This is a federal case, and the Federal Sentencing Guidelines (while now discretionary, see Booker) simply don't work that way. 100 years is the potential maximum he would get if the sentences were served consecutively, but at the federal level, there must be special circumstances to justify imposing consecutive sentences. Consequently, consecutive sentencing is the exception, not the rule, and is almost exclusively reserved for the most heinous crimes, i.e., rapes, murders, or high-level drug offenses. (Note that certain factors can also result in consecutive sentences, such as gun "enhancements" which can add 5-25 years to a base sentence.)
Edit: The above assumes the case even proceeds to the sentencing stage. Several US courts have already ruled that merely hyperlinking is not enough; there must be an additional circumstance to make the hyperlinking illegal. For example, if the information hyperlinked was clearly intended to be protected or private (i.e., Schwartz and the AT&T subscriber data), then dissemination of links could fall within the meaning of one or more statutes for unauthorized access.
A physical analogy to explain why this matters: a URL isn't simply an address; it is a path, and this makes all the difference. A p.o. address, for example, may tell you how to get to someone's apartment but it wouldn't tell you how to get up there if the front door is locked. A URL is more akin to giving someone an address and telling them how to get inside. (And for you nitpickers, in this example also assume that you don't know the person at this address; you simply know the URL.)
Why did it become socially acceptable for prosecutors to throw around 100-year threats, though? It seems like the only reason that's not a crime is because they're the legal system.
Maybe there should be a limit on the span between maximum threat and minimum sentence, so that 100-year threats can't be thrown around unless the minimum plea is at least 5-10 years. That would make a prosecutor hesitate to employ such a powerful weapon, because the defendant would be more willing go to trial in that scenario, which reduces their chances of landing that conviction.
It's not, and they don't. For non-heinous crimes (i.e., crimes that aren't rape or murder) prosecutors threaten the maximum sentence for the "worst" crime charged, and only that number, because any competent defense attorney would immediately let their client know that sentences wouldn't be served consecutively. This is true in most, but not all states as well. (For heinous crimes, the consecutive sentences don't matter; the defendant has already received a life sentence and the additional years are meaningless.)
This is also a legal ethics issue, since a prosecutor who fraudulently claims a higher maximum penalty during plea bargaining can be suspended or disbarred. Cops can lie to you--prosecutor's can't. They have sworn an oath (to the bar) to be honest in their legal representations. Prosecutors have been sanctioned, suspended, and even disbarred for being dishonest about sentencing because such dishonesty indicates moral turpitude that likely extends into other facets of their legal work.
It's the media that throws around the 100-year numbers by adding together all of the potential individual sentences. It turns out that journalists aren't very good at understanding technology, science, or the law.
By all indication anything relating to computers, hacking or security research is considered one of the "worst" crimes in the USA.
Hackers seem to be getting longer sentences then career criminals these days.
"When it comes to computers we must punish severely because it's magical and we don't understand it." is the view all non IT literate politicians and lawyers seem to have.
Yeah, sorry to be 'that guy', but if there ever was a case of 'citation needed', this is it. Please don't get caught up in the bubble of HN/Reddit legal reporting, as it is all very myopic and biased, and a lot of it is plain wrong. Getting your information on legal issues from HN/Reddit is like getting your information on jews from Stormfront.
That's exactly my point - two cases that made the front page on two nerd sites doesn't substantiate the claim that
"By all indication anything relating to computers, hacking or security research is considered one of the "worst" crimes in the USA. Hackers seem to be getting longer sentences then career criminals these days."
The mere fact that there are just two such cases, and that everybody recites the same two cases when making such gross exaggerations as the one above, reinforces my point about living in an echo chamber.
This is only my opinion given there's always some person in the news facing dozens of years in prison for something as simple as sharing a link.
I can't be bothered to search for other similar articles I'm sure you can find them.
Now that quote is the internal monolog I imagine given the actions these people take. It may not be completely accurate or even real but it certainly fits.
If you can come up with a better explanation why the sentences for computer related crimes are so absurdly high I would gladly listen.
I don't really care much for the legal issues the law is just so complex that you can pull off a lot of horrendous shit while perfectly justifying it legally.
If you're a judge that just goes by the letter of the law without applying common sense and morality you have failed.
Can you empathize with how frustrating your posts are to somebody like me who actually knows a thing or two about law? Look, I assume you are generally an intelligent person who is capable of understanding some abstract things, given that you likely know to program since you're on this site. But your argument is Fox News level arguing:
- "my opinion..."
- "can't be bothered to search..."
- "I don't really care much for the legal issues, the law is just so complex..."
You know (by your own admittance) nothing of the underlying issues, yet you have a (somewhat) strong opinion on them based on your "feelings" and what your read left and right, and you have a completely warped view of reality on the facts in these issues. What does it take to convince you otherwise, without me having to spend hours compiling numbers or writing pages and pages of text? Is it enough to mention three-strike laws, which put people away for other offenses for decades for relatively minor property crimes? Or the explanations brought up elsewhere in this thread on the actual sentence in this case? I mean basically you're asking me to argue the 'why' for things that are plain not true.
