Disillusioned ex-Anonymous first outed Sabu last year

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by Elinor Mills

March 7, 2012 7:36 PM PST

Jennifer Emick, who picketed Scientology with the group, says it took her four hours to put a real name to the well known hacker handle.

The trail to the New York apartment where a hacker named "Sabu" of LulzSec and Anonymous fame was arrested last June can be traced back to a former Anonymous participant who turned against the group over its WikiLeaks activities.Sabu, whose name is Hector Xavier Monsegur, pleaded guilty to computer hacking charges in August and spent the last six months working as an informant for the FBI. The undercover operation led to hacking-related charges being filed against four alleged cohorts in the U.K., Ireland, and Chicago yesterday.Sabu was the proverbial big fish who was admired among other hackers and hailed as an online freedom fighter. And unmasking him became a favorite hobby for rivals last year. But it was Jennifer Emick, after being harassed online for criticizing Anonymous' hacking activities, who was the first to match a face and real name with the well-known hacker handle."It took me four hours to find Sabu," Emick told CNET today.It was February 2011 when she and her partners at Backtrace Security compiled a list of identities they believed were tied to the hacker handles associated with the HBGary Federal hack and others. Her break with discovering Sabu's identity came to her from a friend in the group in the form of log files from an Internet Relay Chat room in which Sabu and other LulzSec members discussed the HBGary Federal compromise, she said. One of the log files contained a domain that led to a subdomain that had a mirror to a page where Monsegur posted photos and video of his beloved Toyota AE86 on a car enthusiast social-networking site. That led to a YouTube video that had information that allowed Emick to eventually find Monsegur's Facebook page using a Google search.Shortly after Backtrace Security posted the list of alleged hacker identities on the Web in March 2011, it got a call from the FBI asking it to remove the list and pass the information on to the feds, Emick said.Backtrace Security has been following Sabu's activities and communicating with the feds since then but was not involved in the investigation enough to know that Sabu had agreed to turn over his fellow hackers. But Emick said she suspected something was up when Sabu disappeared from IRC for more than a week in June and from Twitter for almost a month.She speculated that the FBI maintained the undercover operation long enough for Sabu to re-establish trust after his disappearance and to allow them time to gather evidence that would be needed to prosecute his colleagues.FBI officials did not return calls seeking comment for this story. The FBI was able to warn some of the hacking group's targets and alerted 300 government and private entities globally to potential holes in their computer systems, Fox News reported. Agents even ordered Sabu to call hackers off a planned attack on the CIA's public Web site, the report says. "You're knocking over a bee's nest," he warned them. "Stop."

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But it's unclear what was going on with the compromise of global intelligence firm Stratfor in December. The hackers stole 860,000 e-mail addresses and 75,000 unencrypted credit card numbers in that attack and released them on the Web.

Asked why she thinks the feds didn't or weren't able to interfere with the Stratfor hack, Emick speculated that it could have been an elaborate sting to get the hackers to show their hand, or that Stratfor "fell on its sword on purpose" because the company seemed to know about the breach the day it happened. Stratfor representatives did not return a phone call seeking comment today.Things started getting fishy again when he Sabu "took off" about five weeks ago, Emick said, declining to reveal more specifics. Then some Austrian and German hackers became suspicious about Sabu a couple of weeks ago and set up their own server despite his entreaties that they use his server because theirs was owned by the U.S. feds, according to Emick. Then on Monday night hackers started deleting their hard drives because they knew something was up with Sabu, she said.Many Anonymous participants are shocked and angered by the news that Sabu had turned on his compatriots. And some are probably eating crow that Emick was right about Sabu's identity after all."The path to the data looks like Backtrace Security," said Greg Housh, an Internet activist and former Anonymous supporter who still observes the group. "That bothers a lot of people because none of us like them."But Housh reserved his harshest criticism for the FBI, which he accused of relying on "very old-school tactics" in their investigations. "They take down the most vocal guy and hope that gets everyone to stop," he said. "It won't. That's not how the Internet works."Emick seems to think the strategy works and is doing her part to help. "I've recruited like nine active informants on my on, so who knows how many there are really," she said.She used to be part of Anonymous herself, back in 2008 and 2009, specifically for the group's Church of Scientology protests. "We went to Scientology pickets," she said. "It was a part of the group that was funny and tongue-in-cheek. At the time there was not hacktivism...It was a generally law-abiding thing. You had to be because it was a religious cult that would take you to court."But Emick, who was writing about religion for About.com at the time, got disillusioned with Anonymous when the group began aligning itself with WikiLeaks and hacking into networks. "I was being naive at the time," she said. "I was asking, 'why are people who built their reputations on credit card fraud hanging out?' At the time I thought script kiddies and hackers in the soup, and they have access to peoples' details! This is not good."She says to expect more arrests."There's going to be more to the story," she said. "There's stuff I can't talk about right now. People come to me and probably some people came out on their own and they'll be OK. A lot of these people who got involved are kids who didn't know what they got into."

