Barrett Brown leaves prison still chained to a crime he didn’t commit

Dallas-based journalist Barrett Brown walked free from prison on Tuesday morning after spending more than four years behind bars.

The 35-year-old cause célèbre, convicted in January 2015 after spending more than two years in pretrial confinement, faces a laundry list of post-release restrictions and obligations, including drug treatment, mental health evaluations, and computer monitoring. After departing the Three Rivers federal correctional institution in San Antonio, where Brown continued his work as a writer over the past year, publishing award-winning essays at D Magazine and the Intercept, he will report to a halfway house in Hutchins, Texas, before 4pm CT.

Brown has been ordered to continue paying at least $200 every month to Stratfor, the Austin-based intelligence firm, over the devastating cyberattack that nearly crippled the company five years ago. While Brown had no foreknowledge of the security breach—which, despite popular belief, occurred more than a month prior to the involvement of Anonymoushacker Jeremy Hammond and his AntiSec crew—Brown is nevertheless stuck paying $890,250 in restitution for a computer crime he had neither the skillset nor the inclination to carry out himself.

An offbeat agitator, Brown is what David Carr, the late New York Times journalist, described as “a pretty complicated victim.” His case, at its core, was often a battle over the identity of the man himself: Whereas the United States government went to great lengths in court to portray Brown and Anonymous as two sides of the same coin, his supporters (Noam Chomsky, Cory Doctorow, and the late Michael Ratner among them) saw him rather as a cocky, freewheeling journalist with anarchic views about transparency.

Brown’s case was often depicted in the press as having potentially far-reaching consequences for journalists and researchers.

Brown’s eagerness to uncover the U.S. government’s dealings with private security and intelligence contractors led to frequent exchanges with criminal hackers (while, incidentally, under FBI surveillance) and placed him perilously close to the national security investigation into WikiLeaks, which is ongoing to this day.

Read the rest at the Daily Dot.