Hey no taking my statement out of context. You make it sound like I don't understand it however what I'm saying is that it's so complex it's broken.
When you can charge anybody with a crime regardless of what they are doing something is wrong.
The fact that this "exception" and many others like it are allowed to progress this far is quite problematic regardless since not all "exceptions" get reported on by the press this extensively and it takes only one precedent to ruin it for everybody.
I would just like to note that the DOJ prosecutors in their press release for the indictment, have indeed touted the maximums, as well as mandatory two-year sentences on each of the aggravated identity theft counts.
"Upon conviction, however, the trafficking count carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison and the access device fraud count carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. Each of the aggravated identity theft counts, upon conviction, carries a mandatory two-year sentence in addition to any sentence imposed on the trafficking count."
They don't add up the numbers to get 100 years, some reporter did that. They give the maximum penalties for each count, which gives an ides of the maximum he could get depending on which counts he's convicted of. They don't mean for you to add them all together, but to know that e.g. he could get 2 years if convicted only of the least serious offense, but up to 15 if convicted of the most serious.
In this case it is accurate to say he faces up to 45 years for linking, because the statutes that are charged mandate consecutive sentencing. Concurrent sentences are allowed at the court's discretion "only with another term of imprisonment that is imposed by the court at the same time on that person for an additional violation" of the same statute.
1028 does not mandate consecutive sentences. Note that 1028 is also the "base" offense, i.e., the actual felony. That means the first 3 charges yield a potential maximum sentence of 45 years, but more likely 3 simultaneous sentences of 15 years.
1028A is the "enhancement" charge, which is why it must be served consecutively to the base offense on which they are levied. However, the enhancements themselves can be served concurrently. This means the potential enhancement sentence is anywhere from 2 years to 18 years.
This may be too complicated to explain in a brief HN comment, but an enhancement to one charge can be served consecutively to another charge because the concurrency prohibition is specific to the underlying offense. (I.e., if he gets 10 years for Count 1, but 8 years concurrently plus a 2 year enhancement for Count 2, he can serve both 10 year terms concurrently because the enhancement doesn't extend the sentence for count 1).
To follow up to ageisp0lis's post (which is apparently now deleted, but linked to http://www.dmlp.org/blog/2013/adding-105-charges-against-bar...), the reasoning behind the 100-year number is: (1) that is the total maximum possible sentence assuming consecutive terms, and (2) it includes 2 other cases against him, not just the Stratfor case.
My comments on this thread only discuss the Stratfor case, which is the second indictment of the 3 discussed by the DMLP article ageisp0lis linked.
Going to sleep before the response link to your reply goes active, so here's my response:
Is it true to say "no one really knows precisely how much of a threat he's facing"? The justice system is usually precise, so it seems odd that a precise maximum can't readily be found in this case. Do you think the maximum is probably more than 10 years?
Yes, if he is found guilty. No, if he pleads. However, I heartily disagree that the justice system is precise. It's very messy, and two defendants with the exact same facts can get widely disparate sentences. A recent study from 2012 or 2013 revealed that judges were more likely to give harsh sentences after lunch than before lunch (controlling for race, criminal history, and other factors).
1028 imposes a maximum sentence of 15 years for the gravest crime listed in the statute. Assuming he is found (or pleads guilty) this yields a likely maximum sentence of 17 years, or a potential maximum sentence of no more than 33 years.
Does this seem excessive?
Yes since the crime is relatively non-serious compared to something like drug dealing or aggravated assault, and especially since our financial system already protects credit card holders. Hell, even violent robbery with a first-time gun enhancement can have a lower maximum potential sentence than 33 years.
Is it true to say "no one really knows precisely how much of a threat he's facing"? The justice system is usually precise, so it seems odd that a precise maximum can't readily be found in this case. Do you think the maximum is probably more than 10 years?
EDIT: I see you've run the numbers in your other comment, sorry:
1028 imposes a maximum sentence of 15 years for the gravest crime listed in the statute. Assuming he is found (or pleads guilty) this yields a likely maximum sentence of 17 years, or a potential maximum sentence of no more than 33 years.
Where did anyone throw around a 100 year number, besides the reporter?
When someone is convicted of a federal crime, its the Department of Corrections that will put together a presentence report with a computation of the sentence under the guidelines. To get above that, the prosecutor has to argue to the judge that this case is special and requires a sentence above the guideline range. This is very difficult.
> a URL isn't simply an address; it is a path, and this makes all the difference.
I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that a URL is a path. A path implies a route from A to B. When I share a URL with you, I imply no path.
> A p.o. address, for example, may tell you how to get to someone's apartment but it wouldn't tell you how to get up there if the front door is locked.
You began your comment with the words FUD, so I'd like to add two of my own - Red Herring!
If you must use analogies, the physical equivalent of a URL is an address, not a P.O. box. But I suspect you still chose the P.O. box analogy because it allows you to create the false construct of a locked front door.
