10 Year Prison Term Sought for Anonymous Hacktivist Jeremy Hammond
Anonymous hacktivist Jeremy Hammond should receive the maximum 10 year prison term for defacing law enforcement and corporate websites and stealing 200 gigabytes of email and 60,000 credit card numbers from a private intelligence firm, prosecutors argued in a court filing today.
“Contrary to the picture he paints of himself … Hammond is a computer hacking recidivist who, following a federal conviction for computer hacking, went on to engage in a massive hacking spree during which he caused harm to numerous businesses, individuals, and governments, resulting in losses of between $1 million and $2.5 million, and threatened the safety of the public at large, especially law enforcement officers and their families,” the government wrote in a sentencing memorandum.
Hammond is scheduled for sentencing in New York on Friday before U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska. The 28-year-old Chicagoan pleaded guilty earlier this year to the keystone attack of the short-lived Lulzsec/AntiSec era: a damaging December 2011 intrusion into the servers of the private intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting, Inc., where Hammond bulk-deleted files and stole 5 million private email messages, which he gave to WikiLeaks.
