Actualité militante Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison, Jeremy Hammond Uses Allocution to Give Consequential Statement High

Anarchie 13 · 3 Octobre 2014

Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison, Jeremy Hammond Uses Allocution to Give Consequential Statement Highlighting Global Criminal Exploits by FBI Handlers

[NEW YORK, NY] Jeremy Hammond, a 28-year-old political activist, was sentenced today to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to participating in the Anonymous hack into the computers of the private intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor). The Ceremonial Courtroom at the Federal Court for the Southern District of New York was filled today with an outpouring of support by journalists, activists and other whistleblowers who see Jeremy Hammond’s actions as a form of civil disobedience, motivated by a desire to protest and expose the secret activities of private intelligence corporations.

jeremy hammond by molly crabapple
Jeremy Hammond, by Molly Crabapple

The hearing opened with arguments as to what sections of the court record will remain redacted after sentencing. While Jeremy’s attorneys initially erred on the side of caution in previous memorandums and kept large pieces of the record redacted, both the defense and prosecution agreed this morning that many of the sections should now be made available for public view. The prosecution, however took stiff exception to portions of the court record being made public that indicate victims, specifically foreign governments, that Jeremy allegedly hacked under the direction of Hector “Sabu” Monsegur, the FBI informant at the helm of Jeremy’s alleged actions. Judge Preska ordered that the names of these foreign governments remain sealed.

Jeremy’s counsel, Sarah Kunstler, who is 9 months pregnant and due to give birth today, delivered a passionate testimonial as to the person that Jeremy is, and the need for people like Jeremy during this era of exponential changes in our socio-political landscape. (Read Sarah Kunstler’s complete argument HERE) She was followed by co-counsel, Susan Kellman, who wept as she recalled her own experiences reading the hundreds of letters from supporters to the court detailing Jeremy Hammond’s unbridled selflessness and enthusiastic volunteerism. She pointed out that it was this same selflessness that motivated Jeremy’s actions in this case. She closed her testimony by underscoring that, “The centerpiece of our argument is a young man with high hopes and unbelievably laudable expectations in this world.”

Susan was followed by Jeremy Hammond himself, who gave a detailed, touching and consequential allocution to the court. The following is Jeremy’s statement to the court. We have redacted a portion [marked in red] upon the orders of Judge Preska. While we believe the public has a right to know the redacted information therein, we refuse to publish information that could adversely effect Jeremy or his counsel.

JEREMY HAMMOND’S SENTENCING STATEMENT | 11/15/2013

Good morning. Thank you for this opportunity. My name is Jeremy Hammond and I’m here to be sentenced for hacking activities carried out during my involvement with Anonymous. I have been locked up at MCC for the past 20 months and have had a lot of time to think about how I would explain my actions.

Before I begin, I want to take a moment to recognize the work of the people who have supported me. I want to thank all the lawyers and others who worked on my case: Elizabeth Fink, Susan Kellman, Sarah Kunstler, Emily Kunstler, Margaret Kunstler, and Grainne O’Neill. I also want to thank the National Lawyers Guild, the Jeremy Hammond Defense Committee and Support Network, Free Anons, the Anonymous Solidarity Network, Anarchist Black Cross, and all others who have helped me by writing a letter of support, sending me letters, attending my court dates, and spreading the word about my case. I also want to shout out my brothers and sisters behind bars and those who are still out there fighting the power.

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. 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? 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 it’s own citizens or the international community.

My introduction to politics was when George W. Bush stole the Presidential election in 2000, then took advantage of the waves of racism and patriotism after 9/11 to launch unprovoked imperialist wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. I took to the streets in protest naively believing our voices would be heard in Washington and we could stop the war. Instead, we were labeled as traitors, beaten, and arrested.

I have been arrested for numerous acts of civil disobedience on the streets of Chicago, but it wasn’t until 2005 that I used my computer skills to break the law in political protest. I was arrested by the FBI for hacking into the computer systems of a right-wing, pro-war group called Protest Warrior, an organization that sold racist t-shirts on their website and harassed anti-war groups. I was charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and the “intended loss” in my case was arbitrarily calculated by multiplying the 5000 credit cards in Protest Warrior’s database by $500, resulting in a total of $2.5 million.My sentencing guidelines were calculated on the basis of this “loss,” even though not a single credit card was used or distributed – by me or anyone else. I was sentenced to two years in prison.

