In the midst of all the news about Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, James Risen, Aaron Swarz, (and possibly Michael Hastings) we cannot forget about the plight of Barrett Brown who is awaiting trial here in Texas.
The federal trial of journalist-turned-hacktivist Barrett Brown is currently scheduled to begin in a downtown Dallas courtroom next month — a year after he was arrested in his Dallas apartment while in the midst of an online chat. That date may change: Some point soon, possibly before day’s end, a federal judge will rule on a request made by Brown’s attorneys to push the start date to February of next year.
The federal government vehemently opposes an extension, and has also asked the judge to “[restrict] the parties[‘] use of the media.” Brown’s attorneys call the government’s move nothing short of a gag order.
Charlie Swift, best known as the attorney who defended Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard and driver, and UT Law School’s Ahmed Ghappour took Brown’s case in April. Said Ghappour at the time, this case, which could land Brown behind bars for more than 100 years, “is one of those cases that will set standards with respect to the First Amendment.” It’s also a complicated one involving myriad counts of alleged criminal conduct, including threatening an FBI agent, conspiring to release the personal information of a U.S. government employee, identity theft and hyperlinking to “a document full of credit card numbers and their authentication codes that was stolen from the security company Stratfor” after it was hacked by Anonymous in 2011, as Vice explained earlier this year.
Since his arrest and detention in Mansfield, Brown has been the subject of myriad pieces heralding him as, among other things, a “political prisoner of the information revolution,” per the U.K. Guardian‘s July headline. “If he is convicted,” read a recent post on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s website, “it could have dire consequences for press freedom.”
Weird Texas 