The Betrayal of Jeremy Hammond and the Stratfor Leak
On March 5, 2012, a flashbang grenade signaled the end of Jeremy Hammond’s freedom, but the raid on his Chicago apartment was the culmination of a crime the FBI had monitored and facilitated for months. Hammond, a gifted 27-year-old hacker and activist, had just executed one of the decade's most significant breaches: the infiltration of Stratfor, a private intelligence firm known as the "Shadow CIA." While Hammond believed he was working with "Sabu," a legendary figure in the Anonymous collective, to expose corporate corruption, he was actually being directed by Hector Monsegur, an FBI informant operating from a bureau-monitored laptop in New York. This dynamic raises complex questions about entrapment, as the FBI allowed Hammond to steal 5 million emails and 60,000 credit card numbers crimes they could have prevented at any moment to build a case not just against a hacker, but to map the entire network of digital dissent.
The Stratfor leak exposed a terrifying reality of the modern surveillance state: the privatization of espionage. The stolen data revealed that Stratfor was selling intelligence to major corporations like Dow Chemical and Coca-Cola, monitoring activists, Occupy Wall Street protesters, and Bhopal disaster survivors. To achieve this, Hammond utilized an SQL injection, a relatively basic vulnerability that Stratfor’s IT team had neglected to patch. Despite the public service aspect of exposing these unethical practices, the judicial system came down hard. The case was presided over by Judge Loretta Preska, whose own husband was a Stratfor client exposed in the leak a conflict of interest she dismissed. Hammond was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison, becoming a symbol of the heavy price paid by whistleblowers who target the intersection of corporate and state power.