While in prison I have seen for myself the ugly reality of how the criminal justice system destroys the lives of the millions of people held captive behind bars. The experience solidified my opposition to repressive forms of power and the importance of standing up for what you believe.

When I was released, I was eager to continue my involvement in struggles for social change. I didn’t want to go back to prison, so I focused on above-ground community organizing. But over time, I became frustrated with the limitations, of peaceful protest, seeing it as reformist and ineffective. The Obama administration continued the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, escalated the use of drones, and failed to close Guantanamo Bay.

Around this time, I was following the work of groups like Wikileaks and Anonymous. It was very inspiring to see the ideas of hactivism coming to fruition. I was particularly moved by the heroic actions of Chelsea Manning, who had exposed the atrocities committed by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. She took an enormous personal risk to leak this information – believing that the public had a right to know and hoping that her disclosures would be a positive step to end these abuses. It is heart-wrenching to hear about her cruel treatment in military lockup.

I thought long and hard about choosing this path again. I had to ask myself, if Chelsea Manning fell into the abysmal nightmare of prison fighting for the truth, could I in good conscience do any less, if I was able? I thought the best way to demonstrate solidarity was to continue the work of exposing and confronting corruption.

I was drawn to Anonymous because I believe in autonomous, decentralized direct action. At the time Anonymous was involved in operations in support of the Arab Spring uprisings, against censorship, and in defense of Wikileaks. I had a lot to contribute, including technical skills, and how to better articulate ideas and goals. It was an exciting time – the birth of a digital dissent movement, where the definitions and capabilities of hacktivism were being shaped.

I was especially interested in the work of the hackers of LulzSec who were breaking into some significant targets and becoming increasingly political. Around this time, I first started talking to Sabu, who was very open about the hacks he supposedly committed, and was encouraging hackers to unite and attack major government and corporate systems under the banner of Anti Security. But very early in my involvement, the other Lulzsec hackers were arrested, leaving me to break into systems and write press releases. Later, I would learn that Sabu had been the first one arrested, and that the entire time I was talking to him he was an FBI informant.

Anonymous was also involved in the early stages of Occupy Wall Street. I was regularly participating on the streets as part of Occupy Chicago and was very excited to see a worldwide mass movement against the injustices of capitalism and racism. In several short months, the “Occupations” came to an end, closed by police crackdowns and mass arrests of protestors who were kicked out of their own public parks. The repression of Anonymous and the Occupy Movement set the tone for Antisec in the following months – the majority of our hacks against police targets were in retaliation for the arrests of our comrades.

I targeted law enforcement systems because of the racism and inequality with which the criminal law is enforced. 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.

I had never even heard of Stratfor until Sabu brought it to my attention. Sabu was encouraging people to invade systems, and helping to strategize and facilitate attacks. He even provided me with vulnerabilities of targets passed on by other hackers, so it came as a great surprise when I learned that Sabu had been working with the FBI the entire time.

On December 4, 2011, Sabu was approached by another hacker who had already broken into Stratfor’s credit card database. Sabu, under the watchful eye of his government handlers, then brought the hack to Antisec by inviting this hacker to our private chatroom, where he supplied download links to the full credit card database as well as the initial vulnerability access point to Stratfor’s systems.

I spent some time researching Stratfor and reviewing the information we were given, and decided that their activities and client base made them a deserving target. I did find it ironic that Stratfor’s wealthy and powerful customer base had their credit cards used to donate to humanitarian organizations, but my main role in the attack was to retrieve Stratfor’s private email spools which is where all the dirty secrets are typically found.

It took me more than a week to gain further access into Stratfor’s internal systems, but I eventually broke into their mail server. There was so much information, we needed several servers of our own in order to transfer the emails. Sabu, who was involved with the operation at every step, offered a server, which was provided and monitored by the FBI. Over the next weeks, the emails were transferred, the credit cards were used for donations, and Stratfor’s systems were defaced and destroyed. Why the FBI would introduce us to the hacker who found the initial vulnerability and allow this hack to continue remains a mystery.

As a result of the Stratfor hack, some of the dangers of the unregulated private intelligence industry are now known. 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.

