Transcript: Barrett Brown Sam Seder Interview (03/24/2015)

Transcript of audio of interview by Sam Seder of The Majority Report, broadcast on March 24, 2015. Audio can be found at:
http://majority.fm/2015/03/24/324-barrett-brown-explains-why-he-is-in-prison-for-doing-his-job/

Transcript is made of audio taken between 6:40 and 29:30 of file.

SAM SEDER (INTRO)
We've talked about Barrett Brown on this program in the past...and I guess it was now...a year and a half ago? Maybe two years ago? I MCed a fundraiser for Barrett Brown and Jeremy Hammond. Jeremy Hammond basically hacked into Stratfor, which is a security intelligence firm, and, I believe, I'm not sure, HB Gary Federal. Nevertheless, emails involving both those organizations were released on-line. And it outlined, at the very least, what was a pitch to the U.S. government, it's unclear how far this went, but these are companies that do industrial spying and some spying for the federal government. And, it outlined a plan to, essentially, discredit and attack people like Glenn Greenwald. I think Glenn Greenwald was actually named. Supporters of Wikileaks, essentially. Or anybody they perceived to be supportive of Wikileaks.

And Barrett Brown was ultimately sent to prison...there was a plea deal...initially, he was being charged by the federal government for linking, basically seeding a link, putting a link in a chat forum, to that material which also, I don't think- he was unaware of at the time, included credit card information of some of those companies' clients. There was such pushback, because contemplate the notion of this. You link every day. Every day in your twitter feed, you're getting a link to stuff. You have to be responsible for everything in that link, [even] if it's already been made public. It's just absurd. No journalist could do their job.

And Barrett Brown, make no mistake about it, I mean, I don't know how we define journalists in this country...but he wrote for many major publications. Ones that you read every day. Ones that I read stories from, every day. So the government ultimately dropped those charges, because I think they were untenable. And ultimately, Barrett Brown signed a plea deal. Pleading guilty to charges to one...a youtube video he made against a specific FBI agent, who'd apparently threatened his mom with going to jail, as a way of getting her to talk. Now, his youtube video was not explicitly calling for violence...more, sortof implying that he's going to look into his family, and he, I think, concedes that was a big mistake. That was actually not even close, in his plea agreement, to what accounted for the vast majority of his time, that he received. He was also, plead guilty to a misdemeanor obstruction charge, for attempting to hide two laptops when FBI agents arrived at his mother's home to execute a search warrant. Again, that also did not constitute the bulk of his sentence.

The third charge was an accessory after the fact...which came from, essentially, Brown's willingness and making it clear to Hammond and, I believe, Anonymous, that he would act as an intermediary with Stratfor...because Anonymous had these emails, and they were concerned that they were going to endanger the lives of potential sources of information in foreign countries...I believe one of them was Bahrain. Pro-democracy activists, and the like...Hammond [I think Seder means Brown here] made an offer to Stratfor to be the intermediary, in terms of what redactions should take place.

Now, we see this all the time, right? Journalists do this all the time. They get information, they approach the state department. I've received a document dive, we're going to publish it, we want to give you the opportunity to tell us what might be too sensitive, so we don't do any damage to third, innocent third parties here. For that, he was charged with being an accessory after the fact and, I don't know, it seems to me a very strange way of reading the law there, because it doesn't seem like he was seeking to profit in any way. Or, actually, aiding and abetting those hackers in any way, he, it seems to me, aiding and abetting those people mentioned in the hack. But, I don't know.

So, here is the interview with Barrett Brown. Apparently, there's...a lot of the stuff has been under seal, some of it less so now, even less in the years coming. But here is Barrett Brown. And the interview that we got, we'll be starting from the moment that he had to call us, he's calling from prison. It ends a little bit abruptly, as you will note. And, alright, here it is. Go right into it.

ELECTRONIC OPERATOR
You have a pre-paid call. You will not be charged for this call. This call is from: Barrett Brown. An inmate at: a federal prison. Hang up to decline the call, or to accept, dial five now. If you wish to block any future calls of this nature-

BARRETT BROWN
Hello?

