Convicted Hacker Jeremy Hammond Exposed US Plan to Criminalize Democratic Dissent in America
“Without figures like Jeremy Hammond, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Barrett Brown, there is no free press.”
Posted November 15, 2013
Jeremy Hammond Sentenced To 10 Years In Prison:
Convicted hacker Jeremy Hammond was sentenced Friday to 10 years in
prison for stealing internal emails from the global intelligence firm
Stratfor.
TRANSCRIPT:
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News
Network. I’m Paul Jay in Baltimore. And welcome to Reality Asserts
Itself.
On Friday, Jeremy Hammond, the political and internet
activist, will be sentenced. He was charged with hacking into the
computers of Stratfor. That’s a political intelligence consulting
company that works for various pieces of the military-industrial complex
and what many people call the American national security state.
Now joining us in the studio to talk about why the case
against Jeremy Hammond matters to the rest of us is Chris Hedges. Chris
is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a senior fellow at the Nation
Institute. Along with Joe Sacco, he wrote the New York Times bestseller
Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. He writes a weekly column for
Truthdig.
And thanks again for joining us.
CHRIS HEDGES, JOURNALIST, SENIOR FELLOW AT THE NATION INSTITUTE: Thank you.
JAY: So why does what happened to Jeremy Hammond matter to us? What’s the significance of this case?
HEDGES: Well, because without figures like Jeremy
Hammond, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Barrett Brown,
there is no free press.
JAY: So, quickly, for people–most of our viewers must know this, but quickly, just what is it that Jeremy exposed?
HEDGES: He broke into the private security firm known as
Stratfor, which does work for a variety of intelligence agencies–for
the Marine Corps and the Defense Department, the Pentagon, but also for
corporations, including Raytheon, Dow Chemical, and others. And he
turned over 3 million emails, email exchanges within the company to
Rolling Stone, WikiLeaks, and other publications.
Now, this was quite a significant dump, because it
illustrated two or three very chilling things about the security and
surveillance state, first of all that there was no division between
corporate spying and government spying. It was seamless, including the
same people going back and forth. It was from that dump that we realized
the extent to which the Occupy movement was being spied upon and
infiltrated and monitored and followed. And we also found from those
email exchanges that there was a concerted attempt on the part of
security officials, both inside the government and within the private
security contracting agency, to link, falsely, nonviolent dissident
groups with terrorist groups so that they could apply terrorism laws
against these groups.
And when I sued Barack Obama over Section 1021 of the
National National Defense Authorization Act, which permits the U.S.
military, overturning 150 years of domestic law, to seize U.S. citizens
who “substantially” support–that is not a legal term, it’s not material
support, it’s an amorphous term–”substantially” support al-Qaeda, the
Taliban, or something called associated forces–again another nebulous
term–hold those citizens in military facilities without due process
indefinitely, part of the email exchanges were entered as evidence in my
case. And those email exchanges showed that this private security firm,
along with government officials, was attempting to link a group called
U.S. Day of Rage, founded by a journalist and activist named Alexa
O’Brien, who was one of my coplaintiffs, with al-Qaeda. And why were
they trying to link that group with al-Qaeda? So that they could employ
the draconian terrorism laws against nonviolent democratic dissidents.
That all came out from Hammond.
JAY: And you can see an example of a related thing, the
way the British are calling Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda–I
think I have the right last name–calling him a terrorist for–.
HEDGES: Right. Well, we have–you know, our most
courageous investigative journalists are in self-imposed exile,
including Jacob Appelbaum, including Glenn Greenwald, including Sarah
Harrison–she’s British–who is now in exile in Berlin because she
accompanied Snowden, if you remember, to Russia. She can’t go back into
her own country. It is really terrifying.
And when you couple that with the fact that the security
and surveillance state has effectively shut down investigation into
national security, the national security apparatus by the traditional
press, largely through the Espionage Act, but also because we now know
that–and more importantly, those who might be whistleblowers know that
all of electronic medications are captured and stored in perpetuity by
the state, meaning that anyone who decides to reach out to a journalist
can be very easily traced and charged. And that is a really, as a
journalist, a truly [snip] not a journalist, but I was a former
investigative journalist for The New York Times–a truly terrifying
development.