After Stratfor, I continued to break into other targets, using a powerful “zero day exploit” allowing me administrator access to systems running the popular Plesk webhosting platform. Sabu asked me many times for access to this exploit, which I refused to give him. Without his own independent access, Sabu continued to supply me with lists of vulnerable targets. I broke into numerous websites he supplied, uploaded the stolen email accounts and databases onto Sabu’s FBI server, and handed over passwords and backdoors that enabled Sabu (and, by extension, his FBI handlers) to control these targets.

These intrusions, all of which were suggested by Sabu while cooperating with the FBI, affected thousands of domain names and consisted largely of foreign government websites, including those of XXXXXX, XXXXXX, XXXX, XXXXXX, XXXXX, XXXXXXXX, XXXXXXX and the XXXXXX XXXXXXX. In one instance, Sabu and I provided access information to hackers who went on to deface and destroy many government websites in XXXXXX. 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.

jeremy hammond hearing
Sketch from inside Judge Preska’s courtroom, by Molly Crabapple

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 U.S. hypes the threat of hackers in order to justify the multi billion dollar cyber security industrial complex, but it is also responsible for the same conduct it aggressively prosecutes and claims to work to prevent. 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. Yes I broke the law, but I believe that sometimes laws must be broken in order to make room for change.

In the immortal word of Frederick Douglas, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

This is not to say that I do not have any regrets. I realize that I released the personal information of innocent people who had nothing to do with the operations of the institutions I targeted. I apologize for the release of data that was harmful to individuals and irrelevant to my goals. I believe in the individual right to privacy – from government surveillance, and from actors like myself, and I appreciate the irony of my own involvement in the trampling of these rights. I am committed to working to make this world a better place for all of us. I still believe in the importance of hactivism as a form of civil disobedience, but it is time for me to move on to other ways of seeking change. My time in prison has taken a toll on my family, friends, and community. I know I am needed at home. I recognize that 7 years ago I stood before a different federal judge, facing similar charges, but this does not lessen the sincerity of what I say to you today.

It has taken a lot for me to write this, to explain my actions, knowing that doing so — honestly — could cost me more years of my life in prison. I am aware that I could get as many as 10 years, but I hope that I do not, as I believe there is so much work to be done.

STAY STRONG AND KEEP STRUGGLING!

To schedule interviews with Jeremy Hammond’s attorneys and supporters following today’s sentencing please contact Andy Stepanian, 631.291.3010, [email protected].

The Jeremy Hammond Defense Committee is a coalition of family members, activists, lawyers, and other supporters who are working together to protect free speech and to support Jeremy Hammond. The committee’s goal is to provide information to the public and the press, to organize events related to Jeremy’s case, and to support Jeremy while he is in jail. For more information, please visit http://freejeremy.net.

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Hacked!
hammond-surveilled
The fall of the FBI’s most-wanted cybercriminal
By Kevin Collier on August 9th, 2014

On an unseasonably cold Saturday afternoon in March 2012, Jeremy Hammond, one of the most destructive hackers in American history, logged into his computer in his squalid Chicago duplex for the second-to-last time.

His friend Sabu, a notorious hacker who had often encouraged him to attack more ambitious targets, was playfully giving him a hard time over his period offline.

“I mean you disappered all day. I’m lways used to you online haha,” Sabu hammered out in a hastily typed chat on March 4. “missed you . no homo.”

Hammond, typing from the username “yohoho,” responded sharply: “yeah I have been putting in nearly full time work here. weekdns I usually go out partying.”

Under the banner of the faceless hacker collective Anonymous, the two had close been cohorts for the past eight months. Sabu usually picked the targets—namely foreign government sites like that of the Brazilian military police—while Hammond, a longstanding political activist, did the heavy lifting. It’s not that he didn’t trust his partner, but Hammond, a veteran hacker at 27, took precautions. He only talked with Sabu over encrypted chat, and while they spoke multiple times a day, he never gave his actual name and made only oblique references to his personal life.

They were, after all, Anonymous.

Their conversation moved to their next target, an online security firm called Panda. Hammond wasn’t quite ready to strike. He said he wanted help getting the company’s full email services.

For the FBI, not even the most technically adept member of Anonymous can stay anonymous forever.

Panda had become personal: Hammond was particularly peeved at the company’s technical director, Luis Corrons, for allegedly helping police bust some of their compatriots. Corrons would later tell me that he never specifically helped cops with Hammond and Sabu’s hacking crew, LulzSec (meaning “LOL Security”), though he’s worked with law enforcement to stop hackers plenty of times before and since.

