Jailed Anonymous hacker Jeremy Hammond: 'My days of hacking are done'
Hammond calls his 10-year sentence a 'vengeful, spiteful act' by US
authorities eager to put a chill on political hacking
Ed Pilkington in New York
theguardian.com, Friday 15 November 2013
<http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/15/jeremy-hammond-anonymous-hacker-sentenced>
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<http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/feeding_the_flame_of_revolt_20131117>
Feeding the Flame of Revolt
Posted on Nov 17, 2013
By Chris Hedges
NEW YORK-I was in federal court here Friday for the sentencing of
Jeremy Hammond to 10 years in prison for hacking into the computers
of a private security firm that works on behalf of the government,
including the Department of Homeland Security, and corporations such
as Dow Chemical. In 2011 Hammond, now 28, released to the website
WikiLeaks and Rolling Stone and other publications some 3 million
emails from the Texas-based company Strategic Forecasting Inc., or
Stratfor.
The sentence was one of the longest in U.S. history for hacking and
the maximum the judge could impose under a plea agreement in the
case. It was wildly disproportionate to the crime-an act of
nonviolent civil disobedience that championed the public good by
exposing abuses of power by the government and a security firm. But
the excessive sentence was the point. The corporate state, rapidly
losing credibility and legitimacy, is lashing out like a wounded
animal. It is frightened. It feels the heat from a rising flame of
revolt. It is especially afraid of those such as Hammond who have the
technical skills to break down electronic walls and expose the
corrupt workings of power.
"People have a right to know what governments and corporations are
doing behind closed doors," Hammond told me when we met in the
Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan about a week and a half
before his sentencing.
I did not hope for justice from the court. Judge Loretta A. Preska is
a member of the right-wing Federalist Society. And the hack into
Stratfor gave the email address and disclosed the password of an
account used for business by Preska's husband, Thomas Kavaler, a
partner at the law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel. Some emails of the
firm's corporate clients, including Merrill Lynch, also were exposed.
The National Lawyers Guild, because the judge's husband was a victim
of the hack, filed a recusal motion that Preska, as chief judge of
the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, was
able to deny. Her refusal to recuse herself allowed her to oversee a
trial in which she had a huge conflict of interest.
The judge, who herself once was employed at Cahill Gordon & Reindel,
fulminated from the bench about Hammond's "total lack of respect for
the law." She read a laundry list of his arrests for acts of civil
disobedience. She damned what she called his "unrepentant
recidivism." She said: "These are not the actions of Martin Luther
King, Nelson Mandela or even Daniel Ellsberg; there's nothing
high-minded or public-spirited about causing mayhem"-an odd analogy
given that Mandela founded the armed wing of the African National
Congress, was considered by South Africa's apartheid government and
the United States government to be a terrorist and was vilified,
along with King and Ellsberg, by the U.S. government. She said there
was a "desperate need to promote respect for the law" and a "need for
adequate public deterrence." She read from transcripts of Hammond's
conversations in Anonymous chat rooms in which he described the goal
of hacking into Stratfor as "destroying the target, hoping for
bankruptcy, collapse" and called for "maximum mayhem." She admonished
him for releasing the unlisted phone number of a retired Arizona
police official who allegedly received threatening phone calls
afterward.
The judge imposed equally harsh measures that will take effect after
Hammond's release from prison. She ordered that he be placed under
three years of supervised control, be forbidden to use encryption or
aliases online and submit to random searches of his computer
equipment, person and home by police and any internal security agency
without the necessity of a warrant. The judge said he was legally
banned from having any contact with "electronic civil disobedience
websites or organizations." By the time she had finished she had
shredded all pretense of the rule of law.
The severe sentence-Hammond will serve more time than the combined
sentences of four men who were convicted in Britain for hacking
related to the U.S. case-was monumentally stupid for a judge seeking
to protect the interest of the ruling class. The judicial lynching of
Hammond required her to demonstrate a callous disregard for
transparency and our right to privacy. It required her to ignore the
disturbing information Hammond released showing that the government
and Stratfor attempted to link nonviolent dissident groups, including
some within Occupy, to terrorist organizations so peaceful dissidents
could be prosecuted as terrorists. It required her to accept the
frightening fact that intelligence agencies now work on behalf of
corporations as well as the state. She also had to sidestep the fact
that Hammond made no financial gain from the leak.
