Friday 15 March 2013
Who is Jeremy Hammond and why is his case so important?
Jeremy Hammond is an anarchist activist from Chicago. He is also a digital revolutionary, a hacker who is alleged to have liberated private intelligence emails, through the breach of Strategic Forecasting, Inc., a company in the U.S. hooked into the "intelligence-industrial complex" - in other words, a private U.S. henchman for CIA. The emails he obtained from Strator were leaked to Wikileaks. Like previous Wikileaks material, they show the U.S. as a corrupt and illegal military power, set on engineering a global agenda, and operating under an illegal double standard, in order to retain power by any means necessary.
Like other hactivists and whistleblowers who dare to expose the massive fraud that operates as the U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement machine, he faces severe and unjust penalty, while the perpetrators of the real crimes walk free. If convicted at trial, he will face 30 years to life under the CFAA, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He is 28 years old.
His case is important because it shows how far the U.S. government will go to shut down Anonymous, anarchists, and revolutionaries who fight against entrenched government and corporate power. The judge in his case, Loretta Preska has connections, though her husband, to the target, Stratfor, and has presided in other cases as a government lackey to CIA. So Freeanons does things like offer support to Hammond Support Network, who is holding a rally February 21 in Manhattan, in order to recuse the judge.
What other cases are you providing support for that people should know about.
We provide support for anyone who has been arrested, or is is under investigation, for working under the Anonymous banner. Current prosecutions are not just against hackers. They are against media artists like Adam Nafa in the U.S. whose "crime" was producing a video about Ddos, and also Barrett Brown in the U.S., a journo who was tracking U.S. military technology to infiltrate chat rooms and flood them with U.S. propaganda. There are cases against network engineers and irc admins like Christopher Weatherhead in the U.K., whose real crime, as far as we can tell, was simply being an admin at Anonops irc. We also support the PayPal4, activists who utilized a cooordinated network attack against PayPal when PayPal cut payment to Wikileaks, just because they wanted to suck up to U.S. politicians. In addition, we currently track other hacktivist cases like those against Redhack in Turkey, and hacktivist reformers in countries throughout Europe and South America.