The availability of digital resources at a public URL is equivalent to the availability of physical resources at an address. The "locked front door" is irrelevant in both these (limiting) examples.
I think a url is both an address and a path. The domain is clearly the address of the server (residence), where the 'path' applies to. You can even construct a path in many cases that includes a password to grant entry to an otherwise protected resource, which is no different from giving someone a key to get in the door.
I don't like that interpretation, because i feel it's important that linking remains legal in most crcumstances, if not all, but that doesn't change the fact that if you reason by analogy to the physical world most url's are indeed paths. And this is where the danger is: reasoning by analogy. It doesn't produce good results to reason about dgital resources by analogy to physical resources.
At the risk of prolonging an unnecessary digression (the analogy was brought up by the parent), I still don't believe a public URL in itself contains a path. In fact it's quite possible that some URLs may never lead to a valid path depending on the starting address. Paths are only inferred or drawn up during traversal.
I wouldn't mind being proven wrong though, preferably with an example.
Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs, aka URLs) are short strings that identify resources in the web: documents, images, downloadable files, services, electronic mailboxes, and other resources. They make resources available under a variety of naming schemes and access methods such as HTTP, FTP, and Internet mail addressable in the same simple way. They reduce the tedium of "log in to this server, then issue this magic command ..." down to a single click.
"the most heinous crimes, i.e., rapes, murders, or high-level drug offenses"
As a side note, it's amazing how the war on drugs advanced in the propaganda front. Selling drugs in bulk is not only a serious crime, it's high up there with rape and murder.
Look, I understand that you are referring to that guy in apartment 4c who brings some pot for his buddies from Colorado to finance his daily bong. That is quite different from, say, a Pablo Escobar who sells in tonnes leading an organisation the size of a large multinational, including a private army.
I'm as pro-legalisation as they come, but any reasonable person would have to admit that the damages caused by the actions of the leaders of big drug cartels are, in the aggregate, causing at least as much suffering as, let's say, a single rape. I know I'm threading on thin ice here because this might make it seem like I'm trivializing rape, which I'm decidedly not, but regardless of what side of the debate one is one, it's wholly unreasonable to assert that drug dealers do not cause any suffering and that they are in no way responsible for that suffering (i.e. the 'users make their own choices' and 'if I didn't sell it, somebody else would have' arguments).
You are conflating the (very real) damages caused by drug consumption with the much larger damages caused by other crimes in the illegal drug trade. Drug cartels do a lot of murder.
Drug laws would lock up for good the guy in apartment 4c as well, and large segments of society do not see him as "quite different" than the cartels.
No, I'm not conflating anything, I was referring to the suffering of addicts and their families from addiction itself, apart from the second-order crime from cartels and addicts who need to commit petty crime to fund their habit. Now one might argue that that suffering is caused largely by the mere fact of the drugs being illegal, and in fact I made that argument myself usually. That doesn't change the existence of that suffering though, even if it's relatively small compared to the total.
And all of that is separate still from the murders drug cartels commit as part of their business operations, I realize that. Apart from all that, there are still harmful effects from their acts. (hence my wording 'in no way responsible' - they are not fully responsible, but are at least contributing, and their contributions to many cases make for a lot of aggregate negative effects).
If you throw around possibility of ridiculously high sentences to scare people and manipulate them into guilty pleas, then you have no right to complain when people act like being threatened with unfairly high sentence.
To respond to your point, the statutes in question here DO in fact mandate consecutive sentencing. Look it up next time.
18 USC § 1028A, etc.
"no term of imprisonment imposed on a person under this section shall run concurrently with any other term of imprisonment imposed on the person under any other provision of law..."
Only one of the statutes in question mandates consecutive sentences, 1028A. The maximum sentence for these counts is 2 years for the crime charged. (He was not charged with a terrorism offense under 1028A, so the 5 year sentence is not applicable.) The way this statute is written, this 2 year sentence may not be concurrent to any other sentence for any other crime but multiple counts of the same crime can be served simultaneously. (Note that 1028A is an "enhancement" charge, similar to the gun enhancements I mentioned earlier. They are add-ons to other crimes, and cannot be charged separately. Basically, enhancement charges are used when additional circumstances covered by the enhancement make the underlying crime "worse" than a normal instance of that crime.)
1028 imposes a maximum sentence of 15 years for the gravest crime listed in the statute. Assuming he is found (or pleads guilty) this yields a likely maximum sentence of 17 years, or a potential maximum sentence of no more than 33 years.
Sadly, the headline is unfortunate because "Barrett Brown faces 100 years for link" was not supposed to be the story here. The story is that his legal team filed a motion arguing that hyperlinks are protected speech under the First Amendment, etc. lol
A p.o. address, for example, may tell you how to get to someone's apartment but it wouldn't tell you how to get up there if the front door is locked.
A URL may tell you how to get to someone's file, but it wouldn't tell you how to download it if the server required authentication. A URL might be more comparable to driving directions than a mere address, but it does not grant access to a resource with even the most rudimentary access control.
