A federal judge in Virginia has accepted the plea agreement of former CIA agent John Kiriakou and sentenced him to 30 months in prison for leaking the name of a CIA operative who participated in the waterboarding of al Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah to a free-lance journalist in an e-mail. The journalist then disclosed the operative's name to a researcher for a defense lawyer representing some of the Guantanamo detainees, who used the name in a sealed pleading, prompting an investigation.

The name was not disclosed publicly at the time, but it appeared on an obscure Web site in October.

As part of the agreement, the Government dropped charges against Kiriakou related to another alleged disclosure. [More...]

The feds are not letting up on activist and Anonymous "spokesman" Barrett Brown. As Wired reports, they just filed a third criminal case against him.

• Indictment in First Case
• Indictment in Second Case
• Indictment in Third Case

Brown is scheduled to have a competency hearing in the first case on January 30. (Barrett requested one.) Randall Rattan, the prison psychologist at FCI Forth Worth notified the court that prison staff believe he is competent to stand trial. [More...]

David Coleman Headly was sentenced today for his role in the Mumbai bombings and planned attack of a Danish newspaper. His plea agreement called for a life sentence, allowing him to avoid the death penalty.

He was sentenced today to 35 years, a reduced term, because of his cooperation with authorities. Even Patrick Fitzgerald showed up to argue for the lesser sentence.

Headley is 52. The Judge said today he hoped his sentence would keep Headley in prison for the rest of his life. (He will have to serve 85% of the 35 years, but he will get credit for the time he has spent in custody since his arrest in 2009.) [More...]

Ray Nagin, the former mayor of New Orleans, has been indicted by a federal grand jury on corruption charges, including bribery, money laundering, wire fraud and filing false tax returns. The indictment is here.

Key players in the case are here.

In the George Zimmerman case, Mark O'Mara has requested a subpoena to ABC News for Matt Gutman's recordings of interviews with Witness #8, who Gutman refers to as "Dee Dee" (not her real name.) You can read the motion here.

Dee Dee is the witness who claims to have been on the phone with Trayvon Martin moments before his fatal encounter with George Zimmerman. Her existence was revealed on March 20, 2012 at a press conference called by Martin family lawyer Benjamin Crump, at which he played snippets of what she told Crump during an audio interview the night before. Gutman has said he has a recording of the interview and interviewed her several times that week.

Here is the backstory. (More here.) Diwataman has the videos of Gutman's and Crump's statements on Dee Dee.

Mass. U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz answered some questions at a news conference about Aaron Swartz yesterday. She acknowledged the office knew he had mental health issues at his arraignment, 18 months ago.

Ortiz said “some issues about his mental health came up” about 18 months ago, but they were addressed during his arraignment.

As I wrote here, they were addressed by the Court ordering "medical or psychiatric treatment as directed" as a condition of bond.

But Aaron's father today, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, denies Aaron had a longstanding problem with depression. [More...]

A petition to the White House to remove Mass. U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz for her office's handling of the Aaron Swartz case has gathered 37,000 signatures. 25,000 signatures are necessary for a response from the White House.

Ortiz' husband, Tom Dolan, took to Twitter and criticized the Swartz family for its obituary, claiming it left out the 6 month offer to Aaron. Then Dolan deleted his Twitter account. But you can see it here. [More...]

George Zimmerman's legal team has received the school records of Trayvon Martin. The court authorized the subpoena in October. The state didn't object to the subpoena per se, but it wanted them submitted to the court under seal for in camera review before being released to the defense, instead of having the records delivered directly to the defense team. The Court denied that request. The Martin family, through its lawyers, objected to the subpoena.

It issued this press release today about the records, which will not be made public.

I explained the legal support for the request and including the Munoz case his lawyers cite today here, here and here. [More...]

Two of Aaron Swartz's attorneys, one current and one former, say that the Government wanted Aaron Swartz to plead guilty to all 13 counts in the Superseding Indictment, and it would recommend a sentence of six months in confinement.

Aaron's first attorney, Andrew Good, also says he told the Government Aaron was a suicide risk.

[Good]said he told federal prosecutors in Massachusetts that Swartz was a suicide risk. “Their response was, put him in jail, he’ll be safe there,” Good said.

[More...]

MIT announced it will conduct an internal probe of its role in the events that led to Aaron Swartz' suicide. MIT President Raul Reif writes:

I have asked Professor Hal Abelson to lead a thorough analysis of MIT's involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present. I have asked that this analysis describe the options MIT had and the decisions MIT made, in order to understand and to learn from the actions MIT took. I will share the report with the MIT community when I receive it.

Also Sunday, Anonymous hacked MIT's website, posting a tribute to Aaron and calling for reform. [More...]

The latest in the explosives bust of the rich heroin users in Greenwich Village a few weeks ago: Police say Aaron Greene planned to blow up the Washington Square arch.

This is such an odd story. [More...]

Kim Dotcom claims a double-cross. More here. The brief his legal team filed yesterday in the Eastern District of Virginia is here.

Megaupload and Dotcom are also seeking to have the search warrant from June 24, 2010 against Carpathia Hosting company unsealed. (It was provided to Carpathia and Megaupload when issued by the Court, but has never been officially unsealed for the public.) It notes that Wired, in this article, has already published the search warrant. The warrant was sought in an investigation of Ninjavideo (government press release on sentencing in Ninjavideo here.)

Another good article explaining all this is here. Dotcom lawyer Ira Rothken explains the relevance here. [More...]