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Hacker Jeremy Hammond was sentenced this morning to 10 years in prison and three years of supervised release for a damaging, politically motivated computer intrusion at the private intelligence firm Stratfor in 2011.
The 28-year-old Chicagoan pleaded guilty earlier this year to hacking the servers of Strategic Forecasting, Inc., where he wiped out files and databases and stole 5 million private email messages and 60,000 customer credit card numbers. The emails went to WikiLeaks, while the credit cards were used by Anonymous to rack up $700,000 in fraudulent donations to non-profit groups.
Hammond’s lawyers, armed with an internet petition and over 250 letters of support, had sought a sentence of 20 months time-served, positioning Hammond as a whistleblower working to expose wrongdoing at private contractors tied to law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
“I targeted law enforcement systems because of the racism and inequality with which the criminal law is enforced,” Hammond told U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska, reading from a statement that’s now been posted online.
“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.”
Stratfor was primarily in the business of selling private geopolitical intelligence reports from around the world to subscribers, including companies, journalists and private individuals. But the emails taken by Hammond showed Stratfor was engaged in some ickier practices, including tracking the public movements of activists fighting Dow Chemical over the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, India.
“Jeremy saw working with Anonymous and Antisec as an opportunity to be like Chelsea Manning – to do his part to access information that needed to be shared with the people,” wrote defense attorneys Susan Kellman and Sarah Kinstler in a court filing earlier this month.
Prosecutors noted that Hammond had already been given a reduced sentence once before, in 2006, when he received two years in prison for hacking a right-wing group’s website and stealing credit card numbers.
“Hammond is a computer hacking recidivist who … went on to engage in a massive hacking spree during which he caused harm to numerous businesses, individuals, and governments, resulting in losses of between $1 million and $2.5 million, and threatened the safety of the public at large, especially law enforcement officers and their families,” the government wrote in a sentencing memorandum.
Hammond has a long history of liberal activism and direct action, including work for the anti-war group Food Not Bombs.
His other hacking targets included the FBI’s Virtual Academy; the Arizona Department of Public Safety; Brooks-Jeffrey Marketing, Inc.; Special Forces Gear; Vanguard Defense Industries; the Jefferson County, Alabama Sheriff’s Office; the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association; and Combined Systems, Inc.
Hammond was undone by his comrade-in-arms, Hector Xavier Monsegur, aka “Sabu,” a former computer security consultant and the ersatz leader of the Lulzsec hacking team.
Monsegur secretly turned informant after the FBI tracked him down in May 2011, and he became an agent provocateur, publicly cheerleading for hack attacks against private security contractors and law enforcement agencies. In this way he ensnared Hammond and the other Stratfor hackers, and even got them to transfer their stolen material to an FBI-controlled server.
With his prior hacking conviction and the high financial losses, Hammond’s guilty plea would have carried a sentence of 12.5 to 15.5 years under federal sentencing guidelines. But under the terms of his plea agreement, he pleaded guilty to a single charge that has a 10 year maximum by statute. With good behavior and credit for the time he’s spent in custody, he’ll be released in September 2021.
Source: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/11...-sentence/