JAY: So, Jeremy’s going to be sentenced on Friday. Talk a
little bit about him. And what motivated Jeremy Hammond as you know
him? You spent some time with him in prison.
HEDGES: Yeah. I was at the Metropolitan Correctional
Center in New York where he’s being held on Wednesday with him for the
afternoon. He’s not allowed to have social visits because of a series of
minor infractions, including his tier getting a hold of some marijuana.
But he can see journalists, although it took me two months to get in to
see him.
I found him–you know, he’s a follower of the Black Bloc,
and I’m very critical of the Black Bloc. But nevertheless, I certainly
recognize the right of the Black Bloc to exist. And not only that, I
don’t think anyone should be criminalized for what they believe,
including if they are supportive of the Black Bloc. So he comes out of
the Black Bloc.
But he’s one of those rare examples of somebody who has
these amazing technical skills in sort of being able to hack, but also a
deep political consciousness, and a lot of times that doesn’t always go
with hackers.
He, as a high school student during the Bush call to
invade Iraq, led a walkout of students from his high school. He founded
an underground newspaper. He was involved in all sorts of acts of civil
disobedience. I think he’d been arrested by the time he was 21 ten
times, including protesting against the Republican National Convention
when it was held in New York. And he had hacked into a right-wing
group–I think it was called Patriot Warrior, and for that he’d gone to
prison in Illinois for two years. When he got out, he was–I guess this
is in a few states, and Illinois is one of them–they can put you under a
curfew in your own house. So from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., you have to be in
your house. So he was living in a curfew.
And from all we can see, and really sort of avoiding the
kind of hacking activity that had gotten him into so much trouble–he
was working with Food Not Bombs and these kinds of groups and delivering
books to prisoners–I mean, he has a real social consciousness–very
influenced, by the way, by the old anarchists. He said he made frequent
trips to the monument in the Chicago cemetery for the martyrs of the
Haymarket labor uprising. Four of them were hanged. Emma Goldman’s
buried very close by. Reads a lot, thanks a lot.
And it was 2010, and Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning was
arrested for giving those documents and videos to WikiLeaks. And he said
that really prompted him, that he knew he had the skills to do
something like that and that the act, the courageous act that Manning
did and the sacrifice that Manning made prompted him to act, although he
knew now, because he could move around, he couldn’t leave his house, he
was still living under curfew, that his chances of being caught were
high. And yet he went ahead and hacked into the security firm. And he
didn’t seek any financial gain. He didn’t get any. I mean, this for me
as a journalist is the work of a classic whistleblower who wants to make
public information that we have a right to know. It’s our information.
JAY: So the argument you would get from President Obama
or his supporters–and this is all being done under the Obama
administration, who’s been especially vigorous going after
whistleblowers–
HEDGES: Far worse than Bush.
JAY: –their argument’s going to be a state has a right
to protect its secrets, particularly its security secrets. A corporation
has a right to protect its secrets. I mean, how do you deal with this
issue? How do you balance this?
HEDGES: Well, not when they shred the Constitution and
violate our most basic right to privacy. Not only that, remember that we
now know from this information they are actively working to criminalize
democratic dissent. That’s a crime. It should be a crime. And whatever
crime Jeremy Hammond committed is nothing, pales in comparison to the
crimes that are being committed by the state. That’s the point. The same
thing with Chelsea Manning. Whatever crime Chelsea Manning may have
committed, it is nothing compared to the war crimes in the fraud and the
lies that are being perpetrated by the corporate state.
And I think that’s the point, that when you shut down
the possibility of a free press, when there is no judicial or
legislative oversight–and there isn’t anymore–then the abuse of power
becomes rife, especially when you build walls of secrecy. And the last
best hope are these people who can break down those walls and make
public that information which we have a right to know. We have a right
to know that the government is criminalizing our forms of protest and
attempting to treat us as if we were terrorists.
JAY: And the state then has an absolute right to secrecy, and it has an absolute right to make sure no one else has any secrecy.
HEDGES: If it’s totalitarian. And that’s what corporate totalitarianism, which is a species of totalitarianism, is about.
JAY: Thanks very much for joining us, Chris.
HEDGES: Thank you.
JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
Paul Jay is CEO and Senior Editor of The Real News Network.
Transcript: courtesy Information Clearing House
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