Google links to a lot of sites, even a large number that contain Hacked/Obscene/Defamatory/Copyrighted material as defined by appropriate laws.
Since Google is posting these publicly (using many fancy techniques to improve their relevance no less) how many billion years of Sentencing will Brin & Page face under these extremely well worded/just/sane Federal Laws?
I think you could have up with this explanation had you tried, or had you done an objective evaluation of the situation before posting, but for the sake of other posters who might be less entrenched in their ideological predispositions: the difference is clearly that Google doesn't do any filtering or doesn't willingly lead people to certain material. Google presents an uncurated (within limits, like DMCA takedown notices, court-mandated filtering, ...) overview of all links out there. To go along with the (strained) analogy above of giving driving directions to somebody's house and telling them how to get in: what Google does is provide an atlas, and maybe a way to search therein.
David Gregory (a nightly news anchor) waved around a high-capacity magazine on national television within the borders of the District of Columbia, which is a felony offense. No charges filed. [0]
Explain that one, Mister Ideological Predisposition.
The article you linked to includes an explanation:
"Influencing our judgment in this case, among other things, is our recognition that the intent of the temporary possession and short display of the magazine was to promote the First Amendment purpose of informing an ongoing public debate about firearms policy in the United States, especially while this subject was foremost in the minds of the public"
Edit: Another question gets downvoted. Hacker News really hates when people ask questions. You can go through my recent comment history and see where other questions[1] I ask get downvoted too. Whatever you do, don't ask people on Hacker News about whatever comments they make.
I think at this point pg would be doing everyone a favor if he just rebooted this site or just closed it down completely given what it the community has turned into.
If a normal person would face unjust charges and a famous, powerful person doesn't, equality isn't achieved by enforcing unjust charges on everyone, it's achieved by not enforcing them on anyone.
That is one way. I don't know that putting people in jail left and right and hoping eventually one of them is famous is the most efficient way to go about getting the law changed.
I'm not sure what alternative you have in mind. The pigs who patrol our streets are very much in favor of having crufty laws on the books for the purpose of abusing their political enemies and the less fortunate, and politicians are generally supportive of pigs.
Laws don't just pop up out of the ether. They're created by fallible people. If a law doesn't make sense and isn't making society better, it should be repealed. It shouldn't be kept in place and slavishly enforced out of blind adherence to "Rule of Law".
And yes, equality is something that governments attempt to achieve through laws. Equal application of the law is one of the founding tenets of the US government. In my opinion, yes, equality is a more worthy goal to pursue than blanket enforcement of every law that happens to have gotten onto the books.
Well, it depends on who thinks it "doesn't make sense". The D.C. city government believes suppressing gun ownership in every way they can get away with "makes society better" (well, it makes their ruling over their subjects easier, it's easy to punish areas that don't vote correctly by removing a lot of their police protection, or so I heard when I lived next door in Arlington for a dozen years; classic Anarcho-Tyranny). They have a lot of company, as I'm sure you've noticed.
And the fact is they uniformly enforce these laws, albeit with quite a few jury nullifications, except when people like David Gregory and institutions like NBC commit these crimes. Knowingly in NBC's case.
I wish more people would admit we have a severe problem with having effectively having two sets of laws, one for our nomenklatura and another for the rest of us.
The "DC city government" is an abstract notion representing an ever-changing group of people. As such, it is incapable of conscious thought and does not actually believe anything.
Certain individuals who are part of the DC government believe those things. Some other individuals don't. We count up the ones on each side and then democracy happens. We have the courts to make sure the majority hasn't gone completely crazy.
DC went through a long time where they were leading the US in murders. When people are getting shot around you left and right, it's pretty reasonable to think that maybe you could stop that if you could stop people from having guns. The purpose of the laws was to stop people from getting shot. It's pretty clear that David Gregory was not going to shoot anyone, so putting him in jail was not going to serve the purpose of the law.
Are they willing to be as rational if the person isn't famous? I don't know. I'm not aware of any other cases where a non-famous citizen has gotten ahold of an illegal ammo clip to use as a prop in an argument about gun control.
Minor problem with the post hoc ergo propter hoc example of D.C. becoming the nation's "Murder Capitol": these severe anti-gun laws and administrative refusal to register any more guns happened before that.
"We have the courts to make sure the majority hasn't gone completely crazy."
Yes, that's what Heller was all about, but that hasn't stopped D.C. from engaging in Massive Resistance.
Getting back to the other case, Irvin Nathan had one defective shotgun shell in his home. Is putting him in jail going to serve the purported purpose of the law?
There are plenty of analogous examples to David Gregory with "illegal guns" being used a props by politicians and the like. Of course, they too are members of the nomenklatura that people like you are so willing to excuse.
I agree sending someone to jail over a single shotgun shell is a gross miscarriage of justice and perversion of the law. Committing a second miscarriage of justice by sending a TV news commentator to jail does not make the situation better.
