular attention — as topics for the FBI’s search. This was revealing. A year prior, a raid by Anonymous on the servers of HBGary had revealed, among other things, the firm’s leading role in a conspiracy by a consortium calling itself Team Themis to conduct an array of covert operations against WikiLeaks and even journalists like Glenn Greenwald, prompting a congressional inquiry that would ultimately be squashed by a Republican committee chairman.

It’s often been reported, incorrectly, that I was the one to reveal the Themis conspiracy, different aspects of which were in fact discovered more or less simultaneously by several parties shortly after HBGary’s emails were made public. My own initial role, which began when I was informed of the hack as it was being conducted, was merely to explain developments to the press. But as it became clear that the media was losing interest despite clear evidence there was much more to the story, I began working with a rotating team of volunteer researchers to determine further details of Themis and related programs by searching through the remaining 70,000 emails that the hackers had seized and following up on the various mysterious references found therein. Although we made a number of significant discoveries and managed to shed light on other matters, the press didn’t generally realize the significance of these things until later.

On the other hand, I did get to indirectly gum up the works at Endgame Systems, which, though one of the four firms involved in Themis’s proposed operations against journalists and activists, managed to avoid being mentioned in most of the press coverage that followed the original exposure of the plot. You see, Endgame’s execs had insisted in one particular email thread that its name never appear in any Themis operational materials, explaining that the nature of the firm’s central activities was such that any public scrutiny would lead to disaster, and that this was a particular concern of their partners. Other emails ended up working against it, though, as I was able to pique the interest of Bloomberg Businessweek by forwarding this hilariously sinister “NO ONE MUST EVER KNOW” exchange to a contact I had there. A few months later, the magazine ran a long feature on Endgame revealing its ability to seize control of computers across the world and that it was offering this service to unknown customers outside of the U.S. government. This in turn prompted sufficient discomfort that the firm had to stop doing this, or at least claim to have stopped. Perhaps that’s why Endgame Systems was listed on my search warrant — and never mentioned again in a single other filing by the government in my case.

But the chief enemy I’d made was apparently the Department of Justice — because when Team Themis was exposed, the emails revealed that the whole indefensible conspiracy had been set in motion by the DOJ itself, which had made the necessary introductions when Bank of America came to the agency looking for advice on how to go after WikiLeaks. There were no known consequences for anyone at the DOJ; a congressman’s calls for an official inquiry were shot down by Lamar Smith, the relevant committee chair, who proclaimed that the DOJ itself should handle any investigation. Whether the DOJ took Smith’s advice and investigated itself for secretly arranging a corporate black ops partnership is unknown. Rather, it was my head that was to roll, in retaliation for my efforts to keep the story alive in articles I continued to write for The Guardian as well as for my occasional successes in causing difficulties to Themis participants like Endgame and the intelligence contracting industry as a whole, which regularly hires ex-government officials at high salaries and thus has a working relationship with most federal agencies. And so when the FBI came for my laptops and left that search warrant listing the entirely legal journalism entity I’d been using to lead an investigation into the state-affiliated firms that the warrant also listed, I knew from the brazenness of this move that I’d eventually be arrested and charged. I didn’t know for what, exactly, but that was OK — the DOJ didn’t know yet either. Eventually they resorted to indicting me on charges related to another firm, Stratfor, that wasn’t even listed on my search warrant, which were so flimsy that they eventually had to be dropped in favor of a vague “accessory after the fact” count.

ANYWHO, AFTER THAT first FBI raid I started reading those little guides on life in prison that one finds online and noticed several references to role-playing games. When I got to the jail unit at Federal Correctional Institution Fort Worth shortly after my arrest, then, I immediately started agitating in favor of a campaign of Dungeons and Dragons or whatever was available, to begin ASAP, with the wooden table in the little corner library to be requisitioned for our use. A huge black guy awaiting trial on complicated fraud charges happened to have the basic mechanics memorized; I drafted him to be the dungeon master. Soon enough I’d also managed to recruit a white meth dealer who was familiar enough with the game to help the rest of us create our characters, a large and bovine Hispanic gangland enforcer who wanted to try the game and was at any rate influential enough to help us secure control over the table, and a fey Southern white guy for atmosphere.

