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
Jeremy Hammond, the Anonymous hacktivist who released millions of
emails relating to the private intelligence firm Stratfor, has denounced
his prosecution and lengthy prison sentence as a “vengeful, spiteful
act” designed to put a chill on politically-motivated hacking.
Hammond was sentenced on Friday at federal court in Manhattan to the
maximum 10 years in jail, plus three years supervised release. He had
pleaded guilty to one count under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
(CFAA) flowing from his 2011 hack of Strategic Forecasting, Inc, known
as Stratfor. In an interview with the Guardian in the Metropolitan
Correction Center in New York, conducted on Thursday, he said he was
resigned to a long prison term which he sees as a conscious attempt by
the US authorities to put a chill on political hacking.
He had no doubt that his sentence would be long, describing it as a
"vengeful, spiteful act". He said of his prosecutors: "They have made it
clear they are trying to send a message to others who come after me. A
lot of it is because they got slapped around, they were embarrassed by
Anonymous and they feel that they need to save face.”
Most pointedly, Hammond suggested that the FBI may have manipulated
him to carry out hacking attacks on “dozens” of foreign government
websites. During his time with Anonymous, the loose collective of
hackers working alongside WikiLeaks and other anti-secrecy groups, he
was often directed by a individual known pseudonomously on the web as
“Sabu”, the leader of the Anonymous-affiliated group Lulzsec, who turned out to be an FBI informant.
Hammond, who is under court orders restricting what he says in
public, told the Guardian that Sabu presented him with a list of
targets, including many foreign government sites, and encouraged him to
break into their computer systems. He said he was not sure whether Sabu
was in turn acting on behalf of the FBI or other US government agency,
but it was even possible that the FBI was using Sabu’s internet handle
directly as contact between the two hackers was always made through
cyberspace, never face-to-face.
“It is kind of funny that here they are sentencing me for hacking
Stratfor, but at the same time as I was doing that an FBI informant was
suggesting to me foreign targets to hit. So you have to wonder how much
they really care about protecting the security of websites.”
In the interview, conducted in a secure prison meeting room hours
before the 28-year-old Chicagoan was sentenced, he was sanguine about
his prospects. “I knew when I started out with Anonymous that being put
in jail and having a lengthy sentence was a possibility. Given the
nature of the targets I was going after I knew I would upset a lot of
powerful people.”
Dressed in a brown prison jump suit, and with a long wispy goatee and
moustache (he planned to shave both off before the sentencing hearing),
Hammond was scathing about the way the CFAA was being twisted in his
view for political ends. “They are widening the definition of what is
covered by the Act and using it to target specifically political
activists,” he said.
He invoked the memory of Aaron Swartz, the open-data crusader who killed himself in January while
awaiting trial under the CFAA for releasing documents from behind the
subscription-only paywall of an online research group. “The same beast
bit us both,” Hammond said. “They went after Aaron because of his
involvement in legitimate political causes – they railroaded charges
against him, and look what happened.”
Hammond has been in custody since March 2012 having been arrested in
Chicago on suspicion of the Stratfor leak of millions of emails that
were eventually released by WikiLeaks
as the Global Intelligence Files. His sentence is an indication of the
aggression with which prosecutors have been pursuing political hackers
in the US – other Anonymous members in Britain involved in the breach of
Stratfor were sentenced to much shorter jail terms.
Hammond stressed that he had not benefitted personally in any way
from the Stratfor email release, that exposed surveillance by private
security firms on activists including Anonymous members themselves,
Occupy protesters and campaigners in Bhopal, India involved in the push
for compensation for victims of the 1984 industrial catastrophe. “Our
main purpose in carrying out the Stratfor hack was to find out what
private security and intelligence companies were doing, though none of
us had any idea of the scale of it.”
Paradoxically, Hammond insists that he would never have carried out
the breach of Stratfor’s computer system had he not been led into doing
it by Sabu – real name Hector Xavier Monsegur – the fellow hacker who is
himself awaiting sentencing having pleaded guilty to 12 hacking-related
criminal charges. “I had never heard of Stratfor until Sabu brought in
another hacker who told me about it. Practically, I would never have
done the Stratfor hack without Sabu’s involvement.”
Hammond discovered that Monsegur was an FBI informant the day after
his own arrest. As he was reading the criminal complaint against him, he
saw quotes marked CW for “co-operating witness” that contained details
that could only have come from Sabu.
“I felt betrayed, obviously. Though I knew these things happen. What
surprised me was that Sabu was involved in so much strategic targeting,
in actually identifying targets. He gave me the information on targets.”
Part of Sabu’s interest in him, he now believes, was that Hammond had
access to advanced tools including one known as PLESK that allowed him
to break into web systems used by large numbers of foreign governments.
“The FBI and NSA are clearly able to do their own hacking of other
countries. But when a new vulnerability emerges in internet security,
sometimes hackers have access to tools that are ahead of them that can
be very valuable,” he said.
Looking back on his involvement with anonymous, the Chicagoan said
that he had been drawn to work with Anonymous, because he saw it as “a
model of resistance – it was decentralised, leaderless.” He grew
increasingly political in his hacking focus, partly under the influence
of the Occupy movement that began in Wall Street in September 2011 and
spread across the country.
Chelsea Manning, the US soldier formerly known as Bradley who leaked a
massive trove of state secrets to WikiLeaks now serving a 35-year
sentence in military jail, was a major influence on him. Manning showed
him that “powerful institutions – whether military or private security
firms – are involved in unaccountable activities that the public is
totally unaware of that can only be exposed by whistleblowers and
hackers”.
Hammond has often described himself as an anarchist. He has a tattoo
on his left shoulder of the anarchy symbol with the words: “Freedom,
equality, anarchy”. Another tattoo on his left forearm shows the Chinese
representation of “leader” or “army”, and a third tattoo on his right
forearm is a glider signifying the hacking open-source movement that is
drawn from the computer simulation Game of Life .
He says he plans to use his time in prison “reading, writing, working
out and playing sports – training myself to become more disciplined so I
can be more effective on my release”. As to that release, he says he
cannot predict how he will be thinking when he emerges from jail, but
doubts that he would go back to hacking. “I think my days of hacking are
done. That’s a role for somebody else now,” he said.