Now you have two people in jail instead of one. We should be trying to have zero people in jail who should not be there. We shouldn't say "Well, we put one person there for a bad reason, so we should put everyone else there for the same bad reason too". This is what you seem to be proposing. I get David Gregory doesn't share your politics, and maybe you just don't like him. That doesn't mean we should put him in jail just so you can feel better about some other person getting screwed. I doubt Irvin Nathan would feel any better about being in jail if David Gregory were there along with him. I'm sure he'd much rather just not be there.
The murder rate in DC was rising steadily since 1960 until the gun control laws were passed in 1976. It went down briefly, then exploded with the crack epidemic in the late 80s, early 90s. Obviously, there are many, many factors contributing to the murder rate and you can't control it by modifying only one input. I'm not trying to imply otherwise.
I think you already know that the parent poster is saying that, even if the TV news commentator was the first person to commit the crime, and the commoner was the second, the TV news commentator still wouldn't be punished but the other person would.
This clear inequality appears to bother the parent poster more than the given example of heavy handed punishment.
You might say they bother me at different levels. Having owned guns in an repressive state (but much less so than D.C., although that is and was true of every state to my knowledge), I can empathize with the "commoner".
Whereas the establishment of a shameless nomenklatura in the US is an existential threat to the Republic. Which could, I might add, have even nastier personal consequences.
Invidious gun grabber laws are as old as Reconstruction, but we've been fantastically successful at beating them back starting in 1986. Our fight with our ruling class ... not so much.
Sure, the inequality sucks. The way to solve inequality is not "let's make everything equally shitty for everyone". It's "let's make everything equally good for everyone"
Adding "He had no malicious intent" would serve to make the asker's intention more clear, but still wouldn't add much to the discussion because it had already been established. I don't think asking why should be discouraged.
What purpose would have been served by imprisoning this person? Is the general public better off / safer if he's behind bars? Is he a threat to the welfare of others? Was anyone injured (physically, monetarily or otherwise) by his actions? What benefit are we achieving to counterbalance the cost of imprisoning him?
"We need to enforce the law because it's the law so we need to enforce it" is shitty, circular reasoning. This is the exact reason we have judges and juries in the first place: to interpret laws so they don't get blindly applied in places where they don't benefit us.
The state is a threat to the welfare of the people, and allowing it to selectively enforce laws is worse for people in the long run than requiring it not to.
How is that even related? Is your point that some offenses are prosecuted and others not? That's prosecutorial discretion - the hundreds of thousands of nmap scans that one might construe as 'precursors to a cyberattack' if one were to take literally some interpretations of some laws aren't prosecuted either, because they wouldn't stand a chance in court. I honestly don't see what your point is, giving one example of millions of actions and responses from law enforcement, or lack thereof.
The material Barrett Brown linked to was millions of lines long. Only a handful had credit card numbers.
Its not like he was out there trying to sell credit card numbers. He was trying do disseminate information for the public good and some illegal information was swept up. Prosecutoral discretion, indeed.
The guy was steamrolled. They found a scapegoat for a problem they were embarassed they couldn't do much about (Anonymous). Luckily he was engaged in questionable personal activities like drug use so they knew they had an easy road to discredit his work and drag him through the mud. Then they found a reason to provoke and prosecute and did it.
So breaking into a house and taking the TV is illegal, but if you take just everything and also take out the garbage, it becomes legal. You can of course make such laws but this would be just madness. (Don't take the analogy to serious. ;)
I am pretty sure that if you publish a phone catalog with drug dealers numbers and then include all other numbers in a town that would be a problem as well. Especially if drug dealers' numbers are in shiny font in front of the book with big "DRUGS HERE!" ad to boost it and the rest is somewhere on 20-9999 page.
It started off like your were going to provide a sound rebuttal, but it didn't materialise. Instead we got:
> Google doesn't do any filtering (except the filtering that it does do)
> Google doesn't give directions to somebody's house and tell you how to get in, it gives directions to everybody's houses and tells you how to get in.
"It started off like your were going to provide a sound rebuttal, but it didn't materialise. Instead we got:"
What is this, a formal debate with research and fact-checking and carefully proofread dissertations? We're just a few guys writing stream-of-consciousness paragraphs between code compiles. I maintain that anybody who doesn't recognize the difference between somebody posting a link to a bunch of credit card numbers and Google showing links in their search results is being deliberately obtuse or autistic, or both. There is obviously a continuum between them (in the sense that they both revolve about 'links'), and one can argue about cases on this continuum (although I have no interest in doing so), but the argument 'a link is a link' without any consideration for context, intent, etc is prima facie stupid to any reasonable person.
>What is this, a formal debate with research and fact-checking and carefully proofread dissertations?
No, you're right. Let's keep this emotional, fact-free, and useless.
>the argument 'a link is a link' without any consideration for context, intent, etc is prima facie stupid to any reasonable person.