That’s not how Hammond saw it.

“Luis himself says he cooperated with the police to bust hackers,” he wrote.

The painful irony was that Sabu, whose real name is now known to be Hector Monsegur, was operating at the time as an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Sabu’s New York City apartment had been raided by the FBI in June 2011, not long after Hammond first reached out to him to partner up, and he quickly flipped to avoid a long prison sentence away from his two nieces, whom he raised like daughters.

This chat and hundreds of others with Hammond—detailing every intended and executed criminal hack—went straight to federal authorities.

Hammond didn’t know that when he logged off and left his house a few hours later, the FBI was posted outside, watching. Agents were tracking him as he went out with friends, playing a show with his ska-punk band and dumpster-diving for food in the wee hours of the morning. It was his last free night before his arrest and eventual 10-year sentence, the maximum for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

Jeremy Hammond never left explicit traces of his identity to even his most trusted online confidant—”yohoho” was hardly his only regular username—and he took all the necessary technical steps to hide his tracks online. However, sealed court documents from his trial—a cache of thousands of chat logs, surveillance photos, and court orders, obtained by the Daily Dot—offer a rare look at the extreme detective work the FBI put into nabbing a coveted hacker target.

For the FBI, not even the most technically adept member of Anonymous can stay anonymous forever.

hammond-breaker

Sitting alone in the lunch hall of Manchester Federal Correctional Institution, the Kentucky federal prison where he’s serving out his sentence, Hammond’s still baffled as to how he got caught. He’s bulked up some in prison, but his khaki uniform is still baggy on his wiry frame. His wispy mustache and goatee look like an unintentional nod to the Guy Fawkes mask, the symbol of Anonymous.

“I mean, were there 100 FBI agents sitting around brainstorming?” he asked me.

Hammond knew from the evidence presented to him before he went to trial that the feds didn’t track his computer through cyberspace. They found him by piecing together his identity so skillfully, the agency convinced a court to let them bust down his door.

“Once they got that warrant, they got my hard drive. Even though it was encrypted, it was all over.”

The FBI pinned its case on one piece of glaring evidence: A hacker, who chatted with Sabu under the alias “sup_g,” was the primary actor in the attack on the American intelligence firm Stratfor in December 2011. An elite intelligence-gathering firm, Stratfor was a perfect target for Hammond: a glaring example of the military industrial complex, boasting pathetically weak security. And with customers as prominent in the American political system as Dan Quayle and Henry Kissinger, messing with Stratfor “pissed off a lot of people,” Hammond said.

Stratfor was one of the largest hacks in American history, left in a smoldering ruin by the time AntiSec was done with it. The group deleted several of the company’s databases, exfiltrated an estimated 60,000 credit card numbers and related data, and through the whistleblower organization WikiLeaks, leaked 5 million internal office emails. The hack caused an estimated $3.78 million worth of damage. Sup_g not only bragged about each step in the chat, he detailed the technical knowledge necessary to have pulled it off.

For the FBI, there was one big question: Who was sup_g in real life? The answer came not in the form of a singular revelation, but in a series of seemingly distant dots, between Hammond’s oblique online references and his real-world actions, connected through on-the-ground surveillance, starting that fateful Saturday in March.

That evening, after yohoho wrapped up his chat with Sabu, Hammond left his house for a show with his band, Dirty Surgeon Insurgency, at the Ball Hall, a grungy music-and-art space in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood. According to FBI surveillance logs, Hammond and two compatriots loaded up their instruments into a Jeep Patriot SUV at 2:28am that morning. Agents followed the van a mile and a half to a Shell gas station. There, Hammond hopped out and started rifling through a trash can. The FBI captured the moment with a series of photos.

From there, a photographer captured him crossing the street. “Jeremy Hammond is at a dumpster behind Pizza Hut,” one agent’s report bluntly states.

He returned, got back in the Jeep, and traveled home, but not before making one other stop. The agent’s report reads, “Jeremy Hammond is at a dumpster near Burger King. Jeremy Hammond hands a bag from the dumpster to” a close associate.