SEDER
Barrett.

BROWN
How ya doin?

SEDER
Good, thank you so much for doing this.

BROWN
Happy to do so.

SEDER
How much time do you have?

BROWN
Fifteen minutes.

SEDER
Oaky. Alright, we'll go right into it. So...Barrett, let's, for people who aren't aware of your case, I think most of our audience has some broad awareness. You in, I guess it was January of this year, were sentenced to five years and three months...you have served at this point two and a half years of those five years three months. You struck a plea deal, and plead guilty on three charges. Tell us what those three charges are.

BROWN
The original charge that underlies the investigation, that justifies several years of search warrants and harassment and all that, that they managed to stick, was the accessory after the fact, that was sortof a consolation prize to them after they originally charged me with a number of fraud charges that didn't make a great deal of sense. And which, when they made those public a couple of years ago, caused sortof a firestorm of controversy, and resulted in the U.S. losing a number of places on the Reporters Without Borders press rankings. And the charge that I initially plead to, accessory after the fact charge, is for, after a hack occurred on a company called Stratfor, which does sortof black ops, provide black ops services to other companies, I, on behalf of the hackers contacted the company, and said, "If there's anything in the email they've just stolen from you that they're about to put out, that could get somebody hurt in a foreign country, if you have any contacts under a dictatorship or that sort of thing, let me know, and I'll have them redact them. That's the conduct that I plead to, and which is apparently a crime. Allegedly, I helped a hacker escape, which doesn't make a great deal of sense, but...and then there was also another charge, which I plead to, which was interference with a search warrant, originally obstruction of justice. That was for hiding laptops from the FBI when I knew they were coming to raid me.

I didn't want the FBI to have those laptops for a number of reasons. As I noted in The Daily Beast article I wrote about a month ago ["My Post Cyberpunk Indentured Servitude" http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/31/my-post-cyberpunk-indentured-servitude.html], among other things, those laptops contain information about my contacts in Bahrain and other dictatorships, where the U.S. has bases and with which the U.S. government co-operates. And obviously, to put that information into the hands of the federal government, would have been irresponsible. The final charge, internet threats, that was for videos I made when I was sortof, I was self-detoxing on opiates at the time, I had been raided six months prior, and my mom was being threatened with indictment by the FBI...I said in these videos that I made at the time, I was sortof in a manic state...that, if they're going to investigate me, I was going to investigate them. And I was going to do it the same way that a certain CEO named Aaron Barr had done. Aaron Barr was the head of a company called HB Gary, that we had investigated previous, which had started this whole thing off...our investigation of that revealed that he was going to do sortof nasty, again black-ops propaganda work on behalf of the companies, in a conspiracy that was set in motion by the DOJ...anyway, so it was a, that was a ill-conceived, kindof manic attempt on my part to bring attention to what was happening to me at that point in this investigation. These threats against my family by the FBI, and to also make a point about what the allies of the FBI, like Aaron Barr, got away with. So, those are the charges I eventually plead to. I was facing a number of others, and all together, as you may be probably aware, in fact, I believe you gave a fundraiser for Jerry Hammond and myself, so you know this...I was facing a hundred and five years altogether, at one point.

SEDER
And ultimately, I think, the attention surrounding the first set of charges of you simply linking, or seeding a link to these materials, I think, frankly, there was far too much pushback. Let me ask you this, you're also responsible for almost nine hundred thousand dollars in restitution, what is that supposedly based upon?

BROWN
The majority of that is, I think it's eight hundred and seventy thousand that I owe just to Stratfor, the company that Jeremy Hammond hacked at the end of 2011. Stratfor, like I said, is a company that employs former State Department officials, and provides clandestine and really quasi-illegal services to companies like Dow Chemical...for instance, they spy on activists on their behalf...the most egregious thing that was uncovered in that hack-

ELECTRONIC OPERATOR
This call is from a federal prison.

