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Jeremy Hammond sentenced to 10 years for Stratfor leak
- GuiA 13y agoOne nation under god, with freedom and justice for all :') Edit for below: oops! liberty indeed :)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- grecy 13y agoThose of us outside America never hear the word "Liberty" and we don't understand or care why or how it differs from the word "Freedom". They're both just tools of manipulation.
- COMS 13y agoExcept liberty is in the national motto of France. Those words are certainly used for manipulation but they also reflect the positive transformative nature of classical liberalism.
- jamesaguilar 13y agoIt'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.
- gcb1 13y agobut in the past revealing crimes in those secret documents often lead to trials. now, watergate would have not have ended with 43 incarcerations from nixon admin and his resignation, but probably with journalists from the post being sent to Guantanamo for reporting on national security matters.
- mpyne 13y agoJust like 'The Guardian's journalists working out of their New York office reporting on the NSA have all been sent to Gitmo, amirite?
- gcb1 13y agoone of them just crashed a car that burst up in flames, like every car that crashes, amirite?
- mpyne 13y agoI dunno, ask Tesla about cars and flames, to hear Elon Musk describe gas-powered vehicles it's a wonder they don't spontaneously combust more often. :) Hastings is a wonderful teaching case though, but more along the lines of being the example of you don't recklessly speed down city streets while intoxicated.
- GuiA 13y agoSo if someone does nasty things, but getting access to evidence for these nasty things is impossible without breaking a law, how do you suggest that one should go about proving that the aforementioned nasty things were committed?
- jamesaguilar 13y agoNot sure. You might have to take one for the team like with other acts of civil disobedience. That said, in this case, were nasty things uncovered? I can't find anything about that. Also, mixing investigative journalism with theft and use of other people's credit card numbers is probably not the best way to maintain an appearance of innocence.
- gcb1 13y agoand 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 13y agoI'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?
- lymie 13y agoLet me look one up in my enemy combatants handbook.
- mkohlmyr 13y agoAnd the judges husband is a stratfor client directly affected by the hack.. edit: wrong word
- horm 13y agoJeremy Hammond? Doesn't seem very anonymous to me.
- forgottenpass 13y agoFor 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-of-jeremy-hammond-enemy-of-the-state-20121207?print=true http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-rise-and-fall-o...
- dopamean 13y ago> “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 13y agoThere 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.
- mindslight 13y agoComputer hacking laws actually have pretty light sentences compared to their historic counterparts. A show trial followed by some years in jail is much nicer than being executed for witchcraft.
- duairc 13y agoSo we should feel good about it, or feel that we're lucky, or not try to fight back against this system? I know you probably think you're “not saying that”, but if you're not, why did you feel the need to post that?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- happycube 13y ago. o O (they would have caught Richard May, but he was too slow to hack anything.)
- krapp 13y ago"Oh cock, it's the cyber-rozzers..."
- 6d0debc071 13y agoWithout 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.
- clienthunter 13y ago> ...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?
- dyc 13y agoGood obviously got what he deserved.
- kh_hk 13y agoPart 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.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- notjustanymike 13y agoAnyone else accidentally freak out that this would affect Top Gear?
- themoogle 13y agoThat is the first thing I thought of. I was scratching my head waiting for the page to load thinking "Why the hell... how the hell... what the hell..."
- prawks 13y agoIt 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
- baldfat 13y agoHe 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 13y agoThe 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.
- nutball 13y agoSend Jeremy books! http://freejeremy.net/updates/send-jeremy-books/ http://freejeremy.net/updates/send-jeremy-books/
- andrethegiant 13y agoI 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.
- rookadook 13y agoBecause, 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 13y agoWhat 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.
- erikpukinskis 13y ago> 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.
- ChrisAntaki 13y agoJeremy 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 13y agoThanks 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 13y agoThere'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.
- seoguru 13y agowow. 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-what https://www.aclu.org/living-death-sentenced-die-behind-bars-...
- ThrowFarAway 13y agoIf 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.
- rospaya 13y agoIt'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.
- jlgaddis 13y agoTangentially 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.