November 18, 2013
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NEW YORK—I was in federal court here Friday for the sentencing of
Jeremy Hammond to
10 years in prison for hacking into the computers of a private security
firm that works on behalf of the government, including the Department
of Homeland Security, and corporations such as Dow Chemical. In 2011
Hammond, now 28, released to the website WikiLeaks and Rolling Stone and
other publications some 3 million emails from the Texas-based company
Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor.
The sentence was one of
the longest in U.S. history for hacking and the maximum the judge could
impose under a plea agreement in the case. It was wildly
disproportionate to the crime—an act of nonviolent civil disobedience
that championed the public good by exposing abuses of power by the
government and a security firm. But the excessive sentence was the
point. The corporate state, rapidly losing credibility and legitimacy,
is lashing out like a wounded animal. It is frightened. It feels the
heat from a rising flame of revolt. It is especially afraid of those
such as Hammond who have the technical skills to break down electronic
walls and expose the corrupt workings of power.
“People have a
right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed
doors,” Hammond told me when we met in the Metropolitan Correctional
Center in Manhattan about a week and a half before his sentencing.
I did not hope for justice from the court. Judge Loretta A. Preska is a member of the right-wing
Federalist Society.
And the hack into Stratfor gave the email address and disclosed the
password of an account used for business by Preska’s husband, Thomas
Kavaler, a partner at the law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel. Some
emails of the firm’s corporate clients, including Merrill Lynch, also
were exposed. The National Lawyers Guild, because the judge’s husband
was a victim of the hack, filed a recusal motion that Preska, as chief
judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York,
was able to deny. Her refusal to recuse herself allowed her to oversee a
trial in which she had a huge conflict of interest.
The judge,
who herself once was employed at Cahill Gordon & Reindel, fulminated
from the bench about Hammond’s “total lack of respect for the law.” She
read a laundry list of his arrests for acts of civil disobedience. She
damned what she called his “unrepentant recidivism.” She said: “These
are not the actions of Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela … or even
Daniel Ellsberg; there’s nothing high-minded or public-spirited about
causing mayhem”—an odd analogy given that Mandela founded the armed wing
of the African National Congress, was considered by South Africa’s
apartheid government and the United States government to be a terrorist
and was vilified, along with King and Ellsberg, by the U.S. government.
She said there was a “desperate need to promote respect for the law” and
a “need for adequate public deterrence.” She read from transcripts of
Hammond’s conversations in
Anonymouschat
rooms in which he described the goal of hacking into Stratfor as
“destroying the target, hoping for bankruptcy, collapse” and called for
“maximum mayhem.” She admonished him for releasing the unlisted phone
number of a retired Arizona police official who allegedly received
threatening phone calls afterward.
The judge imposed
equally harsh measures that will take effect after Hammond’s release
from prison. She ordered that he be placed under three years of
supervised control, be forbidden to use encryption or aliases online and
submit to random searches of his computer equipment, person and home by
police and any internal security agency without the necessity of a
warrant. The judge said he was legally banned from having any contact
with “electronic civil disobedience websites or organizations.” By the
time she had finished she had shredded all pretense of the rule of law.
The severe sentence—Hammond will serve more time than the combined sentences of four men
who were convicted in
Britain for hacking related to the U.S. case—was monumentally stupid
for a judge seeking to protect the interest of the ruling class. The
judicial lynching of Hammond required her to demonstrate a callous
disregard for transparency and our right to privacy. It required her to
ignore the disturbing information Hammond released showing that the
government and Stratfor attempted to link nonviolent dissident groups,
including some within Occupy, to terrorist organizations so peaceful
dissidents could be prosecuted as terrorists. It required her to accept
the frightening fact that intelligence agencies now work on behalf of
corporations as well as the state. She also had to sidestep the fact
that Hammond made no financial gain from the leak.
