
Jeremy Hammond sentenced to 10 years for Stratfor leak - callum85
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/15/jeremy-hammond-anonymous-hacker-sentenced
======
dopamean
> “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.”

First let me say that I am pretty sympathetic to Hammond and Swartz (though I
think their actions were totally different). I am sympathetic because I've
been in Hammond's shoes actually. I had my door kicked in when I was 15 for
things I shouldn't have done online.

What Hammond has said here really bothers me for two reasons. The first is
that he attempt to conflate things that are not equal in any way. Swartz may
have had a "legitimate political cause" but he sullied it (in my opinion) with
illegal activities. Anonymous may also have a legitimate gripe but their
actions were illegal and Hammond is now paying the price. That's how it works.
It is wrong to act as if you somehow should be looked at differently by the
law because you had a "legitimate political cause."

Also, it's really not fair at all for Hammond to compare his situation to
Swartz. The damage done by what Swartz did is nothing compared to damage and
potential for real harm with what Hammond did. Maybe I'm alone in this but I
think that is an asinine comparison that does Swartz's reputation a
disservice.

~~~
dmix
There is not much value in pedantically debating the differences between the
two.

Better to focus our energies on the similarities which are overtly real: the
extreme sentencing mismatching the level of harm done. It's an issue of the
state seeking vengeful punishment for political purposes and not seeking to
maximizing public safety or victim compensation. In addition to computer
hacking/unauthorized access laws having unusually high maximum sentences vs
other more more harmful offences.

~~~
andrewfong
10 years doesn't strike me as unreasonable. What he did basically amounted to
burglary and over $1M in credit card fraud. 10 years is at the upper end of
what I would sentence for those crimes, but it's not out of range --
especially considering that he's relatively unrepentant about the whole thing.

~~~
gngeal
_10 years doesn 't strike me as unreasonable._

...while in Norway, you typically only get the maximum 21 years of
imprisonment for multiple murders. And even that is apparently with the
possibility of an early release after 14 years and unsupervised weekend parole
after 7 years. And even with murder on your hands, they just might send you
off to Bastøy to rehabilitate yourself properly. And somehow, the crime rate
in Norway is still much lower, as are the reoffending rates.

I just wonder, what comes next in the US, two years for littering, perhaps?

~~~
cobrausn
You cannot just take a system that works some place in the world and
transplant it to another, completely devoid of any cultural context associated
with it. What works for Norway would probably work really well if applied to
most middle-class Americans. I seriously doubt we would see much success with
a system like that applied across the board - there are too many other
problems keeping our recidivism rate up, such as lack of support after jail,
the lucrative nature of the drug trade, the way we structure our prisons to
support gang mentalities, the lack of opportunities for convicted felons, etc
etc.

Since we're being honest here, if someone murdered someone close to me and
then got unsupervised weekend parole after 7 years, they'd be dead in an alley
their first weekend out. Maybe Norweigans are very different, culturally.
Maybe I'm just a vengeful asshole who should just deal with it - but I doubt
I'm alone over here. But this could also just be a reaction to violent crime -
I don't feel as though most non-violent crime deserves harsh sentences. Hell,
I'd settle for large fines in most cases.

~~~
cgag
And how many years do you think you would deserve for killing him in an alley?
How much less likely to kill again would you be after 10 years in prison vs
5/15/20?

~~~
cobrausn
'Less likely to kill again' isn't the only metric we are going for here. Some
people like to assuage their own conscience by believing in rehabilitation
only, but prison sentences are actually for more than that. They exist to
punish as well, because otherwise the victims feel no sense of actual justice
- the victim didn't matter, the only real problem here is that we now have
someone who might kill again, so let's fix that and then set him on his way.

The length of this sentence is _absolutely_ a cultural thing - perhaps some
would feel that 7 years before unsupervised weekends is a fitting punishment.
I can guarantee you that most Americans do not - if you want to see a rapid
increase in vigilantism in the U.S., try reduced sentences for things like
murder.

Oh, and I would fully expect to have the court system hit me the harshest
penalty they could - they hate vigilantism. But that's irrelevant to the
decision that got me there.

