When I wrote that we need protest and change rather than more crypto many people accused me of being naive and/or not proposing concrete enough alternatives. Well here is one thing you can do immediately: donate money to Barrett Brown’s defense fund.

Why should you do this? Because Barrett Brown is currently facing 105 years in prison primarily for posting a link to materials already available on the Internet. The link in question was to information that had been obtained by someone hacking the operations of Stratfor, a global intelligence company that provides analyses to governments and corporations (this is a correction: my first version mistakenly said the link was to HB Gary information).

Barrett Brown certainly has done some stupid things, such as posting a Youtube rant threatening an FBI agent. But there is a fundamental asymmetry at play at the moment. We have the NSA actively hacking into computer systems and undermining security all with impunity. And we have citizens who report on such activity under massive legal threats for doing so. The courts can play a critical role here which is why the Barrett Brown case is very important.

There are also some legislative attempts at balancing, such as the currently debated Shield Law, but they are not native to the internet as they are still trying to define what a “real reporter” is and via amendment looking to exclude sites such as Wikileaks.

The link is the fundamental unit of construction of the web. We want people to link more not less as it ties information together creating huge value. Try to imagine Wikipedia without links for a moment. Or the web at large (you’d have to type an address into your browser bar for every bit of information – that includes the images in a page). The legal starting point here should be that sharing a link should not in and of itself be a criminal offense even when that link points at problematic information.

As an aside, the information in question here are credit card files. We need to get to a security model where having someone’s credit card information is not sufficient to charge the card.