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-57392951-245/disillusioned-ex-anonymous-first-outed-sabu-last-year/#ixzz1oVYbPGjD

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WikiLeaks Volunteer Was a Paid Informant for the FBI

• By Kevin Poulsen
  

Thordarson with Julian Assange. Photo: Courtesy Sigurdur Thordarson

On an August workday in 2011, a cherubic 18-year-old Icelandic man named Sigurdur "Siggi" Thordarson walked through the stately doors of the U.S. embassy in Reykjavík, his jacket pocket concealing his calling card: a crumpled photocopy of an Australian passport. The passport photo showed a man with a unruly shock of platinum blonde hair and the name Julian Paul Assange.
Thordarson was long time volunteer for WikiLeaks with direct access to Assange and a key position as an organizer in the group. With his cold war-style embassy walk-in, he became something else: the first known FBI informant inside WikiLeaks. For the next three months, Thordarson served two masters, working for the secret-spilling website and simultaneously spilling its secrets to the U.S. government in exchange, he says, for a total of about $5,000. The FBI flew him internationally four times for debriefings, including one trip to Washington D.C., and on the last meeting obtained from Thordarson eight hard drives packed with chat logs, video and other data from WikiLeaks.
The relationship provides a rare window into the U.S. law enforcement investigation into WikiLeaks, the transparency group newly thrust back into international prominence with its assistance to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Thordarson's double-life illustrates the lengths to which the government was willing to go in its pursuit of Julian Assange, approaching WikiLeaks with the tactics honed during the FBI's work against organized crime and computer hacking or, more darkly, the bureau's Hoover-era infiltration of civil rights groups.
"It's a sign that the FBI views WikiLeaks as a suspected criminal organization rather than a news organization," says Stephen Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy. "WikiLeaks was something new, so I think the FBI had to make a choice at some point as to how to evaluate it: Is this The New York Times, or is this something else? And they clearly decided it was something else."
The FBI declined comment.
Thordarson was 17 years old and still in high school when he joined WikiLeaks in February 2010. He was one of a large contingent of Icelandic volunteers that flocked to Assange's cause after WikiLeaks published internal bank documents pertaining to that country's financial crisis.
When a staff revolt in September 2010 left the organization short-handed, Assange put Thoradson in charge of the WikiLeaks chat room, making Thordarson the first point of contact for new volunteers, journalists, potential sources, and outside groups clamoring to get in with WikiLeaks at the peak of its notoriety.
In that role, Thoradson was a middle man in the negotiations with the Bradley Manning Defense Fund that led to WikiLeaks donating $15,000 to the defense of its prime source. He greeted and handled a new volunteer who had begun downloading and organizing a vast trove of 1970s-era diplomatic cables from the National Archives and Record Administration, for what became WikiLeaks' "Kissinger cables" collection last April. And he wrangled scores of volunteers and supporters who did everything from redesign WikiLeaks' websites to shooting video homages to Assange.
He accumulated thousands of pages of chat logs from his time in WikiLeaks, which, he says, are now in the hands of the FBI.
Thoradson's betrayal of WikiLeaks also was a personal betrayal of its founder, Julian Assange, who, former colleagues say, took Thoradson under his wing, and kept him around in the face of criticism and legal controversy.
"When Julian met him for the first or second time, I was there," says Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of Icelandic Parliament who worked with WikiLeaks on Collateral Murder, the Wikileaks release of footage of a US helicopter attack in Iraq. "And I warned Julian from day one, there's something not right about this guy… I asked not to have him as part of the Collateral Murder team."
In January 2011, Thoradson was implicated in a bizarre political scandal in which a mysterious "spy computer" laptop was found running unattended in an empty office in the parliament building. "If you did [it], don't tell me," Assange told Thoradson, according to unauthenticated chat logs provided by Thoradson.
"I will defend you against all accusations, ring [sic] and wrong, and stick by you, as I have done," Assange told him in another chat the next month. "But I expect total loyalty in return."
Instead, Thoradson used his proximity to Assange for his own purposes. The most consequential act came in June 2011, on his third visit to Ellingham Hall the English mansion where Assange was then under house arrest while fighting extradition to Sweden.
For reasons that remain murky, Thoradson decided to approach members of the Lulzsec hacking gang and solicit them to hack Islandic government systems as a service to WikiLeaks. To establish his bona fides as a WikiLeaks representative, he shot and uploaded a 40-second cell phone video that opens on the IRC screen with the chat in progress, and then floats across the room to capture Asssange at work with an associate. (This exchange was first reported by Parmy Olson in her book on Anonymous).