The sentencing
converges with the state’s persecution of Chelsea Manning, Edward
Snowden, Julian Assange and Barrett Brown, along with Glenn Greenwald,
Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras and Sarah Harrison, four investigative
journalists who are now in self-imposed exile from the United States.
And as the numbers of our political prisoners and exiled dissidents
mount, there is the unmistakable stench of tyranny.
This draconian
sentence, like the draconian sentences of other whistle-blowers, will
fan revolt. History bears this out. It will solidify the growing
understanding that we must resort, if we want to effect real change, to
unconventional tactics to thwart the mounting abuses by the corporate
state. There is no hope, this sentencing shows, for redress from the
judicial system, elected officials or the executive branch. Why should
we respect a court system, or a governmental system, that shows no
respect to us? Why should we abide by laws that serve only to protect
criminals such as Wall Street thieves while leaving the rest of us
exposed to abuse? Why should we continue to have faith in structures of
power that deny us our most basic rights and civil liberties? Why should
we be impoverished so the profits of big banks, corporations and hedge
funds can swell?
No one will save us but ourselves. That was the
real message sent out by the sentencing of Jeremy Hammond. And just as
Hammond was inspired to act by the arrest of Chelsea (then Bradley)
Manning, others will be inspired to act by Hammond and the actions taken
against him. And we can thank Judge Preska for that.
Hammond is rooted in the
Black Bloc.
As he was escorted out of the courtroom on the ninth floor of the
federal courthouse at 500 Pearl St. on Friday he shouted to roughly 100
people—including a class of prim West Point cadets in their blue
uniforms—gathered there: “Long live Anonymous! Hurrah for anarchy!” In a
statement he read in court he thanked “Free Anons, the Anonymous
Solidarity Network [and] Anarchist Black Cross” for their roles in the
fight against oppression.
Hammond has abandoned faith not only in
traditional institutions, such as the courts, but nonviolent mass
protest and civil disobedience, a point on which he and I diverge. But
his analysis of corporate tyranny is correct. And the longer the state
ruthlessly persecutes dissidents, the more the state ensures that those
who oppose it will resort to radical responses including violence.
“Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change
inevitable,” John F. Kennedy said. And the corporate state is not only
making peaceful change impossible but condemning it as terrorism.
In
late October I spent an afternoon with Hammond in New York’s
Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he had been held for 20 months.
He said during our conversation, parts of which his lawyer requested be
published only after his sentencing, that he believed that the sole way
the people will now have any power is to rise up physically and seize
it. My column last week was about that interview, and now I am including
previously withheld parts of the conversation.
Hammond defines
himself as “an anarchist communist.” He seeks to destroy capitalism and
the centralized power of the corporate state. His revolutionary vision
is “leaderless collectives based on free association, consensus, mutual
aid, self-sufficiency and harmony with the environment.” He embraces the
classic tools of revolt, including mass protests, general strikes and
boycotts. And he sees hacking and leaking as part of this resistance,
tools not only to reveal the truths about these systems of corporate
power but to “disrupt/destroy these systems entirely.”
He
participated in the Occupy movement in Chicago but found the politics of
Occupy too vague and amorphous, a point on which I concur. He said
Occupy lacked revolutionary vigor. He told me he did not support what he
called the “dogmatic nonviolence doctrine” of many in the Occupy
movement, calling it “needlessly limited and divisive.” He rejects the
idea of acts of civil disobedience that protesters know will lead to
their arrest. “The point,” he said, “is to carry out acts of resistance
and not get caught.” He condemns “peace patrols,” units formed within
the Occupy movement that sought to prohibit acts of vandalism and
violence by other protesters—most often members of the Black Bloc—as “a
secondary police force.” And he spurns the calls by many in Occupy not
to antagonize the police, calling the police “the boot boys of the 1
percent, paid to protect the rich and powerful.” He said such a tactic
of non-confrontation with the police ignored the long history of
repression the police have carried out against popular movements, as
well as the “profiling and imprisonment of our comrades."