With unlimited paper and pencils provided by the federal government, we had everything we needed except for a set of variously sided dice. It turned out that this was generally handled by making a spinner out of cardboard, a paperclip, and the empty internal plastic tube from an ink pen. This latter item is impaled loosely on the paperclip, itself positioned in the center of the cardboard, on which has been drawn a diminishing series of concentric circles divided into 20, 12, 10, 8, 6, and 4 equal segments, respectively. As we attended to this chore at the wooden table, an inmate sitting nearby realized what we were making and proceeded to tell us about a cell mate he’d had during a previous bid who’d used something similar.

This fellow, he told us, had had some $500,000 in drug profits stashed away on the outside, and it was the prospect of someday being reunited with his money that kept him going. Then one day he learned that his brother had gotten addicted to crack and spent it all. Shattered, the inmate embarked upon an ultra-consumerist fantasy life whereby he pretended to still have the half-million, which he’d “spend” over time by picking things out of catalogues and deducting their prices from his total imaginary assets. He also cut out magazine pictures of attractive women to represent the four girlfriends he could have expected to rate on the outside (based, I suppose, on a calculation of one girlfriend per $125,000). This was where the spinner came in: To endow each girl-picture with a degree of agency he divided the circle into two sections, one signifying “Yes” and the other “No,” so he could ask each in its turn, “Are you going to give me a blowjob today?” The excitement would presumably lie in the uncertainty. When the guy at the table finished telling his tale, I was left in a reflective mood. I knew now that no matter what happened over the years to come, I had to stay alive; I had to survive to tell the world this crazy fucking story.

We began the campaign with our party having just entered a mysterious cavern that appeared to be inhabited. The gamemaster drew out a map for us as our crude little character tokens advanced down the dark, cliché-ridden passages. Coming upon a fountain in which jewels could be seen lying under the surface of the water, our Hispanic gangster/minotaur barbarian proposed to grab some. The team veteran and meth dealer/elven ranger stopped him, dipped in his flask, and, as our gamemaster informed us, watched as it sizzled and melted, the “water” having been acid.

“Whoa,” said the gangster/minotaur, awed at how close he’d just come to losing his forearm. He was beginning to understand that this wasn’t the relatively straightforward world of street-level dope dealing anymore; this was Dungeons and Dragons. Presumably the feds had never attempted to trick him into incinerating his own arm. But then some of these guys had been targeted by the ATF, so you never know.

The gangster/minotaur seemed not to have profited from this reminder of the perils of impulsiveness and greed. An unfortunate incident involving a trap door left our party divided, not unlike the ’68 Democrats. MinoGangster and the pale southern gay guy/human cleric, whom I’ll call Truman Capote, soon came upon a treasure chest that could be unlocked by solving a puzzle. Capote figured it out and opened the lid, revealing a pile of silver pieces and a wand, and then MinoGangster, whom I was beginning to suspect had been ratted out to the feds by his own partners, grabbed up all the contents.

“You better give that back,” hissed Capote.

“Nah, fuck nah.”

So Truman Capote declared that he was attacking MinoGangster with his mace, rolled a critical hit, and slew him right then and there. At the table, the gangster stared down sadly at his little game token as Capote flipped it over on its back to emphasize its deadness.

I’VE NEVER BEEN one for the fantasy genre, but then there exist all sorts of role playing games covering every imaginable setting. For instance, the one time I’d actually gotten to play, when I was 13, a friend’s older brother had led us in a campaign set in the original, gritty comic book version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles universe, except some decades hence after a global nuclear war had mutated many of the world’s animals, who themselves were now organized into an array of polities with names like Dolphin Free State and Prairie Dog Imperium. I played as a mutant roadrunner who wore a bandolier and dual-wielded a pair of cheap, inaccurate submachine guns. When a school full of children was seized and held for ransom by warthog motorcycle bandits, the Sacramento-based Americorp government wisely called upon our team to respond. At one point I ran into the gymnasium at 60 mph, firing wildly and otherwise creating a distraction while one of my friends, a porcupine with a great ax, snuck in through the other door and decapitated the pig chieftain. Afterward, when we received our reward money and sold off all the salvaged weapons, it turned out that we had enough to buy an old bus and install a roof-mounted minigun turret with 360-degree rotation, and I knew then what life could be. Later, recruiting players at various jails and prisons, I’d use this story as a means of generating excitement, spreading out my arms and trotting in a circle while making machine gun noises with my mouth so as to better convey the scene.