------
jamesaguilar
It's unfortunate that a possibly productive member of society has to go to
jail for this.

At the same time, I wonder at what seems like a tone of surprise about the
outcome. What he did is not materially different from breaking into secure
offices and stealing copies of private documents. Apparently he or others
working with him also made donations in the order of millions of dollars using
stolen credit card numbers from this hack. His punishment should be of the
same order as someone who did those things. Political motivation is not a get
out of jail free card.

Presumably he knows this and the emphasis in this direction is the work of the
article's author. Or maybe I'm picking up on something that's not there.

~~~
peterwwillis
> possibly productive member of society

Let me stop you right there. Hammond was not a productive member of society.
He stole water and power and food, even though he could pay for it (his web
design side-job paid for the trinkets he didn't deem capitalist waste). He
attacked old people in restaurants. He tried to insight people in public
settings to go out and vandalize and attack public infrastructure. He
threatened many, many people with bodily harm. He's been in and out of prison
and probation for years.

This fuck had it coming.

And let me quote the last part of the article:

    
    
      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”.
    

Does this sound like a stable, productive member of society to you?

~~~
ceejayoz
> Does this sound like a stable, productive member of society to you?

I'm really not sure what's supposed to be scary about that quote. It sounds
like self-improvement to me.

~~~
peterwwillis
Well, for example:

    
    
      20:55 <+tylerknowsthis> what are the advantages of a kindle or other similar devices as compared to an ipod touch or droid or something
      20:56 <+tylerknowsthis> r0d3nt: I'm on top of that shit too... but i'm talkin actual books.... autobiographies, history books, technical guides, political ideology
      20:56 <+tylerknowsthis> and of course the underground network of zines
      20:56 <+tylerknowsthis> i'm reading "Courtroom 302: right now.... a history of cook county jail  kinda academic tho
      20:57 <+tylerknowsthis> r0d3nt now you just pullin shit out your ass
      20:57 <+tylerknowsthis> I did a fuckload of reading in prison... 2-3 books a week
      20:57 <+tylerknowsthis> a habit I didn't lose when I got out
      20:58 <+tylerknowsthis> oh I wasn't doing nothing. I was training myself physically and mentally to be a more effective fighter
      20:58 <+tylerknowsthis> for the service of the revolution. prison is a good organizing opportunity
      21:00 <+tylerknowsthis> I also fine tuned my chess game.... picked up tricks from the killers
      21:01 <+tylerknowsthis> wonder why people are so fascinated with prison rape
      21:01 <+tylerknowsthis> it's true people get punked out all the time
      21:02 <+tylerknowsthis> it's a sink or swim situation you can't let anyone get an inch
    

From [https://afreak.ca/share/jeremy.txt](https://afreak.ca/share/jeremy.txt)
. Lots of crap to dig through, but some winners too.

~~~
mcantelon
While this guy may be an obnoxious asshole/blowhard, I haven't seen you
present anything to convince me this guy is a menace worthy of 10 years jail
time. Making threats is one thing, carrying them out is another.

------
mkohlmyr
And the judges husband is a stratfor client directly affected by the hack..

edit: wrong word

~~~
grecy
Surely that's a conflict of interest and the judge should be dismissed?

~~~
mkohlmyr
the judge didnt think so.

------
kh_hk

        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.
    

I do not think this means what they think it means.

------
forgottenpass
For more background, The Rolling Stone had a good piece on him last year after
he was arrested: The Rise and Fall of Jeremy Hammond: Enemy of the State [0]

[0] [http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-rise-and-
fall-o...](http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-rise-and-fall-of-
jeremy-hammond-enemy-of-the-state-20121207?print=true)

------
6d0debc071
Without commenting on the politics of the thing, I'd suggest the proper lens
to look at this situation with is one of an insurgency.

When you look at insurgencies you start asking, it feels horrible to say this,
what a life is _worth_ to a cause. If the insurgents take out a couple of
soldiers but lose a bomb-maker then they've done poorly on the exchange, if
they take out a general or political figure but lose a few dozen suicide
bombers they've done well.

