Barrett Brown spent his 300th day behind bars this week, accused of using information acquired by the hacker group Anonymous to report on private intelligence firms, threatening an FBI agent, and committing credit card fraud by linking to a document that contained stolen credit card data. His supporters say the writer is being targeted for daring to investigate the secret world of security contracting.

“Using information Anonymous took from the firm HBGary Federal, Brown helped discover a secret plan to tarnish the reputations of WikiLeaks and journalist Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian,” “Democracy Now!” reported Thursday. “Brown similarly analyzed and wrote about the millions of internal company emails from Stratfor Global Intelligence that were leaked in 2011.”

“Democracy Now!” talked with Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University whose article “The Strange Case of Barrett Brown” appeared in The Nation last month. Ludlow said: “Considering that the person who carried out the actual Stratfor hack had several priors and is facing a maximum of 10 years, the inescapable conclusion is that the problem is not with the hack itself but with Brown’s journalism.”

The charges against Brown could suggest it is criminal “to even link to something or share a link with someone,” he adds.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

‘Democracy Now!’:

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