Unfortunately for Thorsadson, the FBI had busted Lulzsec's leader, Hector Xavier Monsegur, AKA Sabu, a week earlier, and secured his cooperation as an informant. On June 20, the FBI warned the Icelandic government. "A huge team of FBI came to Iceland and asked the Icelandic authorities to help them," says Jonsdottir. "They thought there was an imminent Lulzsec attack on Iceland."
The FBI may not have known at this point who Thoradson was beyond his screen names. The bureau and law enforcement agencies in the UK and Australia went on to round up alleged Lulzsec members on unrelated charges.
Having dodged that bullet, it's not clear what prompted Thoradson to approach the FBI two months later. When I asked him directly last week, he answered, "I guess I cooperated because I didn't want to participate in having Anonymous and Lulzsec hack for Wikileaks, since then you're definitely breaking quite a lot of laws."
That answer doesn't make a lot of sense, since it was Thoradson, not Assange, who asked Lulzsec to hack Iceland. There's no evidence of any other WikiLeaks staffer being involved. He offered a second reason that he admits is more truthful: "The second reason was the adventure."
Thoradson's equivocation highlights a hurdle in reporting on him: He is prone to lying. Jonsdottir calls him "pathological." He admits he has lied to me in the past. For this story, Thoradson backed his account by providing emails that appear to be between him and his FBI handlers, flight records for some of his travels, and an FBI receipt indicating that he gave them eight hard drives. The Icelandic Ministry of the Interior has previously confirmed that the FBI flew to Iceland to interview Thoradson. Thoradson also testified to much of this account in a session of the Icelandic Parliament, with Jonsdottir in attendance.
Finally, he has given me a substantial subset of the chat logs he says he passed to the FBI, amounting to about 2,000 pages, which, at the very least, proves that he kept logs and is willing to turn them over to a reporter disliked by Julian Assange.
Thoradson's "adventure" began on August 23, 2011, when he sent an email to the general delivery box for the U.S. embassy in Reykjavík "Regarding an Ongoing Criminal investigation in the United States."
"The nature of the intel that can be brought to light in that investigation will not be spoken over email conversation," he wrote cryptically.
An embassy security officer called him the same day. "He said, What investigation?' I said the Wikileaks," says Thoradson. "He denied there was such an investigation, so I just said we both know there is."
Thoradson was invited to the embassy, where he presented a copy of Assange's passport, the passport for Assange's number two, Kristinn Hrafnsson, and a snippet of a private chat between Thoradson and Assange. The embassy official was noncommittal. He told Thoradson they might be in touch, but it would take at least a week.
It happened much faster.
Photo: Courtesy Sigurdur Thordarson