Some lives are more valuable to a cause than others.

Here someone relatively smart, a high value target so to speak - though
apparently not overly skilled in opsec, has been taken out of the game. That's
a win for the powers that be, and perhaps helps to explain the punitive nature
of his sentence. Anonymous has a lot of people who turn up in crowds, but we
don't hear about them having a lot of high-quality hackers.

There are people that it makes more sense for them to sacrifice. To have the
attacks that these people do executed by someone other than the people capable
of making the tools in the first place.

They could do everything through encrypted channels, that could be made
largely immune to traffic analysis, with the sort of really fluid cell
structures that would facilitate. Just the first idea that springs to mind:
uploading an encrypted steg'd message as part of a lolcats image on reddit
that thousands of people are going to download - the noise to signal ratio
would be enormous.

But then, insurgencies - in general - do a lot of things that don't make sense
when taken purely from the perspective of their cause. I wonder how that sort
of approach would interact with the social dynamics of A, how they'd find
people who were up for it. Whether that's more what we're going to be looking
at if A gets to mature as an organisation or whether their largely ephemeral
nature excludes that sort of distribution of risk.

------
ChrisAntaki
Jeremy Hammond helped uncover TrapWire, possibly the most cutting edge
surveillance system currently exposed to the public.

[http://rt.com/usa/stratfor-trapwire-abraxas-
wikileaks-313/](http://rt.com/usa/stratfor-trapwire-abraxas-wikileaks-313/)

~~~
sfx
Thanks for sharing this article, I don't know why I hadn't heard of this. It's
pathetic that it takes illegal leaks for the public to know about this type of
surveillance, then we jail the leakers/whistleblowers. Shouldn't this type of
thing at the very least be a voting issue? They really do want to know what
every American is doing all the time, terrifying.

------
ThrowFarAway
If anyone who wants to somehow argue that Stratfor is evil incarnate thus
rendering Hammond's sentence unjust, I invite you to first read some of their
stuff:

[http://www.stratfor.com/free-reports](http://www.stratfor.com/free-reports)

Disclosure: I'm a subscriber, and have been for a number of years now, and
find most of the Stratfor-bashing that inevitably (and predictably) happens in
these discussions to be void of any understanding of what they actually
produce. So, please read up and then tell us why the fact that he attacked a
private forecasting company somehow makes his sentence unjust.

------
andrethegiant
I remember when Hammond helped run (or at least was an admin for)
HackThisSite. That site helped pique my interest in web development, which is
now my career. I owe a lot of my web tech prowess to that site.

------
erikpukinskis
> It is wrong to act as if you somehow should be looked at differently by the
> law because you had a "legitimate political cause."

Like morally wrong? If you think the law is bad, what is morally wrong about
breaking it and saying "I understand the law, but I don't think I should be
punished for this act"? That's what civil disobedience is. I can understand if
you think it's stupid, or if you think the justice system should ignore those
people, but I don't understand what morally wrong about it.

------
clienthunter
> ...Hammond had access to advanced tools including one known as PLESK...

Could somebody _please_ tell me there's another kind of PLESK beyond that
which is shat forth by Parallels?

------
gcb1
and the stratfor people are all innocent even after the leaks. that will
surely tell people that they should not be activists but live within the law.

~~~
jamesaguilar
I've only looked briefly (mostly wikipedia and the linked article), but I
didn't see anything that referenced lawbreaking on the part of the Stratfor or
its employees. Can you post a citation?

------
notjustanymike
Anyone else accidentally freak out that this would affect Top Gear?

~~~
prawks
It did cross my mind, oddly enough. For those wondering:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Clarkson](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Clarkson)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hammond](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hammond)

------
nutball
Send Jeremy books! [http://freejeremy.net/updates/send-jeremy-
books/](http://freejeremy.net/updates/send-jeremy-books/)

------
seoguru
wow. I consider this sentence overkill. and sadly he is not the only victim of
extreme sentencing: [https://www.aclu.org/living-death-sentenced-die-behind-
bars-...](https://www.aclu.org/living-death-sentenced-die-behind-bars-what)

------
rookadook
Because, after ten years, he will get out and become a model citizen. Right?
If you don't deal with the root of the problem, the monster you create will be
your undoing. If the feds keep doing this, it won't be pretty. They are
creating a lot of monsters.

