Jeremy Hammond Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison

Jeremy Hammond sketched by Molly Crabapple

Jere­my Ham­mond sketched by Mol­ly Crabap­ple

Jeremy Hammond sketched by Molly Crabapple

Jere­my Ham­mond sketched by Mol­ly Crabap­ple

I’m find­ing this post hard to type; my fin­gers are trem­bling, my pulse is rac­ing. I’m furi­ous. Just min­utes ago hack­tivist Jere­my Ham­mond learned his fate in a Man­hat­tan fed­er­al court. Ten years in prison, for tak­ing part in a hack that revealed some of the shadi­est aspects of the cor­po­rate intel­li­gence indus­try.

The 28-year-old plead­ed guilty ear­li­er this year to par­tic­i­pat­ing in the Anony­mous hack of the pri­vate intel­li­gence firm Strate­gic Fore­cast­ing (Strat­for). Ham­mond, a long­time Chica­go polit­i­cal activist, gar­nered no per­son­al finan­cial gain from the hack; he has con­sis­tent­ly main­tained that he act­ed in what he believed to be the pub­lic inter­est. The rev­e­la­tions of the Strat­for hack uphold his claim: It is indeed in the pub­lic inter­est to know that Dow Chem­i­cals paid a pri­vate secu­ri­ty firm to fol­low and low-lev­el harass indi­vid­u­als fight­ing for recog­ni­tion and resti­tu­tion for the Bhopal dis­as­ter; it is of pub­lic inter­est too that the Coca Cola com­pa­ny employed Strat­for to spy on PETA activists, that the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty used the firm to spy on Occu­py activ­i­ties. These details all came out of the Strat­for hack. Our con­text is such that the intel­li­gence firm’s activ­i­ty is sup­port­ed and upheld by the law, Hammond’s work to reveal it is pun­ished with a ten year sen­tence.

 

Ham­mond admit­ted guilt to a crime; he has already served 18 months in fed­er­al deten­tion, much of the time in soli­tary con­fine­ment. But whether Hammond’s acts were legal or not should not be con­flat­ed with whether or not they are eth­i­cal. This coun­try would be a dark­er place even than it is today were its his­to­ry not pep­pered with peo­ple will­ing to act out­side of what is legal in ser­vice of what is right. It’s worth stress­ing too that the law that Ham­mond is being pun­ished for break­ing falls under the out­dat­ed and dan­ger­ous­ly sprawl­ing Com­put­er Fraud and Abus­es Act (CFAA) — the same leg­is­la­tion, enact­ed in 1986, that threat­ened to put Aaron Swartz in prison for decades before the young tech­nol­o­gist took his own life. At his sen­tenc­ing Fri­day, Ham­mond read a state­ment (please read here in full), explain­ing why he chose to act out­side legal con­fines in hack­ing Strat­for and oth­er cor­po­ra­tions:

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.

… 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.

Hammond’s fight is part of a larg­er “epis­temic war”, as philoso­pher Peter Lud­low has put it. There is an ide­o­log­i­cal bat­tle under­way between those who seek to con­trol infor­ma­tion — and there­fore the very truths avail­able to the pub­lic — and those who seek to share it and cre­ate and informed and empow­ered pub­lic. The stakes, as Chelsea Man­ning and now Ham­mond have learned, are high. ” 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,” Ham­mond said today.

Yes, the hack­tivist broke the law; he has admit­ted as much for some months from with­in a prison cell. But if there was some doubt as to the ide­o­log­i­cal valance to Hammond’s pun­ish­ment, con­sid­er that hack­ers who plead­ed guilty to involve­ment in the very same hack but were charged on British soil received sen­tences of no more than 30 months, most of which is to be served on pro­ba­tion. Hammond’s 120 month sen­tence is a chill­ing mes­sages of the lengths the U.S. gov­ern­ment will take to crush dis­sent and pun­ish chal­lenges to the cor­po­ratist sur­veil­lance state.

“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,” said Ham­mond — and ten years he has received. There is so much work to be done.