FBI agents and two federal prosecutors landed in a private Gulfstream on the next day, on August 24, and Thorsadson was summoned back to the embassy.
He was met by the same embassy official who took his keys and his cell phone, then walked with him on a circuitous route through the streets of downtown Reykjavík, ending up at the Hotel Reykjavik Centrum, Thoradson says. There, Thorsadson spent two hours in a hotel conference room talking to two FBI agents. Then they accompanied back to the embassy so he could put money in his parking meter, and back to the hotel for more debriefing.
The agents asked him about his Lulzsec interactions, but were primarily interested in what he could give them on WikiLeaks. One of them asked him if he could wear a recording device on his next visit to London and get Assange to say something incriminating, or talk about Bradley Manning.
"They asked what I use daily, have always on," he says. "I said, my watch. So they said they could change that out for some recording watch."
Thorsadson says he declined. "I like Assange, even considered him a friend," he says. "I just didn't want to go that way."
In all, Thorsadson spent 20 hours with the agents over about five days. Then the Icelandic government ordered the FBI to pack up and go home.
It turns out the FBI had mislead the local authorities about thier purpose onthe country. According to a timeline (.pdf) later released by the National Commissioner of the Icelandic Police, the FBI contacted Icelandic law enforcement to report Thorsadson's embassy walk-in, and ask for permission to fly into the country to follow up. But the bureau had presented the request as an extension of its earlier investigation into Lulzsec, and failed to mention that its real target was WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks is well regarded in Iceland, and the incident errupted into a hot political topic when it surfaced there this year, with conservatives arguing that Iceland should have cooperated with the FBI, and liberals complaining about the agents being allowed into the country to begin with. "It became a maasive controversy," says Jonsdottir. "And then none of them knew what sort of person Siggi is."
Politics aside, the FBI was not done with Thorsadson.
The agents persuaded Thorsadson to fly to Copenhagen with them, he says, for another day of interviews. In October, he made a second trip to Denmark for another debriefing. Between meetings, Thorsadson kept in touch with his handlers through disposable email accounts.
In November 2011, Thorsadson was fired from WikiLeaks. The organization had discovered he had set up an online WikiLeaks tee shirt store and arranged for the proceeds to go into his own bank account. WikiLeaks has said the embezzlement amounted to about $50,000.
Thorsadson told the FBI about it in a terse email on November 8. "No longer with WikiLeaks so not sure how I can help you more."
"We'd still like to talk with you in person," one of his handlers replied. "I can think of a couple of easy ways for you to help."
"Can you guys help me with cash?" Thorsadson shot back.
Image: Courtesy Sigurdur Thordarson

For the next few months, Thorsadson begged the FBI for money, while the FBI alternately ignored him and courted him for more assistance. In the end, Thorsadson says, the FBI agreed to compensate him for the work he missed while meeting with agents (he says he worked at a bodyguard-training school), totaling about $5,000.
With the money settled, the FBI began preparing him for a trip to the U.S. "I wanted to talk to you about future things we can do," his handler wrote in February. The FBI wanted him to reestablish contact with some of his former WikiLeaks associates. "We'll talk about specific goals of the chats, but you can get a head start before our meet by just getting in touch and catching up with them. If you need to know who specifically, we can discuss on the phone."
The three-day D.C. trip took place in February of last year. Thorsadson says he flew on Iceland Air flight 631 to Logan International Airport on February 22, and transferred in Boston to JetBlue flight 686 to Dulles International Aiport, where he was greeted by a U.S. Customs official "and then escorted out the Dulles terminal into the arms of the FBI."
He stayed at a hotel in Arlington, Virginia, where the Justice Department's investigation into WikiLeaks is centered, and met there with his two usual FBI contacts, and three or four other men in suits who did not identify themselves.

"At the last day we went to a steak house and ate, all of us," he says. "Where they served Coca Cola in glass bottles from Mexico."
On March 18, 2011, he had one more meeting with the FBI in Denmark. On this trip, he brought along eight of his personal hard drives, containing the information he'd compiled while at WikiLeaks, including his chat logs, photos and videos he shot at Ellington Hall. The FBI gave him a signed receipt for the hardware.
Then they cut him off.
Today, Thorsadson, now 20, has new problems. He's facing criminal charges in Iceland for unrelated financial and tax crimes. In addition, WikiLeaks filed a police report for the tee-shirt shop embezzlement.
The legacy of his cooperation with the FBI is unclear. A court filing revealed last week shows that in the months following Thorsadson's last debriefing, Justice Department officials in Arlington, Virginia, began obtaining court orders targeting two of Thorsadson's former WikiLeaks colleagues in Iceland: Smari McCarthy and Herbert Snorrason.
Snorrason, who ran the WikiLeaks chat room in 2010, before Thorsadson took it over, had the entire contents of his Gmail account handed over to the government, under a secret search warrant issued in October 2011.