This is the sort of non-exclusive evidence the FBI brought to the table in March, when the Department of Justice charged him with the CFAA, a law that prohibits “unauthorized access” to another’s computer. Critics say its broad language allows it to be selectively enforced whenever the government wants to make an example of a hacker. Andrew “weev” Auernheimer spent more than a year in prison for breaking the law before a judge threw out the case, and Internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz‘s CFAA charges loomed heavily on him when he took his own life in January 2013.

The FBI already suspected Hammond enough to put a surveillance detail on him, of course, and slowly hazy clues started coming into focus. As one agent would later testify, “Hammond is a ‘freegan.’ In conducting surveillance, agents have seen Hammond going into dumpsters to get food.”

That observation was paired with an online exchange from seven months before—a needle in a haystack of countless chat logs.

Around 3:30am on July 31, 2011, as the FBI would later tell the court, a user known as POW had written that “dumpster diving is all good i’m a freegan goddess.” POW had dropped an identifying clue 10 days before as well. In an IRC chat, Sabu asked, “who is POW,” requesting “your old nick.” POW replied, “something anarchist related maybe.” Agents took that to refer to the user “Anarchaos,” who frequented those same Anonymous chat rooms.

And who was Anarchaos? Sabu told the FBI that before he was caught and turned informant, Anarchaos had alluded to being detained during the Republican National Convention in 2004, held in New York City. And on June 10, 2011—after Sabu turned, putting all his chats on the record—yohoho made a similar claim. Referring to Sabu’s native New York City, which was an open secret in the Anonymous circles, yohoho said, “I haven’t been there since the RNC.”

That’s where the breadth of the FBI’s system of tracking potential troublemakers came into play: They’d had tabs on Hammond, simply as an activist who knew computers, since at least 2004. That’s when he was truly coming into his own as an activist.

“Growing up in the Bush years, the war in Iraq, the passage of laws like the Patriot Act is what got me involved [as an activist],” he told me in the prison.

Hammond was filled with a righteous indignation at the Bush administration, and the Republican Party in general, and made his foray into relative fame. He even gave a talk that year at the DEFCON hacking conference in Las Vegas, Nev., called “Electronic Civil Disobedience and the Republican National Convention.” At its conclusion, a DEFCON employee joined Hammond onstage to stress that the conference wasn’t sanctioning anyone to “blow up a Republican bus!” At this point, Hammond glibly remarked, “Please do.”

That was the first time Hammond met the FBI. “Agents came to my home and said, ‘You said in your speech you wanted to blow stuff up?’” Hammond recalled. “I said no to everything, of course.”

A month after that talk, Hammond traveled to New York City to protest the Republican National Convention. It was held barely a year after the U.S.’s invasion of Iraq, and the GOP was seen by many as crassly exploiting 9/11 to drum up support for an unrelated, illegal war. Hammond was among the hundreds detained at those protests, a group that later won the largest protest settlement in American history.

“The biggest thing that sunk me was being at the RNC,” Hammond told me. There, he was among the many activists who arrived to protest the convention but were detained in paddywagons. An FBI agent questioned him and took down his name. Being there was a badge of honor he carried for years.

“Sabu was never that important. I was doing the hacking. I was writing the press releases. He was just a mouth, bragging on Twitter.” —Jeremy Hammond

Anarchaos, Sabu later recalled to the FBI, had referenced being detained at that convention. So when yohoho made a similar reference, the FBI had a thread. And on Nov. 6, in a private encrypted chat on messaging platform Jabber, sup_g—the same user who a month later outed himself as the main actor in the Stratfor hack—bluntly told Sabu, “k im sup g.”

The FBI concluded its most-wanted cybercriminal went by Anarchaos, yohoho, and POW. It knew he was a freegan activist who had been detained at the 2004 GOP convention. Those accounts, as well as others the FBI traced to Hammond, also echoed his political sentiments: anarchism, vicious anti-racism. One alias referenced prison time, and Hammond had previously done a stint for hacking a right-wing, pro–Iraq War site called Protest Warrior.

That was enough for a judge to grant the FBI a warrant and permission to secretly install what’s known as a pen/trap device, which allowed for the monitoring of Hammond’s Internet activity at the end of February 2012. That, coupled with the physical surveillance, allowed the agency to see when he was home. What they found correlated with his Tor usage—which allowed him to hide his IP address—and when “yohoho” was online, talking to Sabu.

Screen Shot 2014-08-08 at 2.58.50 PM

“I did use all of those,” he admitted to me. “And a few of them I used they didn’t find.”

hammond-breaker

Here’s how the actual bust went down.

