Former Anonymous ‘spokesman’ and journalist Barrett Brown was handed a 63-month federal jail term on Thursday for threatening an FBI agent and two other offences.
Brown, who has written for the Guardian, Vanity Fair and the Huffington Post, will also need to pay $890,000 in restitution fees after a Dallas judge threw the book at him, despite the fact he has already spent nearly three years in prison.
The journalist founded Project PM, a wiki designed to crowdsource the analysis of ‘intelligence contracting’, cybersecurity and surveillance industries.
In 2012, Brown posted a series of YouTube videos and tweets allegedly threatening an FBI agent investigating the 2011 Stratfor hack, for which he was arrested and charged.
Months later, he was indicted on new charges which effectively amounted to him sharing a link to the hacked Stratfor records that had been posted online.
Although the authorities eventually dismissed 11 of the 12 charges based on hyperlinking, in March 2014 he ultimately signed a plea agreement.
This involved him pleading guilty to three crimes: hiding a laptop, which interfered with the execution of a search warrant; threatening an FBI agent; and being an accessory after the fact to unauthorized access to Stratfor’s computers.
Some 48 of the total 63-month sentence was handed down for the FBI threats Brown made, which he has already admitted was a mistake and the result of withdrawing from prescription medication.
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