Great article by the currently imprisoned #JeremyHammond ____________________________________________________ Here in prison, I am asked a lot about #hacking and especially about #Anonymous, because of course there is interest in new technologies like #Bitcoin for money or darknets for #fraud. After all, convicts – like #hackers – develop their own codes and ethics, and they are constantly finding ways to scam and exploit cracks in the system. The anti-government message of Anonymous rings true among prisoners who have been railroaded, condemned and warehoused. So when they hear about hacked government websites and cops getting doxed, my fellow inmates often tell me things like, “It’s good to see people finally doing something about it.” That rejection of established, reformist avenues for achieving social change is why Anonymous continues as a force to be reckoned with, made all the more obvious by the presence of Guy Fawkes masks at the protests in Ferguson, Missouri – and beyond. Hackers are a #controversial, #chaotic and commonly misunderstood bunch. Many of us have been arrested, from Mercedes Haefer and Andrew Auernheimer to Mustafa Al-Bassam and more, and few outside observers get that Anonymous is not a monolithic entity but a wide spectrum of backgrounds, #politics and tactics. The journalist #BarrettBrown gets it, but he continues to await his sentencing for merely linking to hacked material. And so I’ve been sharing a new book with my fellow inmates by the anthropologist and author Gabriella Coleman called Hacker, Hoaxer, #Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous. The book chronicles the development of Anonymous from its trickster troll days to its involvement in Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, to the LulzSec and AntiSec hacking sprees and all the word done by the group since Stratfor, the intelligence firm I hacked in 2012. But it is more than a timeline written by an outsider: Coleman spent years in dozens of chatrooms and travelled the world to meet hackers. Some, like my LulzSec codefendants in the UK, I have not heard from since our collaboration on various hacks and subsequent arrests, so I was especially happy to hear how they have been keeping the spirit alive. Sabu betrayed me. How could we have been so foolish? I was especially struck by Coleman’s interactions with Hector Monsegur – aka Sabu, the hacker-turned-FBI-informant who is responsible for many of our arrests and who was released this spring after his “extraordinary cooperation” with the FBI. One of the few people to ever meet him face-to-face until he gave an interview to Charlie Rose this month, Coleman had feelings that parallel my own: Sabu betrayed me. Read the full article by #JeremyHammond below:
Posted on: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 13:28:15 +0000