On March 5, 2012, the night after agents spied Hammond dumpster-diving, the FBI prepared to move in. From multiple stakeouts, agents created a rough floor plan and decided to enter his home from the rear door.

Hammondfloorplan1

Hammond was chatting with Sabu again, using “yohoho” as usual. At 8:43pm, Sabu claimed he’d found some new exploits. Someone had figured out a way to hack OkCupid, he said. At 8:46, Hammond responded he wasn’t that interested.

At 8:47, Sabu said, “wow this bug is weird.” Hammond didn’t respond, and never would again. The FBI had obtained a no-knock warrant, meaning it could bust in without warning. Agents found him shocked, standing in the doorway to his bedroom. They ordered him down on the ground and cuffed him.

At 9:19, Hammond arrived at FBI offices in Chicago. At 9:30, the FBI’s Evidence Response Team arrived at Hammond’s house and got to work. At 9:41, Hammond requested to speak with his lawyer, so the FBI gave up on trying to interview him and took him to a Chicago Police Department jail for the night.

The ERT began its search for evidence at 105. They counted 15 phones, 165 CDs, and two laptops. Just before midnight, members of the Regional Computer Forensics Lab (RCFL) and the Computer Analysis Response Team (CART) removed one white Apple MacBook and power cord containing a “Prisons Are for Burning” decal, and transported it to the RCFL for further analysis.

At first, Hammond considered trying to fight his charges. When the FBI showed him logs of his chats with Sabu, he gave up and pled guilty.

“I didn’t know he was an informant until the day after I was arrested,” Hammond told me. In group chats, he was always a little worried that someone was an informant, but not in his one-on-ones with Sabu. “It was surprising, but, you know, hindsight.”

Hammond paused. “Sabu was never that important. I was doing the hacking. I was writing the press releases. He was just a mouth, bragging on Twitter. He talked, but he’s not that skilled. We were already cutting him out.”

In the days after his arrest, in solidarity, the remaining members of LulzSec hacked Panda security without Hammond, defacing its pages with videos proclaiming their exploits. But those didn’t stay up long, and the remaining members of LulzSec were either arrested or have faded into the obscurity offered by the Internet. The Dirty Surgeon Insurgency, Hammond’s band, went on tour in his absence and advocated for his release, but the group has since disbanded.

In December, Hammond was sentenced to maximum charges under the CFAA: 10 years minus time served. He’s scheduled for release on Christmas Day, 2020.

His partner-in-cybercrime, Hector “Sabu” Monsegur, wasn’t sentenced until May 27, 2014. Judge Loretta Preska praised his “extraordinary” efforts in aiding law enforcement and spoke of “virtual around-the-clock cooperation where Mr. Monsegur was sitting with agents.” He was granted just one year of probation.

Questions still linger, however, about the nature of the relationship between Hammond and Sabu.

Other FBI documents provided to Hammond’s defense team, obtained by the Daily Dot, show that Sabu not only explicitly directed Hammond to hack Stratfor but gave him the tools to do so. Sabu appears to have also instructed other members of LulzSec to hack a multitude of high-level targets, including Arizona’s Department of Public Safety, the Federal Trade Commission’s own anti-hacking advisory site, at least 10 Brazilian targets, and others in Iran, Syria, and Turkey.

Peggy Cross-Goldenberg, one of Sabu’s attorneys, told the court during his sentencing hearing that the FBI “tracked everything he typed with a key-logging program” and installed a camera in his house. As such, it appears the FBI was explicitly involved in orchestrating the very same computer crimes that hackers are routinely charged for.

“It sure sounds like the FBI didn’t have any regard for international law,” Hammond wryly noted to me.

The agency declined to comment for the story.

At the end of our chat, which went on about 10 minutes past our two-hour limit, a guard interrupted Hammond mid-sentence and told us our time was up. I shook his hand, and looked him in the eye, and he headed back—his head still held high.

Correction: A previous version misidentified the hacking crew responsible for the attack on Stratfor. It was AntiSec. We regret the error.

Illustration by Jason Reed
- See more at: http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue...d-fbi-surveillance-bust/#sthash.O8gvMFZt.dpuf

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Actualité militante Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison, Jeremy Hammond Uses Allocution to Give Consequential Statement High

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