Project PM Cloudlfare subpoena. The Obama administration’s campaign against the press has extended to criminalising attempts to accurately cover the cybersecurity industry.
The Obama administration has declared a public research project examining cybersecurity to be “criminal conduct” in another of its ongoing attacks on the press. As Crikey reported a fortnight ago, the US Department of Justice issued a subpoena to network services provider Cloudflare demanding information on researchers, activists and online journalists who formed part of Project PM, a collaborative international project aimed at using publicly available information to examine the burgeoning cybersecurity industry and its links with the US government.
The subpoena was issued as part of the prosecution of writer (and sometime Crikey contributor) Barrett Brown for crimes including sharing links. In an extraordinary response to efforts to quash the subpoena, the US Justice Department has filed a notice of dismissal in which it insists: Project PM. The U.S. Government Is Suing Barrett Brown's Intelligence Research Site. Image via Nikki Loehr Over the past couple of weeks, the controversy surrounding the case against Barrett Brown—the journalist charged with three crimes, including spreading stolen credit card information that was encrypted within leaked emails from the security company Stratfor—has been stirring.
Last week, as I noted in my interview with Barrett from prison, Barrett’s mother plead guilty to her charge of obstructing evidence: she hid his computers from the FBI. ProjectPM_release.pdf. Project PM.