Why is the United States sending some of its best young minds to jail? Jeremy Hammond, a 28-year-old digital activist from Chicago, has just been sentenced to 10 years in jail for participating in the 2011 hack of private security firm Stratfor.
“I believe in the power of the truth,” said Hammond, pleading guilty to helping to liberate millions of emails from the company, which is paid by large corporations to spy on activists around the world. “I did this because I believe people have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors. I did what I believe is right.”
Like the others who took part in the Stratfor hack, Hammond wasn’t out for money, and he didn’t get any. Yet he has already spent 18 months in prison, including extended periods in solitary confinement.
“Punishment has to be proportionate to the harm caused,” said Hanni Fakhoury, staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “These punishments are excessive.”
The global witch hunt for hackers, whistle-blowers and anyone who seeks to release private information in the public interest is being led by the US government, but its targets are international. British activist Lauri Love was arrested last month and may face extradition on charges of hacking into US government networks and a possible decade in jail.
The witch hunt for hackers and leakers is designed as a deterrent. That is the logic behind sending people to prison: threaten potential scallywags with the loss of their freedom and livelihood and they might fall in line. The wildly disproportionate sentencing of young digital activists suggests that there’s something the US government and associated nation states are anxious to deter. The trouble is that this deterrent looks rather likely to backfire.
The legislation used to lock up these people is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a flexible law that allows US courts to impose almost indefinite sentences; the crime is broadly framed as any crime committed with a computer, down to simple violation of terms of service.
By staggering coincidence, the digital crimes that get prosecuted are those that happen to make governments and large corporations look foolish. Financial damage is the main thrust of the case against Hammond and his fellow LulzSec members, but it isn’t the money that matters. Hammond is being asked to pay back just $250 000 (about R2.5-million); you would have to embezzle tens of millions of dollars to get an equivalent sentence for corporate fraud in the same Manhattan courtroom.
What matters is that people are using their computer skills to expose uncomfortable truths, including Stratfor’s alleged involvement in spying on Occupy Wall Street. With the right skills, you no longer have to hide out in a lonely Washington car park to leak classified information. You don’t have to break into a building to steal documents that might be in the public interest. You don’t even have to put trousers on. All you need do is sit at your computer and type.
One thing unites the hackers and whistle-blowers causing the US government such pain, from Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden to prankster Andrew Auernheimer: they have little respect for the moral authority of the US government and its mechanisms. They are in their teens and early 20s; they grew up in the Bush-Blair-Brown years and came of age just as the financial crash of 2008 swept away the socioeconomic justification for Anglo-American imperialism.
The online culture they helped to create believes deeply in transparency. In that culture they are heroes. Hammond is not the first information activist to be made a martyr by the US and he is unlikely to be the last. – © Guardian News & Media 2013
Laurie Penny is a New Statesman contributing editor