No, you're making a false dichotomy of this. The fact is that a link is a link is a link. Tying this in with intent and context is a different matter altogether. The nature of a link doesn't (or at least shouldn't) change between applications of the term, whereas intent and context can. However, if the crux of the matter with regards to intent and context is that a link "posted" by a link aggregator points to something it shouldn't, the effect of that action can't be split out differently simply because a different actor was involved.
By analogy, it doesn't matter that I was swinging a chain saw around my head on a rope with the intention of evenly cutting my hedges, the fact of the matter is that my neighbours are approximately one head-length shorter than they were when they stumbled upon me. Whether or not I'm a gardener or a dedicated chainsaw murderer doesn't affect the outcome here.
"However, if the crux of the matter with regards to intent and context is that a link "posted" by a link aggregator points to something it shouldn't, the effect of that action can't be split out differently simply because a different actor was involved."
head explodes
If you're trolling, congratulations, you got me.
If not, it doesn't make any sense to continue this. I don't see a way to convince anyone who doesn't see the difference between somebody posting a specific link to stolen data and a link aggregator. It's not about the link, it's about posting the link, and the intent and context of that action. I honestly don't see how to go deeper on that.
The 'analogies' game is quite tiring, I'm not even going there.
> uncurated
Say what? When DDG said they didn't personalize searched based on your individual interests, much came crying foul, because they wanted their personalized searches, for some reason.
"trying to distribute" is a false characterization of "posting a hyperlink". It was factual, newsworthy information that certain documents were present at a certain address. Regardless of intent, communicating this fact is not and cannot be a case of "trying to distribute" what is at the link, because the link is not the documents. The only thing he distributed or even tried to distribute (as far as I can tell from the article) was a small piece of truthful information, not the documents.
You're right, that "trying to distribute" seems to be an incorrect characterization of Brown's intent, which is why I have deleted the comment.
However, it's incorrect to fixate on the issue of hyperlinking per se. Whether a "link is not the documents" is just technicality. If he had intended, by hyperlinking, to actually distribute the documents, I don't believe the fact that he did so by hyperlinking as opposed to some other means would matter. However, here he has a strong case that he didn't intend to distribute the documents, but was just reporting the factual information that the documents were available. It all revolves around his intent, not the fact of hyperlinking.
In a just world, Barret Brown would not have DOXed an FBI agent and his family for doing his job, or distributed several thousand people's credit card numbers and corresponding identifying information.
Barret Brown is not Aaron Schwartz. Schwartz at least had a colorable claim that what he was doing should not have been a crime. If the allegations are true, Barret Brown is definitely one of the bad apples and does not deserve our sympathy.
He didn't dox an FBI agent or his family (indeed, he's charged for his speech and there's a motion to dismiss that indictment on First Amendment grounds too); he was under duress and coming off meds, and outraged at the legal threats against his mother. The allegations are "conspiracy to dox" rather than any successful act. Literally they said that someone did a Google search with the goal of making "restricted personal information" public.
He flipped out and lost his cool over constant government-sanctioned harassment. He's not perfect by any means—admitted substance abuse problems and a big naïve/foolish/arrogant streak—but still deserves sympathy.
I don't think he would have known there was a law on the books making it illegal to dox feds. Doxing abusive cops on the other hand is legal and happens all the time between Anonymous/Occupy and even journalists do it sometimes.
In order to convict on threats there needs to be a "true threat" of physical harm, a non-conditional statement made to a specific person. All he said was "if they come" he wouldn't be able to tell FBI from Zetas so he'd exercise self-defense. And he explicitly clarified when he said he was going to ruin the guy's life, he meant to expose him, not as a physical threat.
One can disseminate a link without knowing whats in it. Brown is on the record in many places as being opposed to spreading credit cards. He was against that kind of stuff.
It's disingenuous to suggest that Brown had no actual intent to harm law enforcement agents while leaving out the fact that the indictment starts by establishing a pattern over multiple weeks of Brown making direct threats to them on Twitter, including threats of violence. The threats aren't (as I understand it) unlawful either, but the combination of threats and any actions in furtherance of them can be.
The indictment establishes a pattern of speech but doesn't establish actual unlawful offenses. No, I don't think he was threatening violence. The FreeBB people have written a bit about this. http://tumblr.freebarrettbrown.org/post/77390763109/debunkin...
I would find it very difficult to find any sympathy for the prosecutors and FBI agents in this case. They are bullies, and they have gotten far less blowback than they deserve for doing shitty unethical and likely illegal but for their immunity things like threatening prosecution of family members and intentionally inflicting financial ruin on a defendant's whole family.
A link can't contain credit card numbers or CVVs on its own. It's just a pointer to where the data resides. It's entirely possible that Brown didn't know what he was disseminating. One has to download and open the file to find out. The government is expecting us to know what's in a link before we share it, which is an unreasonable burden. And they're equating transmitting the link with possessing the underlying information. Moreover they haven't shown any illicit transactions resulting from it being shared.
How can reporters verify sources or security researchers examine data dumps without fear of being prosecuted now?