Having found Dungeons and Dragons too thematically constraining, I learned of another gaming system that could potentially accommodate my fast-expanding metaphysical ambitions (I was now facing decades’ worth of trumped-up charges, the prosecution was trying to seize money being raised for my defense, and the press still hadn’t figured out that there was something wrong here, so it seemed like a good idea to come up with about 20 years’ worth of activities). GURPS, the Generic Universal Roleplaying System designed back in the 1980s, provides game mechanics for use in any conceivable setting. You could create a bunch of characters based on the Nixon administration, for instance, assigning them stats in accordance with estimates of the abilities of their real-world counterparts — Kissinger gets high Intelligence and Charisma, Colson gets nothing — plus basic skills included in the GURPS book like Acrobatics and Thrown Weapons, which takes care of Howard Hunt right there. You can also create custom skills appropriate for your particular campaign (Textile Tariff Negotiations; Remembering That Everything You’re Saying Right Now Is Being Recorded on the Taping System That You Yourself Installed, Yes, Even the Anti-Semitic Stuff). Give the characters some basic equipment (crowbars, Cuban people) and you’re set; each player picks their favorite staffer, while as always the gamemaster takes on the roles of the hero’s ally characters like Pinochet as well as villains like Daniel Ellsberg.

My problem, as usual, was knowing where to stop. GURPS included rules for RPG staples like magic and psionic powers. Why not make Nixon a necromancer, or more of one, and maybe give G. Gordon Liddy the power to start fires with his mind whenever he thinks fondly of Hitler? And too many comparably awesome ideas were presenting themselves to me each day, such that I never was really able to decide whether to start designing my increasingly elaborate Nixon game or instead do something simpler where Teddy Roosevelt is hunting you for sport. Nor was it 100 percent certain I’d be able to find people willing to play a Nixon administration-based tabletop RPG at that particular federal detention center, even if I were willing to relax the rule about always speaking in your character’s voice, which I wasn’t. Then one day I was shipped to another jail in Mansfield, Texas, and wasn’t allowed to bring my GURPS book or anything else, and so I spent the next year reading history for 10 hours a day in an overcrowded and windowless room.

EVENTUALLY I MADE it back to a prison where I could depend on keeping books and papers for an extended period of time and was able to resume my experiments, which have lately culminated in a highly complex new hybrid medium in which I oversee some 70 fully realized characters as they pursue their blood-soaked vendettas against one another in accordance with the several handwritten pages of primitive, dice-based behavioral heuristics I have devised for them. Their entire world is limited to a map I’ve drawn on graph paper and taped to my wall, their stage confined to my cell’s steel wall-mounted desk on which I have created an elaborate city consisting of dozens and dozens of buildings, vehicles, vending machines, trees, dogs, rats, surveillance drones, and dwarves — a small world, yes, but one of extraordinary depth and intrigue. I make the pieces out of cardboard tea boxes, drawing and then coloring them with very sharp pencils, and I don’t mind saying that I’ve become very good at making itty-bitty tea box people over the last year or so. Indeed, I tend to spend the late evenings hunched over a metal locker, drinking tea and creating new and more elaborate and ever more delightful little city dwellers; it’s a civilized pastime that makes me feel like a cultured Chinese gentleman-scholar. At any rate, it’s certainly a lot more fun than I had on the outside trying to get the newspaper people to do their fucking jobs and follow up on things like Team Themis.

Which reminds me of one more funny story. Aside from HBGary Federal and Endgame Systems and an obscure junior partner firm called Berico, there was one other corporation that completed the Themis private black ops outfit, which, you’ll remember, was caught plotting illegal hacking and disinformation campaigns against journalists and NGOs with the connivance of the DOJ. That firm was Palantir, where at least a half-dozen employees were shown to be involved in Themis by email threads in which the plans were formulated — among them, the firm’s lead counsel, Matthew Long. Another email indicated that Palantir’s CEO was also made aware of Themis. Palantir’s most demonstrably active participant, Matthew Steckman, was put on leave pending an “investigation” into his conduct but he was quietly brought back on after the press lost interest. Today he’s head of business operations and works in D.C. No one was indicted in connection to Themis except for me, and then, later — when I refused to cooperate with law enforcement against other activists — my mother, who was charged with obstruction of justice for moving my laptops to a kitchen cabinet to hide them from the FBI agents who were congregating outside her house, waiting to execute a search warrant on behalf of the government agency that I’d angered with my investigations into the criminal conduct of its corporate partners.

The chairman and co-founder of Palantir is Peter Thiel — the same man who more recently funded the lawsuit that destroyed Gawker, a media outlet that had angered him, and who served as the final speaker at the Republican National Convention. His firm continues to work closely with the U.S. intelligence community.


