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AP/Cook County Sheriff's Office
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NEW YORK—Jeremy Hammond sat in New York’s Metropolitan Correctional
Center last week in a small room reserved for visits from attorneys. He
was wearing an oversized prison jumpsuit. The brown hair of the lanky
6-footer fell over his ears, and he had a wispy beard. He spoke with the
intensity and clarity one would expect from one of the nation’s most
important political prisoners.
On Friday the 28-year-old activist
will appear for sentencing in the Southern District Court of New York
in Manhattan. After having made a plea agreement, he faces the
possibility of a 10-year sentence for hacking into the Texas-based
private security firm Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor, which
does work for the Homeland Security Department, the Marine Corps, the
Defense Intelligence Agency and numerous corporations including Dow
Chemical and Raytheon.
Four others involved in the hacking have been convicted in Britain, and they were sentenced to less time combined—the longest sentence was 32 months—than the potential 120-month sentence that lies before Hammond.
Hammond turned the pilfered information over to the website WikiLeaks and Rolling Stone
and other publications. The 3 million email exchanges, once made
public, exposed the private security firm’s infiltration, monitoring and
surveillance of protesters and dissidents, especially in the Occupy
movement, on behalf of corporations and the national security state.
And, perhaps most important, the information provided chilling evidence
that anti-terrorism laws are being routinely used by the federal
government to criminalize nonviolent, democratic dissent and falsely
link dissidents to international terrorist organizations. Hammond sought
no financial gain. He got none.
The email exchanges Hammond made public were entered as evidence in my lawsuit
against President Barack Obama over Section 1021 of the National
Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Section 1021 permits the military to
seize citizens who are deemed by the state to be terrorists, strip them
of due process and hold them indefinitely in military facilities. Alexa
O’Brien, a content strategist and journalist who co-founded US Day of
Rage, an organization created to reform the election process, was one of
my co-plaintiffs. Stratfor officials attempted, we know because of the
Hammond leaks, to falsely link her and her organization to Islamic
radicals and websites as well as to jihadist ideology, putting her at
risk of detention under the new law. Judge Katherine B. Forrest ruled,
in part because of the leak, that we plaintiffs had a credible fear, and
she nullified the law, a decision that an appellate court overturned
when the Obama administration appealed it.
Freedom of the press and legal protection for those who expose
government abuses and lies have been obliterated by the corporate state.
The resulting self-exile of investigative journalists such as Glenn Greenwald, Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras, along with the indictment of Barrett Brown,
illustrate this. All acts of resistance—including nonviolent
protest—have been conflated by the corporate state with terrorism. The
mainstream, commercial press has been emasculated through the Obama
administration’s repeated use of the Espionage Act to charge and
sentence traditional whistle-blowers. Governmental officials with a
conscience are too frightened to reach out to mainstream reporters,
knowing that the authorities’ wholesale capturing and storing of
electronic forms of communication make them easily identifiable. Elected
officials and the courts no longer impose restraint or practice
oversight. The last line of defense lies with those such as Hammond,
Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning who are capable of
burrowing into the records of the security and surveillance state and
have the courage to pass them on to the public. But the price of
resistance is high.
“In these times of secrecy and abuse of power there is only one solution—transparency,” wrote Sarah Harrison,
the British journalist who accompanied Snowden to Russia and who also
has gone into exile, in Berlin. “If our governments are so compromised
that they will not tell us the truth, then we must step forward to grasp
it. Provided with the unequivocal proof of primary source documents
people can fight back. If our governments will not give this information
to us, then we must take it for ourselves.”
“When whistleblowers come forward we need to fight for them, so
others will be encouraged,” she went on. “When they are gagged, we must
be their voice. When they are hunted, we must be their shield. When they
are locked away, we must free them. Giving us the truth is not a crime.
This is our data, our information, our history. We must fight to own
it. Courage is contagious.”
Hammond knows this contagion. He was living at home in Chicago in
2010 under a 7-a.m.-to-7-p.m. curfew for a variety of acts of civil
disobedience when Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning was arrested for
giving WikiLeaks secret information about military war crimes and
government lies. Hammond at the time was running social aid programs to
feed the hungry and send books to prisoners. He had, like Manning,
displayed a remarkable aptitude for science, math and computer languages
at a young age. He hacked into the computers at a local Apple store at
16. He hacked into the computer science department’s website at the
University of Illinois-Chicago as a freshman, a prank that saw the
university refuse to allow him to return for his sophomore year. He was
an early backer of “cyber-liberation” and in 2004 started an
“electronic-disobedience journal” he named Hack This Zine. He called on
hackers in a speech at the 2004 DefCon convention in Las Vegas to use
their skills to disrupt that year’s Republican National Convention. He
was, by the time of his 2012 arrest, one of the shadowy stars of the
hacktivist underground, dominated by groups such as Anonymous and
WikiLeaks in which anonymity, stringent security and frequent changes of
aliases alone ensured success and survival. Manning’s courage prompted
Hammond to his own act of cyber civil disobedience, although he knew his
chances of being caught were high.
“I saw what Chelsea Manning did,” Hammond said when we spoke last
Wednesday, seated at a metal table. “Through her hacking she became a
contender, a world changer. She took tremendous risks to show the ugly
truth about war. I asked myself, if she could make that risk shouldn’t I
make that risk? Wasn’t it wrong to sit comfortably by, working on the
websites of Food Not Bombs, while I had the skills to do something
similar? I too could make a difference. It was her courage that prompted
me to act.”