The evidence used to obtain the warrant remains under seal. "I do wonder," says Thorsadson, "whether I'm somewhere in there."

Hacker accuses US government of tricking Anonymous into attacking foreign targets

RESIST! CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND PRISONS, HAMMOND, POLICE ABUSE, SURVEILLANCE, WHISTLEBLOWING
By Kevin Zeese, www.PopularResistance.org
November 15th, 2013

Above: #FreeHammond by Molly Crabapple

Hammond's Full Sentencing Statement Is Below: "I had an obligation to use my skills to expose and confront injusticeand to bring the truth to light."

One of the most important political prisoners and whistleblowers in the United States was sentenced to the maximum sentence of 10 years today in a courtroom filled with his supporters. Hammond should be incarcerated at all for his work in exposing the spying of StratFor, a private corporate spying firm that often works with US intelligence agencies. The documents released by Hammond showed the cooperation between private and government security agencies and methods used to stifle dissent, including their strategies for defeating movements. We stand by Hammond and appreciate his courage.

People outside the court house after Jeremy Hammond was sentenced. Source Twitter

At his sentencing, Hammond remained defiant. The Huffington Post reported that he said:
"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. I took responsibility for my actions, by pleading guilty, but when will the government be made to answer for its crimes?"
His full statement from the Sparrow Project is included below.
Hammond explained that his purpose was to expose the truth and he acted at the behest of an FBI informant to hack foreign government websites. According to RT he said: "I did this because I believe people have the right to know what government and corporations are doing behind closed doors. I did what I believe is right."

Free Jeremy Hammond sign outside of courthouse

Hammond was arrested on March 5, 2012 as a result of an FBI informant with the alias "Sabu," later identified as Hector Xavier Monsegur. Five other people were arrested around the world.Hammond explained in a written statement: "What the United States could not accomplish legally, it used Sabu, and by extension, me and my co-defendants, to accomplish illegally. Why was the United States using us to infiltrate the private networks of foreign governments? What are they doing with the information we stole? And will anyone in our government ever be held accountable for these crimes?" The countries that the FBI targeted through Hammond were Iran, Turkey and Brazil.
The prosecution and sentencing of Jeremy Hammond showed the unethical injustice of the US court system. One of the people identified in the StratFor leaks was the judges husband who was an attorney for StratFor, yet she did not recuse herself from the case. As RT writes: "ensnared the presiding judge, Loretta Preska, whose husband Thomas Kaveler was implicated in the leaked emails. Kaveler is an employee of Cahill Gordon & Reindell LLP, a StratFor client and associate, and many Hammond supporters claimed that Preska's impartiality is harmed by this conflict of interest. Preska denied the charge, however, and Hammond's lawyers were unsuccessful in their attempt to force her recusal."
As we report in this week's newsletter, We Need The Truth, Jeremy Hammond and other whistleblowers who have been persecuted by the government are planning an important role in making transformational change. The beginning of change begins with people know the truth about what is happening around them. This is not easy in an environment where the government spreads misinformation aided by the corporate media. But, enough truth is getting out, thanks to whistleblowers like Jeremy Hammond, that people's political consciousness is being raised and this makes them more difficult to be controlled. We ended our newsletter with comments from Zbignew Brzezinski who recently warned his fellow members of the power structure that there is a "rise in worldwide populist activism;" that this "persistent and highly motivated populist resistance . . . has proven to be increasingly difficult to suppress" and that as a result of this "universal awakening of mass political consciousness" they cannot exert "external control" over the masses.
It will be in large part thanks to Jeremy Hammond and the many whistleblowers like him that mass political consciousness is being raised.
Huff Post lives, Alyona Minkovski reports on the sentencing:

This report from RT is from after Hammond pled guilty and includes his explanation for his actions:

Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison, Jeremy Hammond Uses Allocution to Give Consequential Statement Highlighting Global Criminal Exploits by FBI Handlers