Quote of the day:

“Bob, please get me the names of the Jews, you know, the big Jewish contributors of the Democrats. … Could we please investigate some of the cocksuckers?”

— Richard Nixon, 1971
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
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Re: Barret Brown Sentenced to 63 Months In Prison For a Link

Postby dada » Fri Oct 28, 2016 9:34 pm

See, now that's a solid bit of writing. In my always correct and humble opinion.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Barret Brown Sentenced to 63 Months In Prison For a Link

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Oct 29, 2016 9:26 pm

It's a heck of a sad story but with defiance and hope in it and I enjoyed it. Thanks.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: Barret Brown Sentenced to 63 Months In Prison For a Link

Postby elfismiles » Fri Nov 04, 2016 9:32 am

So glad to hear he's getting out soon! :yay :sun: :thumbsup

BARRETT BROWN PRISON INTERVIEW - NOV 2016
Image
http://www.spreaker.com/user/kenwebster ... w-nov-2016

Barrett Brown is an award winning journalist who's currently serving time in a Federal prison for sharing a URL on the internet. His "crime" pales in comparison to what Hillary Clinton did, and yet he's in jail while she runs for President. Fortunately Barrett will be released from prison at the end of this month. This is an exclusive interview with Barrett from inside his prison with his thoughts on freedom, the election and the future of Barrett Brown.
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Re: Barret Brown Sentenced to 63 Months In Prison For a Link

Postby NeonLX » Fri Nov 04, 2016 9:56 am

Damn. Some good news for a change! I'm so happy to hear he's going to be free soon. Or at least as free as you can be in this god-forsaken (literally) place. Freedom isn't free, you know.
America is a fucked society because there is no room for essential human dignity. Its all about what you have, not who you are.--Joe Hillshoist
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Re: Barret Brown Sentenced to 63 Months In Prison For a Link

Postby elfismiles » Tue Nov 29, 2016 2:13 pm

He's FREE !!!!!!!
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Re: Barret Brown Sentenced to 63 Months In Prison For a Link

Postby Luther Blissett » Tue Nov 29, 2016 2:47 pm

WTF lol
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Re: Barret Brown Sentenced to 63 Months In Prison For a Link

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Wed Nov 30, 2016 7:02 am

That was a brilliant piece of writing.
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Re: Barret Brown Sentenced to 63 Months In Prison For a Link

Postby elfismiles » Sun Jan 08, 2017 10:49 am

New Podcast: Barrett BrownD Magazine
www.dmagazine.com/frontburner/2017/01/n ... ett-brown/
By Tim Rogers Published in FrontBurner January 6, 2017 12:25 pm
2 days ago - He's been working in our office for a week now. Time to talk.

Some show notes might be nice, but you’re not going to get them for this episode, other than the following: we talked with Barrett Brown. We understood about 60 percent of what he said, some of which concerned life in prison, how inmates get ahold of iPhones, what made him throw up after they released him, what he thinks of Ayn Rand and the coffee in the D Magazine offices, and how he’ll write the book he’s under contract to write (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) without being allowed to use a computer (the current sad state of affairs). Enjoy. Stream it here, or download it with your favorite pod catcher, including iTunes.
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Re: Barret Brown Sentenced to 63 Months In Prison For a Link

Postby Luther Blissett » Tue Mar 21, 2017 5:00 pm

Administrative Remedy
By BARRETT BROWN

The 2.2 million people currently incarcerated in the United States exist in a state of perpetual vulnerability to unchecked administrative power

AT the same moment that my editor took the stage at the National Magazine Awards on February 1 to accept on my behalf the prize in the category of columns and opinion, I was locked down in “the hole” at the medium security federal prison at Three Rivers, Texas. I recently finished a four-year sentence there stemming from my work researching state-corporate surveillance margin-ad-rightpartnerships with the activist group Anonymous, and officially, I was being held in administrative detention status for an “investigation” that had begun five days prior, an hour after I’d done a radio interview from a prison phone, which is not against the rules. Although my subsequent “refusal of an order” to meet in private with prison administrators resulted only in a sentence of two weeks’ restriction of privileges, one of the administrators in question simply told the guards to hold me in the Special Housing Unit regardless, entirely contrary to the law. Repeated lawyer calls to the prison were ignored. Nervous passing guards could tell me nothing about my fate, which itself no longer seemed tethered to any recognizable form of due process. Finally after two weeks, I was released without explanation or apology.