BROWN
That's very charming. That they spied on Bhopal activists, on behalf of Union Carbide and Dow Chemical, you know, the Yes Men, the group that's trying to get reparations for those who were killed or wounded in the Union Carbide explosion in the eighties. They do things of that nature and...after the hack was done, as I always do, and the FBI knows perfectly well that I do, I was investigating the emails that were taken in that hack. And doing so, I copied and pasted a link from one chat room to another, to the one run by my group, Project PM, and, the link led to, in this case, a file that among other things, contained customer information for Stratfor, for the newsletter that they put out, which is a small part of what they do, which included credit card numbers. Now, I never knew those numbers were in there, it's very clear from the transcript of the IRC chat that I didn't know they were in there, I never used them. They were already being used, days before, by the actual hackers and there's nothing linking me to any of those charges that were made even after I pasted the link. And the link was already public, was linked to by other people...I never opened the file, et cetera, et cetera. So, it was obviously, extraordinarily  absurd thing to charge me with. And this, that conduct was, led to eleven counts of aggravated identity theft, carrying mandatory minimum of twenty two years in prison.

So, that was obviously a red flag to a lot of people who otherwise might not have followed this case, to show they're retaliating against this guy for something, they're obviously looking for something to hit him with, so what did he really do? And the answer, of course, was that I had been active in investigating and bringing attention to, conduct by companies linked to the DOJ, and linked to the FBI, which had been carrying out crimes on behalf of the government, on behalf of certain corporations. And all that information we kept at echelon2.org, a website we created for the purpose, and which actually is mentioned in the original search warrants...so, it was really a debacle for them, and those charges were obviously a major tactical error on their behalf, that really, I think, singlehandedly show what's really going on here.

SEDER
And so, let me get your sense of, and expand on that last- well, before we do that, much of your, the proceedings have been under seal and, my understanding is that, over the next six months to a year, a lot more of that information is going to come to light. Can you give us a sense of what's going to come to light, and how is that going to, sortof further undercut the reasons why the government went after you?

BROWN
Well, it's going to be, I think it's really going to be just the frosting on the cake. I don't think-

ELECTRONIC OPERATOR
This call is from a federal prison.

BROWN
-based on what I've seen of the video coverage, I don't think anyone at all, at this point, believes their story at all. But it will help to confirm what we've been saying, which is that, this was a situation in which there was not an underlying crime, this was a situation in which, on behalf of several companies that work with the DOJ, I was prosecuted, I was investigated for a long time, in ways that are very unconventional, to say the least. At least, I hope are unconventional. In which they violated the law, in which people associated with the FBI and these companies violated the law. Even before a lot of this information comes out, over the next few months, there'll be an article by Douglas Lucas [website: www.douglaslucas.com] coming out, in the next week or so, that goes into a lot of those details. On conduct on behalf of certain companies, particularly HB Gary Federal, which I'm sure we'll get into in a moment. There's a great deal that's still sealed, I don't know the exact specifics of what the status is, what's going to take for us to get it to the public eye, but I will eventually, myself, writing about this. I don't know which venue yet...quite a bit, for years and years, because there's so much material here. There are transcripts of hearings that are still sealed, in which, for instance, they point out that I'm an anarchist, and use that as an argument that I should get more prison time. Because I have unconventional political views.

There are, there's further instances of perjury, that I've referenced briefly in my allocution, which is public ["Barrett Brown statement: 'This is not the rule of law, it is the rule of law enforcement' " http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/22/barrett-brown-hacking-sentencing-full-statement-text] and also in The Daily Beast article...there's just a great deal of perjury, unambiguous perjury, that I think, people don't get a chance to see federal cases and how this works very often...my case is an extreme example, it's one where they really wanted to get me, But it's emblematic of how this process works, and unfortunately, perjury is not punished. And when it's not punished, and it helps get convictions, what you get is plenty of it. There's a great problem in this country that goes beyond these narrow issues that I was involved in investigating, it goes beyond intelligence contracting and cyber-industrial complex, and really speaks to the absence of the rule of law. Which, I think, as a culture, as a republic, we need to sit down and address these in a serious manner at some point soon, because if we don't, the alternative is going to be more groups on my end of things, and it's going to be a situation in which you have increased conflicts that may not resolve in a way that we really want it to. So, I hope this case presents an opportunity, I hope  the information that's going to come out in the next few months is taken advantage of, by everyone involved, everyone concerned, and used to bring home to more of the press, that there is a serious problem here. That affects them. That needs to be addressed.