This is a chilling attack on digital rights and needs to be stopped. I hope the judge listens. Stratfor was sued because they failed to sufficiently protect their systems and rightfully so. The actual hacker Jeremy Hammond got less time than this guy faces.
Even worse, link's destinations are outside your control. The funny picture can be replaced with anything by the person in control of it. I have goatsed many people when someone embedded an image from my server. In that case it was visible. Changing what a page linked-to.shows is much more hidden.
Reading all the comments here, have people not been watching the news like ... ever?
Large sentence are the norm in the US, not the exception. Petty thief in California and elsewhere[1] are sentenced to 25 years minimum if they are repeat offender, it's completely crazy.
In that regard, it seem unlikely Brown would get a light sentence.
Reality check: what does it matter? This person is facing 15 years in prison for linking to material in an ephemeral setting - a chat room. That there are not people protesting on the streets is a good indicator of how much US citizens enjoy living in an ultranationalist state.
It's a maximum potential sentence of all the charges combined, I think most smart people realize that. As another person noted the media does this to show the charges as excessive.
(1) The circumstances under which hyperlinking to material posted and hosted by others is, or should be, a crime.
(2) If it is a crime, whether the proposed sentence is proportional to the alleged offense.
(3) Whether the prosecutor is trying to exert pressure for a plea bargain. E.g., if they offer him 100 days in jail if he pleads guilty, or 100 years in jail if he's convicted, it would make sense to plead guilty from a pure risk management perspective, even if he has an enormously strong case.
(4) If this length of sentence for this behavior is authorized by statute, whether the statute falls foul of the Constitution's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.
(5) Whether the First Amendment protects hyperlinks to unprotected speech.
if they offer him 100 days in jail if he pleads guilty, or 100 years in jail if he's convicted, it would make sense to plead guilty from a pure risk management perspective, even if he has an enormously strong case.
I'm not so sure about that. Imagine the terrible precedent you'd set. EDIT: Risk aversion is sometimes toxic to society.
Before your edit, you wrote about risk aversion and how it's toxic for a society.
I disagree, mainly because this case is an asymmetric risk scenario - his gains from pleading not guilty are extremely miniscule when compared to his losses(compared to the 100 days he'd have to spend in jail, if he were to plead guilty).
What if it's a charge you know to be bogus, or that you really didn't do anything wrong? Would people willingly go to jail for a crime they know they didn't commit?
If it's hazy about whether what they did was a crime, that's a different matter though. And it's a little frustrating to see prosecutors trump up charges to get an easy plea bargain. Maybe there should be some limit between the max sentence and the min plea sentence, so that they can't throw 50-year threats around without at least a 5-year plea bargain.
Minorities have to put up with this all the time, especially blacks in the South.
I don't see why being a white male hacker makes Barret Brown a special case. If anything, it's a good sign that a white male is being subjected to the same overhanded treatment that minorities have to deal with, because it makes people aware of the problem and creates pressure to fix the system.
He's not the type to plead guilty. I think he's taking this to trial on the principle that he believes he didn't do anything criminal. Also, the defense has a very good case, and the government's appears to be full of holes.
How many people are idealistic and generous enough to take that kind of risk with their own lives? It's not (a quick) death, but life in isolation in the penal system for... not setting a precedent?
I don't think I would be that idealistic or generous.
And that's just the thing. When cops pull you over and point a gun at you, telling you to get out of the car, do you get out of the car or not? Even if you don't have to get out of the car, you won't take that risk with your own life.
Same with cops asking for anything else at gunpoint etc.
Seeing it from outside the American judicial system looks really scary.
Maybe I'm making a generality of a few fringe cases but since 9/11, and the rise of TSA and several horror stories of Police abuse I abandoned my project to one day visit this great country.
Exactly how I feel. I've come to see the U.S. as one of those unsavoury places which is best to avoid. I rather pay extra on my flight tickets than get better deals with transit flights in the U.S. It's sad really.
Bill Clinton once said "There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America", and at the time I agreed with that. It has been a while since I do not believe this anymore.
As someone that hasn't visited the U.S. yet, I think there are risks, but not as bad as to prevent me from visiting.
I believe the likelihood of having a serious run-in with the law in the U.S. as similar to having an accident when doing an "extreme" sport - you have to be aware of the possibility when doing it and accept them, but they're not so bad.
The most likely scenario, from what people who visited experienced: you will be treated a bit roughly at customs/inmigration (fingerprints, questioning your motives) and then you'll be free to have a nice time.
Do your homework and have your visa and papers and travel schedule and hotels in advance, and you'll be fine. It's still one of the least friendly countries to enter (and that's validated by people I know that have visited 100+ countries, I've visited 50+ myself), but I think it's worth it and I'll visit someday.