U.S. inmates quickly get used to the fact that the few rights remaining to them can be violated more or less with impunity. The 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act–passed amid a flurry of hard-to-source anecdotes about prisoners suing prisons over absurd and minor grievances–prevents prisoners from being heard in the courts until they’ve first exhausted a given prison’s “administrative remedy” procedure. For inmates in the federal Bureau of Prisons system, that procedure entails filing a BP-8, waiting five days, filing a BP-9, waiting 20 days, then waiting another 20 days if the prison needs more time, sending off a BP-10 to the regional office, waiting 30 days, then waiting another 30 days if the regional office needs more time, then sending off a BP-11 to the national office, waiting 40 days, then waiting another 40 days if the national office needs more time, and then filing in court.

If that was how the process worked in reality, U.S. inmates could at least be said to have a reasonable, if cumbersome, avenue to the courts, as the Constitution requires. But it just so happens that I’ve recently completed a year-and-a-half-long experiment documenting how the system actually operates, having gradually mailed out copies of my filings and receipts as well as the government’s replies and making them all available online via my column at the Intercept.

When my access to the inmate e-mail service was cut off in early 2015, an hour after I’d used it to contact a journalist about wrongdoing within the Bureau of Prisons, I began the administrative remedy process by submitting a written complaint explaining why the move violated not only the bureau’s own stated policy but also potentially federal law. This set off a surreal chain of events in which the prison missed three of its own deadlines for response before finally accusing me of some unspecified “criminal activity.” I could appeal to the regional office, they added, in the event that I was not satisfied with their reply.

At the regional level, a BOP lawyer claimed that I’d missed a deadline, demanded that I get a written note from staff at a prison from which I’d been shipped months prior, required me to reduce my complaint to one single-sided page instead of two, and gave me a deadline for response, including mailing time, that happened to fall on the very next day. When I replied again with a smaller font so as to cram everything onto a single page and prove that the prison had violated its deadlines, not me, and point out that the Bureau of Prisons had given me less than 24 hours to do several inappropriate things and one impossible one, they demanded three extra copies of the note I’d included explaining all that. This time, they gave me a deadline of ten days prior to the day I received it. The administrative remedy procedure, enchanting in its intricacies, was now apparently complete: I would not be heard by a court. Those who argue that they were prevented by prison officials from completing the complaint process tend to find that many of these tricks–missing deadlines, demanding that complainants abide by impossible ones–don’t violate prison policy.

Congress could go a long way toward fixing this climate of due process deprivation by simply updating the original law to require prisons to give inmates the option of filing these grievances electronically, via the limited-use computers to which inmates now generally have access. This way, the complaint procedure automatically proceeds to the next level when deadlines pass. Although nothing would entirely eliminate the tendency of this criminal bureaucracy to do the sorts of things they have done throughout history, an electronic process would potentially end the practices through which prison staff routinely sabotage the complaint process by “losing” forms, logging them in weeks after receipt, or even not giving them out to begin with. The president, who has been so keen on signing executive orders, could implement this policy for federal prisons next week if he’d like, thereby largely disrupting a de facto policy which, given the involvement of high-level Bureau of Prisons officials in these sorts of practices, can only be regarded as an ongoing conspiracy to deprive 200,000 federal inmates of their right to seek redress in the courts.

The 2.2 million people currently incarcerated in the U.S. are almost unique in the Western world: They exist in a state of perpetual vulnerability to unchecked state power, and their physical isolation, combined with widespread failures by prisons in allowing press access (even to the limited extent officially permitted by their stated policies), means that the usual way of generating outrage over injustice–regular and in-depth media coverage–is rarely an option. The men and women this republic incarcerates and forgets need access to the processes by which basic human rights are realized, and then subsequently protected. The American citizenry needs to consider what it says about our society that those rights remain so difficult to establish to begin with.
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Re: Barret Brown Sentenced to 63 Months In Prison For a Link

Postby elfismiles » Thu Apr 27, 2017 3:34 pm

FUCKING FUCKERS!!! :wallhead: :mad2

Formerly Imprisoned Journalist Barrett Brown Taken Back Into Custody Before PBS Interview
Alex Emmons
April 27 2017, 12:59 p.m.

Award-winning journalist Barrett Brown was re-arrested and taken into custody Thursday, the day before he was scheduled to be interviewed for a PBS documentary.