The sentencing converges with the state's persecution of Chelsea
Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Barrett Brown, along with
Glenn Greenwald, Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras and Sarah Harrison,
four investigative journalists who are now in self-imposed exile from
the United States. And as the numbers of our political prisoners and
exiled dissidents mount, there is the unmistakable stench of tyranny.
This draconian sentence, like the draconian sentences of other
whistle-blowers, will fan revolt. History bears this out. It will
solidify the growing understanding that we must resort, if we want to
effect real change, to unconventional tactics to thwart the mounting
abuses by the corporate state. There is no hope, this sentencing
shows, for redress from the judicial system, elected officials or the
executive branch. Why should we respect a court system, or a
governmental system, that shows no respect to us? Why should we abide
by laws that serve only to protect criminals such as Wall Street
thieves while leaving the rest of us exposed to abuse? Why should we
continue to have faith in structures of power that deny us our most
basic rights and civil liberties? Why should we be impoverished so
the profits of big banks, corporations and hedge funds can swell?
No one will save us but ourselves. That was the real message sent out
by the sentencing of Jeremy Hammond. And just as Hammond was inspired
to act by the arrest of Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning, others will
be inspired to act by Hammond and the actions taken against him. And
we can thank Judge Preska for that.
Hammond is rooted in the Black Bloc. As he was escorted out of the
courtroom on the ninth floor of the federal courthouse at 500 Pearl
St. on Friday he shouted to roughly 100 people-including a class of
prim West Point cadets in their blue uniforms-gathered there: "Long
live Anonymous! Hurrah for anarchy!" In a statement he read in court
he thanked "Free Anons, the Anonymous Solidarity Network [and]
Anarchist Black Cross" for their roles in the fight against
oppression.
Hammond has abandoned faith not only in traditional institutions,
such as the courts, but nonviolent mass protest and civil
disobedience, a point on which he and I diverge. But his analysis of
corporate tyranny is correct. And the longer the state ruthlessly
persecutes dissidents, the more the state ensures that those who
oppose it will resort to radical responses including violence. "Those
who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable,"
John F. Kennedy said. And the corporate state is not only making
peaceful change impossible but condemning it as terrorism.
In late October I spent an afternoon with Hammond in New York's
Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he had been held for 20
months. He said during our conversation, parts of which his lawyer
requested be published only after his sentencing, that he believed
that the sole way the people will now have any power is to rise up
physically and seize it. My column last week was about that
interview, and now I am including previously withheld parts of the
conversation.
Hammond defines himself as "an anarchist communist." He seeks to
destroy capitalism and the centralized power of the corporate state.
His revolutionary vision is "leaderless collectives based on free
association, consensus, mutual aid, self-sufficiency and harmony with
the environment." He embraces the classic tools of revolt, including
mass protests, general strikes and boycotts. And he sees hacking and
leaking as part of this resistance, tools not only to reveal the
truths about these systems of corporate power but to "disrupt/destroy
these systems entirely."
He participated in the Occupy movement in Chicago but found the
politics of Occupy too vague and amorphous, a point on which I
concur. He said Occupy lacked revolutionary vigor. He told me he did
not support what he called the "dogmatic nonviolence doctrine" of
many in the Occupy movement, calling it "needlessly limited and
divisive." He rejects the idea of acts of civil disobedience that
protesters know will lead to their arrest. "The point," he said, "is
to carry out acts of resistance and not get caught." He condemns
"peace patrols," units formed within the Occupy movement that sought
to prohibit acts of vandalism and violence by other protesters-most
often members of the Black Bloc-as "a secondary police force." And he
spurns the calls by many in Occupy not to antagonize the police,
calling the police "the boot boys of the 1 percent, paid to protect
the rich and powerful." He said such a tactic of non-confrontation
with the police ignored the long history of repression the police
have carried out against popular movements, as well as the "profiling
and imprisonment of our comrades."
"Because we were unprepared, or perhaps unwilling, to defend our
occupations, police and mayors launched coordinated attacks, driving
us out of our own parks," he said of the state's closure of the
Occupy encampments.
"I fully support and have participated in Black Bloc and other forms
of militant direct action," he said. "I do not believe that the
ruling powers listen to the people's peaceful protests. Black Bloc is
an effective, fluid and dynamic form of protest. It causes disruption
outside of predictable/controllable mass demonstrations through
'unarrests,' holding streets, barricades and property destruction.
Smashing corporate windows is not violence, especially when compared
to the everyday economic violence of sweatshops and 'free trade.'
Black Bloc seeks to hit them where it hurts, through economic damage.
