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American justice in question, as USA cracks down on hacker Jeremy Hammond

The bigger story is what they’ve done in this country to Jeremy Hammond, Bradley Manning, and what they have proposed to do to Julian Assange, and that’s really say that they’re going to come down as heavily as they can on people who expose government secrets, whistleblowers,”

Anonymous hacker behind Stratfor attack faces life in prison, Rt  : 23 November, 2012, A pretrial hearing in the case against accused LulzSec hacker Jeremy Hammond this week ended with the 27-year-old Chicago man being told he could be sentenced to life in prison for compromising the computers of Stratfor.
Judge Loretta Preska told Hammond in a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday that he could be sentenced to serve anywhere from 360 months-to-life if convicted on all charges relating to last year’s hack of Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor, a global intelligence company whose servers were infiltrated by an offshoot of the hacktivist collective Anonymous.
Hammond is not likely to take the stand until next year, but so far has been imprisoned for eight months without trial. Legal proceedings
in the case might soon be called into question, however, after it’s
been revealed that Judge Preska’s husband was a victim of the Stratfor
hack…….
According to Sue Crabtree, a member of the Jeremy Hammond Solidarity
Network and a witness to his bail hearing this week, Judge Preska
ordered the continue incarceration of Hammond on the basis that he is
a danger to the community and likely to flee the country if released
from holding. Crabtree notes that Hammond does not now nor has he ever
had a passport, though, and has also since been added to a terrorist
watch list.
“In the end, Jeremy was denied bail because he was deemed a flight
risk and more dangerous than [a] sexual predator. And yes, if you are
asking yourself if this was said, it was said. Jeremy’s legal team
stated they would appeal this denial of bail,” she writes on a
Facebook group for Hammond.
After Anonymous went public with the hack of Strafor in December 2011,
the internal emails from the intelligence firm were handed off to
WikiLeaks, who soon after began publishing the findings. Among the
information stored in the emails was documentation alleging that law
enforcement agencies spied on Occupy Wall Street protesters and proof
of an international surveillance system called Trapwire. Hammond is at
this point likely to be the first US citizen tried in a civilian court
for crimes relating to the whistleblower site.
Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) tells The
Real News network this week that the denial of bail is both “very
disturbing” and “legally wrong.”
The bigger story is what they’ve done in this country to Jeremy Hammond, Bradley Manning, and what they have proposed to do to Julian Assange, and that’s really say that they’re going to come down as heavily as they can on people who expose government secrets, whistleblowers,” Ratner says.
http://rt.com/usa/news/anonymous-stratfor-hammond-judge-440/

November 27, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | civil liberties, USA