The Sparrow Project
Jeremy Hammond, a 28-year-old political activist, was sentenced today to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to participating in the Anonymous hack into the computers of the private intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor). The Ceremonial Courtroom at the Federal Court for the Southern District of New York was filled today with an outpouring of support by journalists, activists and other whistleblowers who see Jeremy Hammond's actions as a form of civil disobedience, motivated by a desire to protest and expose the secret activities of private intelligence corporations.
The hearing opened with arguments as to what sections of the court record will remain redacted after sentencing. While Jeremy's attorneys initially erred on the side of caution in previous memorandums and kept large pieces of the record redacted, both the defense and prosecution agreed this morning that many of the sections should now be made available for public view. The prosecution, however took stiff exception to portions of the court record being made public that indicate victims, specifically foreign governments, that Jeremy allegedly hacked under the direction of Hector "Sabu" Monsegur, the FBI informant at the helm of Jeremy's alleged actions. Judge Preska ordered that the names of these foreign governments remain sealed.
Jeremy's lead counsel, Sarah Kunstler, who is 9 months pregnant and due to give birth today, delivered a passionate testimonial as to the person that Jeremy is, and the need for people like Jeremy during our changing socio-political landscape. She was followed by co-counsel, Susan Keller, who wept as she recalled her experiences reading the hundreds of letters from supporters to the court detailing the Jeremy Hammond's selflessness and enthusiastic volunteerism. She pointed out that it was this same selflessness that motivated Jeremy's actions in this case. She closed her testimony by underscoring that, "The centerpiece of our argument is a young man with high hopes and unbelievably laudable expectations in this world."
Susan was followed by Jeremy Hammond himself, who gave a detailed, touching and consequential allocution to the court. The following is Jeremy's statement to the court. We have redacted a portion [marked in red] upon the orders of Judge Preska. While we believe the public has a right to know the redacted information therein, we refuse to publish information that could adversely effect Jeremy or his counsel.