But more than smashing windows they seek to break the spell of 'law
and order' and the artificial limitations we impose on ourselves."
I disagree with Hammond over tactics, but in the end this
disagreement is moot. It will be the ruling elites who finally
determine our response. If the corporate elites employ the full force
of the security and surveillance state against us, if corporate
totalitarian rule is one of naked, escalating and brutal physical
repression, then the violence of the state will spawn a
counter-violence. Judge Preska's decision to judicially lynch Hammond
has only added to the fury she and the state are trying to stamp out.
An astute ruling class, one aware of the rage rippling across the
American landscape, would have released Hammond on Friday and begun
to address the crimes he exposed. But our ruling class, while adept
at theft, looting, propaganda and repression, is blind to the growing
discontent caused by the power imbalance and economic inequality that
plague ordinary Americans at a time when half of the country lives in
poverty or "near poverty."
"The acts of civil disobedience and direct action that I am being
sentenced for today are in line with the principles of community and
equality that have guided my life," Hammond told the courtroom. "I
hacked into dozens of high-profile corporations and government
institutions, understanding very clearly that what I was doing was
against the law, and that my actions could land me back in federal
prison. But I felt that I had an obligation to use my skills to
expose and confront injustice-and to bring the truth to light."
"Could I have achieved the same goals through legal means?" he said.
"I have tried everything from voting petitions to peaceful protest
and have found that those in power do not want the truth to be
exposed. When we speak truth to power we are ignored at best and
brutally suppressed at worst. We are confronting a power structure
that does not respect its own system of checks and balances, never
mind the rights of its own citizens or the international community."
"My first memories of American politics was when Bush stole the
election in 2000," he told me at a metal table as we met at the
prison in a small room reserved for attorney visits, "and then how
Bush used the wave of nationalism after 9/11 to launch unprovoked
pre-emptive wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. In high school I was
involved in publishing 'underground' newsletters criticizing the
Patriot Act, the wars, and other Bush-era policies. I attended many
anti-war protests in the city [Chicago] and was introduced to other
local struggles and the larger anti-corporate globalization movement.
I began identifying as an anarchist, started to travel around the
country to various mobilizations and conferences, and began getting
arrested for various acts."
He said that his experience of street protest, especially against the
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, was seminal, for he saw that the state
had little interest in heeding the voices of protesters and others in
the public. "Instead, we were labeled as traitors, beaten and
arrested."
"I targeted law enforcement systems because of the racism and
inequality with which the criminal law is enforced," he admitted in
court. "I targeted the manufacturers and distributors of military and
police equipment who profit from weaponry used to advance U.S.
political and economic interests abroad and to repress people at
home. I targeted information security firms because they work in
secret to protect government and corporate interests at the expense
of individual rights, undermining and discrediting activists,
journalists and other truth seekers, and spreading disinformation."
An FBI informant, Hector Xavier Monsegur, posing as an Anonymous
member and using the online name "Sabu," prodded Hammond to break
into Stratfor and informed him of technical vulnerabilities in
websites of the company.
"Why the FBI would introduce us to the hacker who found the initial
vulnerability and allow this hack to continue remains a mystery,"
Hammond said as he faced the judge.
"As a result of the Stratfor hack, some of the dangers of the
unregulated private intelligence industry are now known," he said.
"It has been revealed through WikiLeaks and other journalists around
the world that Stratfor maintained a worldwide network of informants
that they used to engage in intrusive and possibly illegal
surveillance activities on behalf of large multinational
corporations."
At Sabu's urging, Hammond broke into other websites, too. Hammond, at
Sabu's request, provided information to hackers enabling them to
break into and deface official foreign government websites, including
some of Turkey, Iran and Brazil. The names of these three countries
are technically under a protective court order but have been reported
widely in the press.
"I broke into numerous sites and handed over passwords and backdoors
that enabled Sabu-and by extension his FBI handlers-to control these
targets," Hammond said.
"I don't know how other information I provided to him may have been
used, but I think the government's collection and use of this data
needs to be investigated," he went on. "The government celebrates my
conviction and imprisonment, hoping that it will close the door on
the full story. I took responsibility for my actions, by pleading
guilty, but when will the government be made to answer for its
crimes?"
"The hypocrisy of 'law and order' and the injustices caused by
capitalism cannot be cured by institutional reform but through civil
disobedience and direct action," Hammond told the court. "Yes, I
broke the law, but I believe that sometimes laws must be broken in
order to make room for change."
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