I had exactly the same thoughs today earlier, before seeing this article. "horror stories" was exactly the words in my mind. To be a prosecutor in the US is a political career, and they go nuclear to sentence the highest number of people they can, with the maximum charges they can, doesn't matter the situation, all out war, to get some press. to make things even better, the jail sistem is private, to build and run jails is a business. There was a guy who the cop befriended and pretended to be his good friend for 2 years, just to convince him to bet some money on football, then the cop sent the SWAT to arrest him for betting , and the Swat guys killed the man in his house. It was on HN i think. Being a third world foreigner and not so white as I am, It becomes easier to abandon the dream of ever stepping the foot on the country. Is a Pity, I really would like to see the girls in the California beaches and Las vegas.
Wow, so now we should all start linking through bit.ly to circumvent direct links? (sarcasm...yet timidly true)
What I find concerning is his lawyer's argument, "Brown did not 'transfer' the stolen information as he arguably would have done had he embedded the link on his web page" ... does this mean for us webmasters, linking to a webpage (even as Google or Bing may do) would mean incrimination. I understanding hosting....but linking!!! WTF!
I wonder, as the world moves to cloud computing, will there be much difference between "hosting" and "linking"? Documents are digital, but "digital" used to mean that the bits were on a device that you own, which is becoming less true with time. Does the location of bits on a harddrive determine guilt, or does the intent to distribute the protected information? If intent, then is linking intent?
That's not the lawyers argument, it's actually the Guardian writer's failed paraphrase of a point they were trying to make. The government is relying on copyright law which traditionally distinguishes "in-line" linking from "embedded" linking. Since this is neither, their reliance on that is flawed... the writer of this article just didn't fully grok it. I recommend you skim the motion.
I've never understood the hate for StratFor. I signed up to see what all the hatred was about, but their analysis of foreign affairs seem interesting and detailed. If they remind me of anything, it would be Economist articles.
U.S. prosecutors are out of control and something needs to be done to reign in on the practice of piling on charges to extort a plea, a couple of ideas:
- Accused have the option to take the plea but continue the trial. If found guilty he only serves what he pleaded.
- Sentences are limited to the max sentence already applied for same crime to somebody else.
I read somewhere (many years ago) regarding hacking that the actual act of intruding a system and/or causing damage and so forth is one crime, and that teaching someone how to do it is another. It could be that the source was simply incorrect (as there are security courses readily available), but I wonder if this is the same kind of scenario? Regardless, -linking- to something isn't the same as actually doing it. But I feel that the same kind of argument has been made against, say, Isohunt.com and it seems to have worked against them.
You don't ban pool halls because mafia members wink and nudge to each other all the time there.
Banning the pool hall is not going to deter the crime. And banning links in chatrooms by making it illegal will not do anything either.
The problem is not the criminal, it's the guy trying to classify the criminal. Just because the baby is in the bath water has a little dirty water on him, doesn't mean we bag up the baby and throw it out.
No but they are also subject to a motion to dismiss by his defense. http://freebarrettbrown.org/files/BB_motiontodismiss1.pdf The allegations there are actually not as significant as the linking. If he were convicted of threats and that was the only charge, he'd be out by now.
I wonder where they'll draw the line? I mean what if you just say where to find the info? For example much of the Stratfor stuff Brown linked to can be found by googling "wikileaks stratfor". Does saying that make me eligible for 100 years too?
"as he arguably would have done had he embedded the link on his web page, but merely created a path to files that had already been published elsewhere"
I am pretty sure they meant "documents" not "link" here
I ask because it seems that we're moving in the direction of
<a href="[not_protected]">[not_protected]</a>
That said:
blah blah blah .... blah blah
Now if a crawler scans that, puts it into an aggregate feed and cites me as the source, and there's a hyperlink in there... That means trouble for everyone.
But really, if I give you some text and you copy-paste a substring of it into a search engine and get a Stratfor document, what's that mean?
Is it the function of a hyperlink + intent, or is it just the speech itself? Doesn't "speech" imply intentionality which itself is what is examined by law?
This is a federal case, and the Federal Sentencing Guidelines (while now discretionary, see Booker) simply don't work that way. 100 years is the potential maximum he would get if the sentences were served consecutively, but at the federal level, there must be special circumstances to justify imposing consecutive sentences. Consequently, consecutive sentencing is the exception, not the rule, and is almost exclusively reserved for the most heinous crimes, i.e., rapes, murders, or high-level drug offenses. (Note that certain factors can also result in consecutive sentences, such as gun "enhancements" which can add 5-25 years to a base sentence.)
Edit: The above assumes the case even proceeds to the sentencing stage. Several US courts have already ruled that merely hyperlinking is not enough; there must be an additional circumstance to make the hyperlinking illegal. For example, if the information hyperlinked was clearly intended to be protected or private (i.e., Schwartz and the AT&T subscriber data), then dissemination of links could fall within the meaning of one or more statutes for unauthorized access.
A physical analogy to explain why this matters: a URL isn't simply an address; it is a path, and this makes all the difference. A p.o. address, for example, may tell you how to get to someone's apartment but it wouldn't tell you how to get up there if the front door is locked. A URL is more akin to giving someone an address and telling them how to get inside. (And for you nitpickers, in this example also assume that you don't know the person at this address; you simply know the URL.)