Hacker Jeremy Hammond was sentenced on Friday to 10 years in prison for stealing internal emails from global intelligence firm Stratfor.
He entered the courtroom with his long hair, a broad smile and shouted “what's up, my brothers” to a room filled with dozens of supporters. When it was his turn to speak, he argued with a defiant statement that his actions were meant to reveal the truth and that he hacked government websites at the behest of an FBI informant.
Hammond, now 28, has a long criminal record for his online and offline protests against the 2004 Republican National Convention and anti-Iraq War activist protests. But the theft of Stratfor data, along with Anonymous, has received a lot of publicity.
In May, he pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to hack into the private intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor. The breach resulted in the theft of employee email addresses and account information from Stratfor’s approximately 860,000 subscribers. The information included 60,000 credit cards.
Hammond did not use credit cards and urged his supporters to use them to make donations to charities.
“Mr. Hammond seems to think of himself as a modern-day Robin Hood,” said U.S. Attorney Loretta Preska before sentencing him. She rejected defense claims that his actions were analogous to those of Martin Luther King Jr. or Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, who also wrote a letter in his defense.
Read Hammond's apology, as announced by his defense team.
Good morning. Thank you for this opportunity. My name is Jeremy Hammond and I am here to stand trial for hacking activities that I carried out during my time with Anonymous. I have been incarcerated at MCC for the past 20 months and have had a lot of time to think about how I would like to explain my actions.
Before I begin, I want to thank all the lawyers and everyone who worked on my case: Elizabeth Fink, Susan Kellman, Sarah Kunstler, Emily Kunstler, Margaret Kunstler, and Grainne O'Neill. I would also like to thank the National Lawyers Guild, the Defense Committee and Jeremy Hammond's support network, the Free Anons, the Anonymous Solidarity Network, the Anarchist Black Cross, and all the others who have helped me and sent me letters of support.
The acts of civil disobedience and direct action that I will be sentenced to today are in accordance with the principles of community law and equality that guide my life. I entered dozens of high-profile corporations and government agencies, knowing full well that what I was doing was against the law, and that my actions could land me in federal prison. But I felt I had an obligation to use my skills to expose and confront an injustice. I wanted to bring the truth to light.I would like to be able to achieve the same goals through legal means. I have tried everything from votes to peaceful protests and I have found that those in power are unwilling to expose the truth. We are facing a power structure that does not respect its own system of checks and balances, the rights of its citizens or the international community.
My entry into politics was when George W. Bush stole the presidential election in 2000, and capitalized on the post-9/11 waves of racism and patriotism to launch unprovoked imperialist wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. I took to the streets in protest, naively believing that our voices would be heard in Washington and we could stop the war. Instead, we were branded traitors, beaten, and arrested.
I have been arrested for numerous acts of civil disobedience on the streets of Chicago. Since 2005, I have been using my computer skills for political protest. The FBI arrested me for hacking into the computer systems of a group called Protest Warrior, an organization that sells racist t-shirts on their website. I was convicted under the Electronic Fraud and Abuse Act, and the “loss” in my case was arbitrarily calculated by multiplying the 5,000 credit cards in the database by $500. A total of $2.5 million. I was convicted for that amount, and the credit cards had not been used by me or anyone else. I was then sentenced to two years in prison.
In prison, I saw the ugly reality of how the criminal justice system destroys the lives of millions of people held captive behind bars. My experience solidified my views against any repressive action and the importance of standing up for what one believes in.
When I got out, 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 community organizing. But over time, I became disillusioned 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 didn’t close Guantanamo.
This time, I worked with Wikileaks and Anonymous. It was very encouraging to see hacktivist ideas come to fruition. I was particularly moved by the heroic action of Chelsea Manning, who exposed the atrocities committed by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. She took a huge personal risk to leak this information – believing that the public had a right to know and hoping that her revelations would be a positive step towards stopping all these abuses.
I thought a lot about choosing this path again. I had to ask myself, if Chelsea Manning went to the nightmare of prison for the truth, would I want to do any less? I think the best way to show solidarity is to continue the work, exposing and confronting corruption.