JEREMY' HAMMOND SENTENCING STATEMENT | 11/15/2013

Good morning. Thank you for this opportunity. My name is Jeremy Hammond and I'm here to be sentenced for hacking activities carried out during my involvement with Anonymous. I have been locked up at MCC for the past 20 months and have had a lot of time to think about how I would explain my actions.
Before I begin, I want to take a moment to recognize the work of the people who have supported me. I want to thank all the lawyers and others who worked on my case: Elizabeth Fink, Susan Kellman, Sarah Kunstler, Emily Kunstler, Margaret Kunstler, and Grainne O'Neill. I also want to thank the National Lawyers Guild, the Jeremy Hammond Defense Committee and Support Network, Free Anons, the Anonymous Solidarity Network, Anarchist Black Cross, and all others who have helped me by writing a letter of support, sending me letters, attending my court dates, and spreading the word about my case. I also want to shout out my brothers and sisters behind bars and those who are still out there fighting the power.
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. 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 injusticeand to bring the truth to light.
Could I have achieved the same goals through legal means? 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 it's own citizens or the international community.
My introduction to politics was when George W. Bush stole the Presidential election in 2000, then took advantage of the waves of racism and patriotism after 9/11 to launch unprovoked imperialist wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. I took to the streets in protest naively believing our voices would be heard in Washington and we could stop the war. Instead, we were labeled as traitors, beaten, and arrested.
I have been arrested for numerous acts of civil disobedience on the streets of Chicago, but it wasn't until 2005 that I used my computer skills to break the law in political protest. I was arrested by the FBI for hacking into the computer systems of a right-wing, pro-war group called Protest Warrior, an organization that sold racist t-shirts on their website and harassed anti-war groups. I was charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and the "intended loss" in my case was arbitrarily calculated by multiplying the 5000 credit cards in Protest Warrior's database by $500, resulting in a total of $2.5 million.My sentencing guidelines were calculated on the basis of this "loss," even though not a single credit card was used or distributed by me or anyone else. I was sentenced to two years in prison.
While in prison I have seen for myself the ugly reality of how the criminal justice system destroys the lives of the millions of people held captive behind bars. The experience solidified my opposition to repressive forms of power and the importance of standing up for what you believe.
When I was released, I was eager to continue my involvement in struggles for social change. I didn't want to go back to prison, so I focused on above-ground community organizing. But over time, I became frustrated with the limitations, of peaceful protest, seeing it as reformist and ineffective. The Obama administration continued the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, escalated the use of drones, and failed to close Guantanamo Bay.
Around this time, I was following the work of groups like Wikileaks and Anonymous. It was very inspiring to see the ideas of hactivism coming to fruition. I was particularly moved by the heroic actions of Chelsea Manning, who had exposed the atrocities committed by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. She took an enormous personal risk to leak this information believing that the public had a right to know and hoping that her disclosures would be a positive step to end these abuses. It is heart-wrenching to hear about her cruel treatment in military lockup.
I thought long and hard about choosing this path again. I had to ask myself, if Chelsea Manning fell into the abysmal nightmare of prison fighting for the truth, could I in good conscience do any less, if I was able? I thought the best way to demonstrate solidarity was to continue the work of exposing and confronting corruption.
I was drawn to Anonymous because I believe in autonomous, decentralized direct action. At the time Anonymous was involved in operations in support of the Arab Spring uprisings, against censorship, and in defense of Wikileaks. I had a lot to contribute, including technical skills, and how to better articulate ideas and goals. It was an exciting time the birth of a digital dissent movement, where the definitions and capabilities of hacktivism were being shaped.
I was especially interested in the work of the hackers of LulzSec who were breaking into some significant targets and becoming increasingly political. Around this time, I first started talking to Sabu, who was very open about the hacks he supposedly committed, and was encouraging hackers to unite and attack major government and corporate systems under the banner of Anti Security. But very early in my involvement, the other Lulzsec hackers were arrested, leaving me to break into systems and write press releases. Later, I would learn that Sabu had been the first one arrested, and that the entire time I was talking to him he was an FBI informant.
Anonymous was also involved in the early stages of Occupy Wall Street. I was regularly participating on the streets as part of Occupy Chicago and was very excited to see a worldwide mass movement against the injustices of capitalism and racism. In several short months, the "Occupations" came to an end, closed by police crackdowns and mass arrests of protestors who were kicked out of their own public parks. The repression of Anonymous and the Occupy Movement set the tone for Antisec in the following months the majority of our hacks against police targets were in retaliation for the arrests of our comrades.
I targeted law enforcement systems because of the racism and inequality with which the criminal law is enforced. 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.
I had never even heard of Stratfor until Sabu brought it to my attention. Sabu was encouraging people to invade systems, and helping to strategize and facilitate attacks. He even provided me with vulnerabilities of targets passed on by other hackers, so it came as a great surprise when I learned that Sabu had been working with the FBI the entire time.
On December 4, 2011, Sabu was approached by another hacker who had already broken into Stratfor's credit card database. Sabu, under the watchful eye of his government handlers, then brought the hack to Antisec by inviting this hacker to our private chatroom, where he supplied download links to the full credit card database as well as the initial vulnerability access point to Stratfor's systems.
I spent some time researching Stratfor and reviewing the information we were given, and decided that their activities and client base made them a deserving target. I did find it ironic that Stratfor's wealthy and powerful customer base had their credit cards used to donate to humanitarian organizations, but my main role in the attack was to retrieve Stratfor's private email spools which is where all the dirty secrets are typically found.
It took me more than a week to gain further access into Stratfor's internal systems, but I eventually broke into their mail server. There was so much information, we needed several servers of our own in order to transfer the emails. Sabu, who was involved with the operation at every step, offered a server, which was provided and monitored by the FBI. Over the next weeks, the emails were transferred, the credit cards were used for donations, and Stratfor's systems were defaced and destroyed. Why the FBI would introduce us to the hacker who found the initial vulnerability and allow this hack to continue remains a mystery.
As a result of the Stratfor hack, some of the dangers of the unregulated private intelligence industry are now known. 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.
After Stratfor, I continued to break into other targets, using a powerful "zero day exploit" allowing me administrator access to systems running the popular Plesk webhosting platform. Sabu asked me many times for access to this exploit, which I refused to give him. Without his own independent access, Sabu continued to supply me with lists of vulnerable targets. I broke into numerous websites he supplied, uploaded the stolen email accounts and databases onto Sabu's FBI server, and handed over passwords and backdoors that enabled Sabu (and, by extension, his FBI handlers) to control these targets.
These intrusions, all of which were suggested by Sabu while cooperating with the FBI, affected thousands of domain names and consisted largely of foreign government websites, including those of XXXXXXX, XXXXXXXX, XXXX, XXXXXX, XXXXX, XXXXXXXX, XXXXXXX and theXXXXXX XXXXXXX. In one instance, Sabu and I provided access information to hackers who went on to deface and destroy many government websites in XXXXXX. 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.