~~~
wavefunction
What do they care? Their children and families are secure in their gated
communities. Creating more monsters just means expanded power and job
security.

The monsters and power-hungry need each other to survive and flourish, and
they prey on the rest of us to do so.

------
GuiA
One nation under god, with freedom and justice for all :')

 _Edit for below: oops! liberty indeed :)_

------
baldfat
He was denied bail due to possible LIFE IN PRISON sentence. WOW! I just do see
that A) He did illegal activities B) Money was involved. A Jail sentence is
very likely BUT life and denial of bail?

~~~
tsotha
The potential sentences for financial and computer crimes in the US are
draconian. If you're going to be a criminal you'd be better off robbing banks.

------
ThrowFarAway
There's a lot of certainty and knee-jerk moralizing on display here (hacker in
trouble! He deserves our unhesitating support!), but there's shockingly little
justification to accompany strong sentiment. Put another way: what's with the
mob mentality, HN? This place is normally better than that.

He did a significant amount of damage to a legitimate business. Some people
seem to hate STRATFOR, without articulating any reasoning for feeling that
way, other than using certain triggers for up votes, "government," "CIA,"
"evil," etc.

The files posted to Wikileaks largely showed them to be a surprisingly
competent private forecasting company. The outcry over telling an attractive
intelligence collector to use her looks as a means by which to get people to
be more pliable? Welcome to the real world. Sex sells, and it also buys.

Many subscriber's identities were stolen in the process. My personal
information was leaked, and it was difficult and costly to deal with. Some
will never be able to fully undo the damage personally done to them by Jeremy
Hammond. I'm not sure how his actions bettered the world, or even sought to.

Activism is valid, and a discussion of hacktivism as a form of civil
disobedience that can effect necessary change, would be welcome.

A guy who selected a target while being almost completely ignorant of the work
they do, a guy who, rather than going to some effort to minimize collateral
damage, actually worked to inflict as much collateral damage as possible, is
not a hacktivist, but a criminal, and a pretty inconsiderate criminal, at
that. Doing harm for the sake of ego isn't hacktivism, it's mayhem.

I'm OK with people like that being segmented from civil society, no matter how
just the cause he thought it would further. If a guy walked around keying cars
in the parking lot because he wanted to achieve world peace, I'd respect his
desire to achieve world peace, but also want him prevented from doing so again
until he demonstrated some understanding and therefore the necessarily
resultant remorse.

I subscribe to STRATFOR's informative, insightful, and apolitical news
service, and think most people who wax lyrical about how evil they are
probably don't, or they'd realize they tend to write things like "Germany's
Problematic Trade Surplus," or "Colombia's River Revitalization Plan."

A hacktivist picked a bad target and sought maximum collateral damage of
innocents. People like that need to demonstrate that they understand why
that's incompatible with living in a civilized society before they get to sit
at the big kid's table again.

I'll get down voted for this, but if Jeremy Hammond still thinks the same way
when his 10 years are up, he will have been released too soon. Sometimes
prison is about rehab and reform, sometimes it's about damage control.

~~~
jebus989
Maybe others are able to give a more objective analysis, assuming your claims
are true you enter the debate with significant bias.

~~~
dandelany
s/bias/relevant knowledge and experience/

------
jlgaddis
Tangentially related:

 _> ... he saw quotes marked CW for “co-operating witness” ..._

"Confidential witness", that is.

"CI", short for "confidential informant", is also commonly seen in similar
documents.

------
rospaya
It's sickening to see so many people claiming Hammond "did a good thing" and
"didn't harm any person". Something I expected from reddit, but not HN.

------
happycube
. o O (they would have caught Richard May, but he was too slow to hack
anything.)

~~~
krapp
"Oh cock, it's the cyber-rozzers..."

------
dyc
Good obviously got what he deserved.

------
horm
Jeremy Hammond? Doesn't seem very anonymous to me.