Hammond—who has black-inked tattoos on each forearm, one the open-source movement’s symbol known as the “glider” and the other the shi hexagram
from the I Ching—is steeped in radical thought. As a teenager, he
swiftly migrated politically from the liberal wing of the Democratic
Party to the militancy of the Black Bloc anarchists. He was an avid reader in high school of material put out by CrimethInc,
an anarchist collective that publishes anarchist literature and
manifestos. He has molded himself after old radicals such as Alexander
Berkman and Emma Goldman and black revolutionaries such as George
Jackson, Elaine Brown and Assata Shakur, as well as members of the
Weather Underground. He said that while he was in Chicago he made
numerous trips to Waldheim Cemetery to visit the Haymarket Martyrs Monument,
which honors four anarchists who were hanged in 1887 and others who
took part in the labor wars. On the 16-foot-high granite monument are
the final words of one of the condemned men, August Spies. It reads:
“The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voice
you are throttling today.” Emma Goldman is buried nearby.
Hammond became well known to the government for a variety of acts of
civil disobedience over the last decade. These ranged from painting
anti-war graffiti on Chicago walls to protesting at the 2004 Republican
National Convention in New York to hacking into the right-wing website
Protest Warrior, for which he was sentenced to two years in the Federal
Correctional Institute at Greenville, Ill.
He said he is fighting as “an anarchist communist” against “centralized
state authority” and “exploitative corporations.” His goal is to build
“leaderless collectives based on free association, consensus, mutual
aid, self-sufficiency and harmony with the environment.” It is
essential, he said, that all of us work to cut our personal ties with
capitalism and engage in “mass organizing of protests, strikes and
boycotts.” Hacking and leaking, he said, are part of this
resistance—“effective tools to reveal ugly truths of the system.”
Hammond spent months within the Occupy movement in Chicago. He
embraced its “leaderless, non-hierarchical structures such as general
assemblies and consensus, and occupying public spaces.” But he was
highly critical of what he said were the “vague politics” in Occupy that
allowed it to include followers of the libertarian Ron Paul, some in
the tea party, as well as “reformist liberals and Democrats.” Hammond
said he was not interested in any movement that “only wanted a ‘nicer’
form of capitalism and favored legal reforms, not revolution.” He
remains rooted in the ethos of the Black Bloc.
“Being incarcerated has really opened my eyes to the reality of the
criminal justice system,” he said, “that it is not a criminal justice
system about public safety or rehabilitation, but reaping profits
through mass incarceration. There are two kinds of justice—one for the
rich and the powerful who get away with the big crimes, then for
everyone else, especially people of color and the impoverished. There is
no such thing as a fair trial. In over 80 percent of the cases people
are pressured to plea out instead of exercising their right to trial,
under the threat of lengthier sentences. I believe no satisfactory
reforms are possible. We need to close all prisons and release everybody
unconditionally.”
He said he hoped his act of resistance would encourage others, just
as Manning’s courage had inspired him. He said activists should “know
and accept the worst possible repercussion” before carrying out an
action and should be “aware of mass counterintelligence/surveillance
operations targeting our movements.” An informant posing as a comrade, Hector Xavier Monsegur,
known online as “Sabu,” turned Hammond and his co-defendants in to the
FBI. Monsegur stored data retrieved by Hammond on an external server in
New York. This tenuous New York connection allowed the government to try
Hammond in New York for hacking from his home in Chicago into a private
security firm based in Texas. New York is the center of the
government’s probes into cyber-warfare; it is where federal authorities
apparently wanted Hammond to be investigated and charged.
Hammond said he will continue to resist from within prison. A series
of minor infractions, as well as testing positive with other prisoners
on his tier for marijuana that had been smuggled into the facility, has
resulted in his losing social visits for the next two years and spending
“time in the box [solitary confinement].” He is allowed to see
journalists, but my request to interview him took two months to be
approved. He said prison involves “a lot of boredom.” He plays chess,
teaches guitar and helps other prisoners study for their GED. When I saw
him, he was working on the statement, a personal manifesto, that he
will read in court this week.
He insisted he did not see himself as different from prisoners,
especially poor prisoners of color, who are in for common crimes,
especially drug-related crimes. He said most inmates are political
prisoners, caged unjustly by a system of totalitarian capitalism that
has snuffed out basic opportunities for democratic dissent and economic
survival.
“The majority of people in prison did what they had to do to survive,”
he said. “Most were poor. They got caught up in the war on drugs, which
is how you make money if you are poor. The real reason they get locked
in prison for so long is so corporations can continue to make big
profits. It is not about justice. I do not draw distinctions between
us.”
“Jail is essentially enduring harassment and dehumanizing conditions
with frequent lockdowns and shakedowns,” he said. “You have to
constantly fight for respect from the guards, sometimes getting yourself
thrown in the box. However, I will not change the way I live because I
am locked up. I will continue to be defiant, agitating and organizing
whenever possible.”
He said resistance must be a way of life. He intends to return to
community organizing when he is released, although he said he will work
to stay out of prison. “The truth,” he said, “will always come out.” He
cautioned activists to be hyper-vigilant and aware that “one mistake can
be permanent.” But he added, “Don’t let paranoia or fear deter you from
activism. Do the down thing!”
Source: Truthdig
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