Free Jeremy Hammond!! Free all Prisoners!

Jeremy Hammond, Accused Anonymous Hacker, Faces Potentially Decades of Incarceration

Jeremy Hammond is a 27-year-old political activist from Chicago, Illinois. He is currently incarcerated at the federal jail in New York City, charged with hacking conspiracies carried out by the LulzSec/AntiSec wing of Anonymous. His four codefendants, Ryan Ackroyd, Jake Davis, Darren Martyn and Donncha OCearrbhail, are awaiting extradition from Britain and Ireland. The charges include the hacking of Stratfor and HBGary Federal, two private security firms contracted to spy and collect intelligence by governments and corporations. They are also charged with focusing on law enforcement by hacking the Arizona Department of Public Safety, infamous for its racist immigration policies. Stratfors clients include not only giant corporations like Bank of America, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, but U.S. government agencies, including all four branches of the military, the FBI, Homeland Security and local police forces. As a private spy agency, Stratfor avoids constitutional constraints. Internal emails published by WikiLeaks offer disturbing revelations about the hidden workings of the military industrial complex. The hack revealed that Stratfor employs a network of paid informants that include government employees and journalists. The hack also revealed that Stratfor client Dow Chemical paid for spying on activists working to seek redress for the Bhopal environmental disaster. Stratfor was also hired by the Texas Department of Public Safety to infiltrate Occupy Austin. HBGary is a technology security company that sell information and other services to the Federal Government. The Anonymous hack revealed HBGarys potentially illegal proposal to take down WikiLeaks by by fueling a feud between different groups, disseminating disinformation, tracking and threatening its financial donors, and submitting fake documents to WikiLeaks and then calling out the error. Other emails appear to show the U.S. Chamber of Commerce contracted the firm to spy on and discredit unions and liberal groups.