Supporters rally to gain leniency for Anonymous hacker, Jeremy Hammond
Supporters of Anonymous hacker and self-styled online anarchist, Jeremy Hammond, are circulating this online petition aimed at cajoling authorities into granting the 28-year-old leniency. Hammond pled guilty this morning to participating in the December 2011 hacking of online publication Stratfor.
Hammond supporters maintain that e-mails he helped steal from Stratfor and post online exposed Stratfor's complicity in surveillance of anti-corporate activists. Stratfor founder George Friedman strongly refutes such notions as nonsense. He has said that Stratfor is a straight-forward, for-profit online publication that charges subscribers $350 a year for well-researched and written essays on global affairs.
Stratfor's site was knocked off line for several weeks. The Stratfor hack was a wakeup call for many web businesses, small and large, that have been lax about data protection. Not much has changed, Jeremy Bergsman, a practice manager at management consultancy CEB.