Sketch from inside Judge Preska's courtroom by Molly Crabapple

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 U.S. hypes the threat of hackers in order to justify the multi billion dollar cyber security industrial complex, but it is also responsible for the same conduct it aggressively prosecutes and claims to work to prevent. 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. Yes I broke the law, but I believe that sometimes laws must be broken in order to make room for change.
In the immortal word of Frederick Douglas, "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
This is not to say that I do not have any regrets. I realize that I released the personal information of innocent people who had nothing to do with the operations of the institutions I targeted. I apologize for the release of data that was harmful to individuals and irrelevant to my goals. I believe in the individual right to privacy from government surveillance, and from actors like myself, and I appreciate the irony of my own involvement in the trampling of these rights. I am committed to working to make this world a better place for all of us. I still believe in the importance of hactivism as a form of civil disobedience, but it is time for me to move on to other ways of seeking change. My time in prison has taken a toll on my family, friends, and community. I know I am needed at home. I recognize that 7 years ago I stood before a different federal judge, facing similar charges, but this does not lessen the sincerity of what I say to you today.
It has taken a lot for me to write this, to explain my actions, knowing that doing so honestly could cost me more years of my life in prison. I am aware that I could get as many as 10 years, but I hope that I do not, as I believe there is so much work to be done.
STAY STRONG AND KEEP STRUGGLING!
To schedule interviews with Jeremy Hammond's attorneys and supporters following today's sentencing please contact Andy Stepanian, 631.291.3010, andy@sparrowmedia.net.
http://www.popularresistance.org/jeremy-hammond-sentenced-to-maximum-sentence-10-years/

Magda Hassan Wrote:Judge in hacker case is married to a Stratfor client

UPDATED: Civil liberties advocates have rallied behind Jeremy Hammond who was denied bail and faces life in prison [B]VIDEO[/B]

[URL="http://www.salon.com/writer/natasha_lennard/"]NATASHA LENNARD
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UPDATE Dec. 3rd: Jeremy Hammond's lawyers plan to file a motion this week for Judge Preska's recusal. Sparrow Media reported that Preska was made aware of the published connection between her husband and Stratfor and that her husband's Stratfor-related information was published by Wikileaks, but "Preska indicated that this personal connection to the Hammond case would not effect her ability to be impartial'." A video from last week's press conference featuring journalists, attorneys and civil liberties advocates is posted below.


Nov. 28th: Hacktivist Jeremy Hammond was told last week by federal judge Loretta Preska that he was being denied bail and could face life in jail for his alleged involvement with the Anonymous/LulzSec hack into the computers of the private intelligence firm Stratfor.
Civil liberties advocates have decried the state's harsh treatment of the activist, who was reportedly held in solitary confinement for five days in Manhattan's Metropolitan Correctional Center and has so far been imprisoned for eight months without trial. Now, Hammond's supporters believe they have an extra and important string to their bow: a release from Anonymous reported that the federal judge who denied Hammond bail is married to a client of Stratfor and was personally affected by the infamous hack.
"Judge Loretta Preska's impartiality is compromised by her husband's involvement with Stratfor and a clear prejudice against Hammond exists, as evidenced by her statements … Without justice being freely, fully and impartially administered, neither our persons, nor our rights nor our property, can be protected," the Anonymous release noted.

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The criminal complaint against Hammond alleges that the Statfor hack exposed the private information of 860,000 Stratfor clients, as well as 5 million emails, which WikiLeaks has been publishing in batches. "Some of this data released belongs specifically to Judge Preska's husband," stated a release from Sparrow Media, which is helping to organize a press conference in New York Thursday during which activists and attorneys, including National Lawyers Guild New York president Gideon Oliver, will brief the media on their call for Judge Preska to immediately recuse herself for failure to disclose this conflict of interest.
Watch a video of last Thursday presser, via Sparrow Media:
[video=vimeo;54656359]http://vimeo.com/54656359[/video]

http://www.salon.com/2012/11/28/judge_in_hacker_case_is_married_to_a_stratfor_client/

Jeremy Hammond: FBI directed my attacks on foreign government sites