"Because
we were unprepared, or perhaps unwilling, to defend our occupations,
police and mayors launched coordinated attacks, driving us out of our
own parks,” he said of the state’s closure of the Occupy encampments.
“I
fully support and have participated in Black Bloc and other forms of
militant direct action,” he said. “I do not believe that the ruling
powers listen to the people’s peaceful protests. Black Bloc is an
effective, fluid and dynamic form of protest. It causes disruption
outside of predictable/controllable mass demonstrations through
‘unarrests,’ holding streets, barricades and property destruction.
Smashing corporate windows is not violence, especially when compared to
the everyday economic violence of sweatshops and ‘free trade.’ Black
Bloc seeks to hit them where it hurts, through economic damage. But more
than smashing windows they seek to break the spell of ‘law and order’
and the artificial limitations we impose on ourselves.”
I disagree
with Hammond over tactics, but in the end this disagreement is moot. It
will be the ruling elites who finally determine our response. If the
corporate elites employ the full force of the security and surveillance
state against us, if corporate totalitarian rule is one of naked,
escalating and brutal physical repression, then the violence of the
state will spawn a counter-violence. Judge Preska’s decision to
judicially lynch Hammond has only added to the fury she and the state
are trying to stamp out. An astute ruling class, one aware of the rage
rippling across the American landscape, would have released Hammond on
Friday and begun to address the crimes he exposed. But our ruling class,
while adept at theft, looting, propaganda and repression, is blind to
the growing discontent caused by the power imbalance and economic
inequality that plague ordinary Americans at a time when half of the
country lives in poverty or “near poverty.”
“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,” Hammond told the courtroom. “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?” he said. “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 its own citizens or the international
community.”
“My first memories of American politics was when Bush
stole the election in 2000,” he told me at a metal table as we met at
the prison in a small room reserved for attorney visits, “and then how
Bush used the wave of nationalism after 9/11 to launch unprovoked
pre-emptive wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. In high school I was
involved in publishing ‘underground’ newsletters criticizing the Patriot
Act, the wars, and other Bush-era policies. I attended many anti-war
protests in the city [Chicago] and was introduced to other local
struggles and the larger anti-corporate globalization movement. I began
identifying as an anarchist, started to travel around the country to
various mobilizations and conferences, and began getting arrested for
various acts.”
He said that his experience of street protest,
especially against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, was seminal, for he
saw that the state had little interest in heeding the voices of
protesters and others in the public. “Instead, we were labeled as
traitors, beaten and arrested.”
“I targeted law enforcement
systems because of the racism and inequality with which the criminal law
is enforced,” he admitted in court. “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.”
An
FBI informant, Hector Xavier Monsegur, posing as an Anonymous member
and using the online name “Sabu,” prodded Hammond to break into Stratfor
and informed him of technical vulnerabilities in websites of the
company.
"Why the FBI would introduce us to the hacker who found the initial vulnerability and
allow this hack to continue remains a mystery,” Hammond said as he faced the judge.
“As
a result of the Stratfor hack, some of the dangers of the unregulated
private intelligence industry are now known,” he said. “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.”
At Sabu’s urging,
Hammond broke into other websites, too. Hammond, at Sabu’s request,
provided information to hackers enabling them to break into and deface
official foreign government websites, including some of Turkey, Iran and
Brazil. The names of these three countries are technically under a
protective court order but have been reported widely in the press.
“I
broke into numerous sites and handed over passwords and backdoors that
enabled Sabu—and by extension his FBI handlers—to control these
targets,” Hammond said.
“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,” he went on.
“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 hypocrisy of ‘law and order’ and the
injustices caused by capitalism cannot be cured by institutional reform
but through civil disobedience and direct action,” Hammond told the
court. “Yes, I broke the law, but I believe that sometimes laws must be
broken in order to make room for change.”
© 2013 TruthDig.com
