re: #62 Charles Johnson

Yes, one of the charges was that he shared a link to the stolen Stratfor docs — but by doing so, he enabled massive credit card fraud and privacy violations of the people who were on Stratfor’s membership list. That one link caused a huge amount of financial damage and grief.

This is definitely true, but the gray area is that Hammond was the one who did the actual hacking, and in technical terms, what Brown did was not really different than Google indexing torrent sharing sites (I know you know this :). Again, Brown caused real problems with this, and he’s not a hero, but the information was already on public servers. So, hacking charges were the wrong legal tool to use against him.