I joined Anonymous because I believe in autonomous, decentralized action. At the time, Anonymous was involved in actions in support of the Arab Spring uprisings, against censorship, and in defense of Wikileaks. I had a lot to contribute, including my technical skills. It was an exciting time – the birth of a digital dissension, where the definitions and possibilities of hacktivism were taking shape.
I was particularly interested in the work of the LulzSec hackers who had breached some major targets. That's when I first started talking to Sabu, who was very open about the breaches he was allegedly committing, and encouraged other hackers to join forces and attack major government and corporate systems under the banner of Anti Security. But soon after I joined, the Lulzsec hackers were arrested, leaving me to break systems and write the press releases. Later, I learned that Sabu was the first to be arrested, and I was talking to him while he was an FBI informant.
Anonymous was also involved in the early stages of Occupy Wall Street. I took part in the operations as part of Occupy Chicago and was very excited to see a global mass movement against the injustices of capitalism and racism. Within a few months, the “Occupations” came to an end, with police crackdowns and mass arrests of protesters being chased out of public parks. The crackdown on Anonymous and the Occupy movement provided targets for AntiSec in the months that followed – the majority of the hacks that followed were against police targets in retaliation for the arrests of our comrades.
I had never heard of Stratfor until Sabu pointed it out to me. Sabu encouraged people to hack systems, and helped strategize how to facilitate attacks. He even gave me the vulnerabilities of the targets that had been shared by other hackers and it was a big surprise when I learned that Sabu was working with the FBI.On December 4, 2011, Sabu was approached by another hacker who had already breached Stratfor's credit card database. Sabu, under the watchful eye of the government, invited the hacker into our private chatroom, where he urged us to download Stratfor's entire database.
I spent a lot of time researching Stratfor and reviewing the information we had been given. I decided that Stratfor's robust customer database contained credit cards that could be used to donate to humanitarian organizations.
It took me over a week to gain further access to Stratfor’s internal systems, until I finally “cracked” their mail server. There was so much information, we needed multiple servers of our own to transfer all the emails. Sabu, who was involved in the operation every step of the way, provided a server, which of course belonged to the FBI. Over the next few weeks, messages were transferred, credit cards were used for donations, and Stratfor’s systems were defaced and destroyed. Why the FBI didn’t arrest the first hacker who found the initial vulnerability that enabled this hack remains a mystery.
After Stratfor, I continued to hack other targets, using a powerful “zero day exploit” that allowed me to gain administrator access to systems running the popular web hosting platform Plesk. Sabu repeatedly asked me for access to this exploit, but I refused to give it to him. Sabu continued to provide me with lists of vulnerable targets. I hacked many websites and uploaded the data to the FBI server.
The government is celebrating my conviction and imprisonment, hoping that this will be the end of this story. I took responsibility for my actions, I pleaded guilty, but when will the government be held accountable for its crimes?
The US uses the threat of hackers to justify the billions of dollars it spends on cybersecurity in the industrial complex, but at the same time it has the same aggressive behavior and claims that it is doing it for prevention. The hypocrisy of “law and order” and the injustices that capitalism causes cannot be cured by institutional reform, but by civil disobedience and direct action. Yes, I broke the law, but I believe that sometimes laws must be broken to make room for change.
Frederick Douglass said, “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.”I realize that releasing personal information about innocent people who had nothing to do with the actions of the authorities was not the best thing to do. I apologize for releasing data that was harmful to individuals who were unrelated to my goals. I believe in the individual right to privacy – from government surveillance, as well as from entities like myself, and I appreciate the irony of my own participation in the violation of those rights. I am determined to work to make this world a better place for all of us. I still believe in the importance of hacktivism as a form of civil disobedience, but it is time for me to move on to other ways to bring about change. The time I have spent in prison has cost my family, my friends, and my community. I know they need me at home. I acknowledge that 7 years ago I stood before another federal judge, facing similar charges, but that will not diminish my honesty.
Stay strong and keep struggling.