Brown quickly became a symbol of the attack on press freedom after he was arrested in 2012 for reporting he did on the hacked emails of intelligence-contracting firms. Brown wrote about hacked emails that showed the firm Stratfor spying on activists on behalf of corporations. Brown also helped uncover a proposal by intelligence contractors to hack and smear WikiLeaks defenders and progressive activists.

Faced with the possibility of 100 years in prison, Brown pleaded guilty in 2014 to two charges related to obstruction of justice and threatening an FBI agent, and was sentenced to five years and 3 months. In 2016, Brown won a National Magazine Award for his scathing and often hilarious columns in The Intercept, which focused on his life in prison. He was released in November.

Jay Leiderman, Brown’s lawyer, told The Intercept Brown was arrested Thursday during a check-in. According to his mother, Brown had not missed a check-in or failed a drug test since he was released to a halfway house in November. Neither his mother nor lawyer has been informed where he is being held.

According to his mother, who spoke with Brown by phone after his arrest, Brown believes the reason for his re-arrest was a failure to obtain “permission” to give interviews to media organizations. Several weeks ago, Brown was told by his check-in officer that he needed to fill out permission forms before giving interviews.

Since his release, Brown has given numerous interviews, on camera and by phone. But according to his mother, Brown said that the Bureau of Prisons never informed him about a paperwork requirement. When he followed up with his check-in officer, he was given a different form: a liability form for media entering prisons.

Just last week, Brown was interviewed for two days by VICE, and his PBS interview was set for Friday.

Leiderman said he had not been presented with a formal justification for the arrest but was told that it had “to do with failing to abide by BOP restrictions on interviews.”

Leiderman called the impromptu media restrictions “disgusting” and said he believed the arrest was an act of reprisal for criticizing the government. “I would call the people who did this a bunch of chicken-shit assholes that are brutalizing the Constitution,” Leiderman said.

https://theintercept.com/2017/04/27/for ... interview/


ETA...

Barrett Brown Arrested for the Most Ridiculous Reason Ever

The Bureau of Prisons really doesn't like this guy.
By Tim Rogers Published in FrontBurner April 27, 2017 11:44 am
6

Looks like we won’t be getting a City Council report from Barrett Brown anytime soon. This morning he was arrested. After being called in to his halfway house for a drug test, the good folks from the Bureau of Prisons showed up and arrested him. What for? Are you ready for this? They arrested him for giving interviews. Barrett’s mom, with whom he’d been living under home confinement, sends the following note:

Barrett was re-arrested during routine check-in this morning and is being transferred to a BOP facility that is unknown. He has not missed a check-in over the last five months of his early release. He has not failed any of the random drug tests administered. He has been on home confinement status since February and has been home each and every time they called the landline at 1:00 to 2:00 a.m. for “bed check.”

He believes this is only because of his refusal to get “permission” from crews to film and interview him. He has had many interviews since his early release, on November 29, both by phone and in person. Last week VICE had a group in to film him for two days [ed: they filmed a bunch up here at D Magazine headquarters], and he was scheduled to be interviewed tomorrow by a group working on a documentary for PBS.

Ms. Luz Lujan, his BOP contact, refused to provide him with copies of program statement rules saying this is a requirement during halfway house and/or home confinement status. The forms that they finally came up with yesterday, after he had been requesting documentation for the past two weeks, are forms offered to media when requesting a visit with an inmate in a federal prison setting.

There was never any mention of these rules during the past four months of his federally approved employment at D Magazine when he was working with media and involved with a range of interviews.


His mom still has no idea where Barrett was taken. Her guess is that they’ll hold him till May 25, when his original sentence was set to end.

https://www.dmagazine.com/frontburner/2 ... ason-ever/
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Re: Barret Brown Sentenced to 63 Months In Prison For a Link

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Apr 27, 2017 4:58 pm

Nasty mofos.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

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I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: Barret Brown Sentenced to 63 Months In Prison For a Link

Postby PufPuf93 » Thu Apr 27, 2017 5:58 pm

The initial and current arrest indicate that Barrett Brown is a source of accurate and potentially embarrassing information.

Best to Mr. Brown (and Brown Mom and other Brown supporters).
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Re: Barret Brown Sentenced to 63 Months In Prison For a Link

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Apr 30, 2017 5:26 pm

Image
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Barret Brown Sentenced to 63 Months In Prison For a Link

Postby tapitsbo » Mon May 01, 2017 6:22 pm

Interesting that I have family members who have heard of Barret Brown but ONLY as a goony sex-harrasser. They hadn't heard of this shit, and claimed it "uninteresting" :ohwh
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