This is Jeremy Hammond and today he was sentenced to ten years in jail - the maximum sentence
he could've been given after he entered into a plea bargain.
So why is he being thrown in jail?
Well he's a hacker, a computer programmer, and an activist.
And to many people he's a whistleblowing hero.
There was a campaign to have him freed and today the court room was packed with his supporters.
But the prosecution in his case called him a computer hacking recidivist.
They accused him of threatening public safety and the safety of law enforcement officers.
It's one of those things that I never really understood.
Why is it that the safety of law enforcement officers is considered separate from the safety
of the public.
It's a really weird us and them thing, but that's a different matter entirely.
In March 2012 Jeremy Hammond was arrested at home in Chicago and charged under the Computer
Fraud and Abuse Act.
That's the same law that was used to chase after the reddit founder Aaron Swartz.
Hammond hacked into the servers of Strategic Forecasting who are better known as Stratfor,
an intelligence firm.
He deleted a load of files and stole five million e-mails before passing them on to
Wikileaks.
Those documents contain tens of thousands of credit card details that related to Stratfor
and Hammond then urged a load of anons to start racking up charges on the credit cards.
Not for personal gain but to donate money to non-profit organisations.
In total they managed to put 700,000 dollars on the cards.
Hammond then told the Anons that he wanted to cause the company to collapse, to be pushed
into bankruptcy.
But focusing on the credit card details as the justice system appears to want people
to do ignores all the other more useful revelations that Hammond's hack uncovered.
Now if any of this sounds familiar that might be because of Barrett Brown, the journalist
who's facing more than 100 years in jail basically for copying and pasting a link to the documents
that Hammond leaked.
Now the reason Hammond got caught out was because he got done over by a former friend.
Hector Monsegur, also known as Sabu.
Sabu was a prominent figure in LulzSec but was tracked down by the FBI and started ratting
on the people that he'd hacked with.
The FBI also used Sabu to encourage hackers to infiltrate the servers of government targets
using his network to commit what would otherwise be considered crimes in order to access information.
The US government has said this about Hammond, "That he was motivated by a malicious and
callous contempt from those with whom he disagreed, particularly anyone remotely related to law
enforcement.
Not a concern with both transparency and privacy."
Funnily enough that statement is pretty much exactly what Hammond predicted back in August
when he wrote this in a statement, "They (the US government) condemn hackers and leakers
when the NSA, CIA, and FBI illegally spy on everybody, and wage cyber espionage through
viruses and hacking for foreign government systems."
Though Hammond does have previous convictions for hacking, he got two years for breaking
into a right-wing website but the thing is he's never made personal gains from his hacks.
They've always been based in his liberal activism and that has won him a load of famous supporters.
Richard Stallman called Hammond "a fine example of a socially responsible hacker."
Birgitta Jonsdottir said that "in Iceland, his actions would have been considered an
act of bravery."
And Chris Hedges said this, "the security and surveillance state is creating a hermetically
closed system of power.
It is going this by rewriting laws to subvert the constitution and grant itself the ability
to criminalize all forms of dissent."
So what do you think?
Is Jeremy Hammond a computer hacking recidivist or a brave socially responsible hacker?
Let us know.