Transcript: Barrett Brown on The Current (March 26, 2015)

Interview is with Anna Maria Tremonti. David Common is the program's occasional co-host. Audio can be found here, program date is March 26, 2015:

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-march-26-2015-1.3010107/barrett-brown-says-imprisonment-serves-as-chill-on-freedom-of-speech-1.3010533

BARRETT BROWN
Hi. How are you doing?

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI
Well, how are you doing? Tell me about the facility where you're incarcerated.

BROWN
It's crowded to overcapacity, like most federal prisons in the U.S., even with the incredible state of prison building in the last twenty years, has failed to keep up with the even higher spate of arrests and incarcerations in the federal system. That's America for you.

TREMONTI
How are you managing?

BROWN
Uh, fine. I like to read and write, and I can do that here, so...frankly, prisons are actually better. They're a little bit more civilized and hospitable than jail units where I've been living for the past two and a half years. So this is actually Disneyland to me.

TREMONTI
Do you see yourself as an activist, or a journalist, or both?

BROWN
Uh, both. I have an unusual status. I'm a journalist, I've been a working journalist most of my adult life. I've also been an activist since about 2010, or so...and, you know, I sortof embody a hybrid of that. I don't think traditional journalism, of which, I've worked as a traditional journalist for a long time, I don't think it's sufficient any more. I think there needs to be something...something new and something different, to approach the issues that are coming to the fore these days.

TREMONTI
You're paying a big price for, uh, for feeling that way.

ELECTRONIC OPERATOR
This call is from a federal prison.

BROWN
It hurts them more than it hurts me. Frankly, they've done a great deal more than we ever could to bring attention to the issues that we were working to expose, simply by going after me in the way they did...such a blatantly, sortof bizarre fashion, with these made-up charges that they've had to drop. You know, they've said more than we could about the importance of what we were bringing to the fore.

TREMONTI
Now, you've faced charges related to the link you posted to information hacked from the private security firm Stratfor. Why did you link to that information?

BROWN
Well, we were...that link had been pasted in a chat room used by Anonymous, like a lot of links coming out of these hacks...that I had been in the habit of going through the emails that come out of these things...I copied and pasted it, in my chat room at Project PM, my own room, so that my researchers could start going through whatever was in there...we thought it was a sample emails that these hackers usually put out right after the hack to show that they actually acquired them, with other emails coming down the line later on. In this case, it turned out to be customer information from Stratfor; names and addresses and all that, including credit card numbers. We didn't know that, I never opened the file, never used any of the credit card numbers...nonetheless, I was charged with eleven counts of aggravated identity theft for having done so, and thus, facing twenty two years minimum in prison just for that link, to say nothing of the other charges...we were doing what we always do, which was to go through the emails that are taken from these hacks, which always show wrongdoing by the government, and by companies close to the government, in order to find out wrongdoing. And that's the exact thing they really want to prevent here, that kind of research.

TREMONTI
And so, you know, part of a sixty three month sentence is obviously an expectation of deterrence. You sound pretty defiant.

BROWN
Well, of course I am. Governments never actually deter this kind of thing by putting people in prison. That's never worked historically. The kind of people that run this government don't know their history. Everyone's looking at these charges and looking at the circumstances behind them, agrees that this is a political prosecution.

TREMONTI
So, what do you see as the broader implications of your case?

BROWN
I think to the extent that you see, even those things that are public, in terms of the indictments, in terms of the transcripts, the government can commit perjury at will. One of the things they try to hit me on, they tried to ascribe to me a comment that had been made on national television by a Fox News analyst, Bob Beckel, saying, asking for the murder of Julian Assange. This is a crazy thing to ascribe to me, since Julian Assange and I admire each other. Been part of the same movement. We pointed out that I didn't say this, this is me quoting somebody...the government still stuck with it. I think people who look at that, they see, look, these people are shameless, they might as well commit perjury, they don't get called on it, there's no negative repercussions for them. So it's a situation where the government has no reason not to commit crimes and violate their own statutes, in order to come after people whose political views they disagree with. I think, uh, the overriding lesson here, beyond all the specifics, beyond the issues that we were digging up, in terms of intelligence contracting and surveillance and that kind of thing, the overriding issue here is that the rule of law is not in effect. And so there needs to be not just civil disobedience, but enhanced civil disobedience, in terms of hacking and leaking, that kind of thing, until the American people or Congress, or someone gets the point.

TREMONTI
You know, you're raising these issues against a backdrop of increased surveillance and government access to computer data, metadata, all in the name of security and counter-terrorism.

BROWN
Yeah, and unfortunately, in the name of counter-terrorism, they've been able to grant themselves wider and wider powers that we've already seen to be abused. And, of course, CIA and the FBI, these three letter agencies in the U.S. and elsewhere, they've been repeatedly caught abusing their own powers. Nonetheless, Congress and the American public don't seem to take this issue seriously. No matter how many times we see journalists and activists singled out, being, basically, committed crimes against, by the government, there doesn't seem to be this realization, maybe we should stop granting these agencies wider and wider powers-

ELECTRONIC OPERATOR
This call is from a federal prison.

BROWN
-unless we can get to a point in which the rule of law applies to them too. Otherwise, they have no reason, if they have a national security mentality, they have no reason not to violate the law, over and over again, to achieve whatever ends they think are best for the country.

TREMONTI
And so, I'm talking to you, you've been thrown in prison...we heard from Quinn Norton at the beginning of my introduction to you...she has stopped reporting on security issues, she's backing away from covering these kinds of stories...is she doing the right thing?

BROWN
She is. Judge Sam Lindsay, the judge in my case, claimed at the hearing that there would be no chilling effect, which is a bizarre claim since the chilling effect started two years ago, when the original charges on linking were first mentioned. Uh, anyone who links to anything in the course of research or journalism is now at risk.

TREMONTI
Who then can be a watchdog in the future?

BROWN
There's no perfect answer to that question, and there never is. We can only, I think, work towards less and less dangerous solutions. After all, in the past few years, my only answer to that is, we need to establish transparent entities that use the internet to bring together citizens who have proven themselves as reliable, as honest...and frankly have been, in a truthful and open manner do what needs to be done until we get to a more stable situation, by which I mean a situation in which the government is held accountable, just as the citizens are. [loud beep sound]

TREMONTI
What's the beep?

BROWN
That is the beep. That means we have a minute left.

TREMONTI
Okay, well, I guess, Barrett Brown, thank you for speaking with me.

BROWN
Thank you. Appreciate it.

TREMONTI
I ended before the minute there, David [Common]. That's Barrett Brown, an American journalist and activist associated with the hacktivist group Anonymous, at the Fort Worth Correctional Institute, in Fort Worth, Texas...if you're a listener to the podcast "Serial", that little "This is a call from the correctional institute..." keeps, to remind you, I guess, where you're talking to.

DAVID COMMON
That you're talking to a prisoner.

TREMONTI
Yeah. He had to call us, so we recorded that earlier.