SEDER
You know, when I've looked over the things that you plead to, eighteen U.S. three, I think, in the accessory after the fact...which is when you're supposedly comforting or assisting the offender in order to prevent his or her apprehension or trial or punishment. And of course, you were approaching Stratfor in terms of giving them the opportunity to do redactions, like you say. Let me ask you two questions. One, do you see this in the context of the other prosecutions we've seen, particularly around, you know, obviously Aaron Swartz was involved in something that was very different from what you were doing, but there seems to have been, and probably continues to be, at the DOJ, a strong over-reaction to the idea of hackers, of Anonymous, of Wikileaks, all of whom have some, you know, association to some degree or another. Do you see it as part and parcel of that, or do you see it as part and parcel, frankly, of, sortof, the war on journalism, that this administration has been up to?

BROWN
There's several overlapping frameworks that you can look at this, pretty accurately. I think, both of those things are accurate. The information freedom movement, as you might as well call it...it encompasses all of these groups, Wikileaks, and what Aaron Swartz was doing, and what we were doing, is a considerable threat to the nation-state. And that's just a fact. The unfortunate fact of modern life, in political life, in general throughout history, is that states do terrible things. They do them, or elements within states do them, and then they have to keep covered up. So, of course, when a process comes about where it becomes very easy for that information to get out and be distributed, then the state has to react, just like a wounded animal. What you're seeing is that reaction, it's a lashing out that's not very well directed, oftentimes, sortof really incompetent, in some cases. But very energetic. And that's what you've been seeing in the past five or six years. It was what I was looking at a couple years ago when Wikileaks was first getting prosecuted, or as I would say, persecuted, because there was no formal prosecution, which really drove me to start acting and get involved in Anonymous and that sort of thing. Just a lawlessness on the part of the state that justifies its existence by law. It's a nasty thing to see up close, and, so yes, it can be viewed in any number of contexts, obviously, the people involved, Aaron Swartz, the people involved with Wikileaks, they all see it as part of the same thing.

SEDER
Well, we have just about a minute and half left, by my calculation. Give me your sense of, how has the establishment media, the mainstream press, do you feel that there's been enough attention to your case?

BROWN
There's- I'm happy with the quality of the attention for the most part that's come from some of these outlets the last couple years. Obviously, in a more perfect world, some of the aspects of this case, and in particular them seizing the Declaration of Independence from my house as evidence of a crime, would have gotten national attention. That's just something that needs to be examined, that somebody has to answer for. There's a number of things like that, I think, that should've gotten a lot more attention. Unfortunately, and I've worked with the media for a long time, in different [loud double beep sound, warning that there's only a minute left of call time] areas, it's a very haphazard process [inaudible] when it doesn't. We didn't quite manage to get the coverage we probably should've. And that's just the way things are, unfortunately.

SEDER
With the remaining time that we have left, is there anything else that you wanted to say to folks?

BROWN
Yeah, the information at echelon2.org, a lot of people have gone to prison for. So, please make use of it. If you're an activist, if you're interested in information, please, do what you can to make sure that information gets- [another loud warning double beep, indicating that the call is almost over, and that the call will be shut down] public-

SEDER
Alright, well, and I guess we can, I'm not sure how much longer we have left, but we will certainly link to that, of course, at majority.fm. And Barrett, in general, how are your spirits?

BROWN
I'm fine. I enjoy being incarcerated. It's very relaxing.

SEDER
[laughs] Really?

BROWN
Yeah.

SEDER
Alright, well, then, I guess...wow. [sound indicating that call is over, and that connection has been shut down] There it is, folks. He left me speechless at the end there. I don't, I really don't know, I mean I don't know Barrett Brown personally...I know that he's got a bit of a sense of humor, but I don't know if he was joking about that or not, frankly.