>Imagine a guy gets passed the key to a storage locker by his friends, and is told that the storage locker holds stolen trade secrets, credit cards, etc. This guy had nothing to do with the theft itself, but he knows about it.

I can imagine, but it's not what happened. LulzSec shotgunned the release out onto the web, where everyone picked it up, not just Brown.

>Let's say further that this guy duplicates the key and mails it to a gang to do with as they will. If providing that gang access to that locker is illegal then homeboy here has certainly "aided & abetted" in that behavior,...

It isn't illegal. LulzSec is responsible for the release. Specifically, Jeremy Hammond has been charged and convicted with the actual crime of hacking into Stratfor and releasing the material. He was facing a life sentence and received 10 years and 2.5 million dollars in restitution upon pleading guilty. The liklihood that he could ever get that restitution dropped, via bankruptcy or other means, is minimal. Financially, he has effectively been given a life sentence. Brown no more aided and abetted anyone than Cryptome or any of the other numerous actors that linked to and received the link or, heaven forbid, downloaded the material, and yet Brown is facing punishment of similar magnitude to the guy who actually committed the crime.

>Likewise our intrepid, noble and completely objective storywriter uses the maximum legally-possible sentence as a FUD factor without so much as a single reference to the sentencing guidelines which would be used to determine an actual eventual sentence.

What typically happens is irrelevant. It shouldn't be possible for someone like Hammond to face life in prison, or Manning to face the death penalty, or Brown to face 105 years at all. To make that possible is to make a "lighter" sentence of 10 years for Hammond (and 2.5 million dollars), or 35 years for Manning, or 5 years for Brown, seem graciously reasonable. The constant whiny poo-pooing that "they won't really get that much," and cheeky linking to blog posts intended to inform the uninformed masses about the federal sentencing guidelines, is nothing more than noise. It truly intends to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

>There is a question to be asked here: Should these types of forcibly-exfiltrated secrets have any special inherent legal protection?

>The answer isn't obviously "no" either, by the way, otherwise our current protections against identity theft could hardly apply, not to mention the Privacy Act of 1974, medical record protections, etc.

It really is an obvious "no." Hacking into customer databases and pilfering the contents is a crime. A crime that has been tried in court with the accused convicted and serving time in prison. Once information is out in the clear, it makes absolutely zero sense to try and claim some sort of retroactive "special inherent legal protection." The protection already exists, with punishment for its violation. The crime is for putting documents into the clear, not propagating them, no matter their contents.

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http://cryptome.org/0005/stratfor-hack.htm

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|->http://pastebin.com/f7jYf5Wd

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|->http://ibhg35kgdvnb7jvw.onion/lulzxmas/stratfor_full.tar.gz

Do I get N decades in prison for that? Do I get N months for that? N days? If my sentence is anything other than "0 days" and "absolutely no harassment" then justice has not been upheld.