Update on Shurat HaDin lawfare attack on Professor Jake Lynch (Australians for BDS – 8 November 2013)

Update on Shurat HaDin lawfare attack on Professor Jake Lynch (Australians for BDS – 8 November 2013)

On Tuesday Oct 29th, 2 Israeli based organisations and three individuals made an application to the Australian Federal Court against Professor Jake Lynch. The case is Shurat HaDin – The Israel Law Center & Ors v Jake Lynch, NSD2235/2013.

The applicants are: Shurat HaDin, Green Freedom Limited (Israel Company Number 514 331 479), Andrew Hamilton, David Hans Lange and Jonathan Rose. 



The following media alert was released as a result of this action and prior to a press conference on Wed Oct 30th led by Professor Stuart Rees and Associate Professor Peter Slezak (Professor Jake Lynch is currently overseas on sabbatical leave).


Australian academic faces lawfare attack
The right to criticize the policies of another country is at stake

Today an Israeli based law centre, Shurat HaDin, filed a case in the Federal Court of Australia, against Professor Jake Lynch from the University of Sydney’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies.

 They claim that he has supported policies which are racist and discriminatory by his specific endorsement of an academic boycott of Israeli institutions and individuals within them, because of these institutions’ support of the illegal occupation of Palestine and their close connections with the Israeli armament industry.

This lawfare attack against academic freedom and freedom of speech has been condemned by over 2000 Australian and international human rights advocates from some 60 countries, who have all signed a pledge supporting BDS and offering to be co-defendants in any legal action taken against Lynch.
 

Shurat HaDin has taken many similar actions internationally against groups who supported the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement. Professor Stuart Rees comments,
“It seems that this firm, Shurat HaDin works in the civil courts as a proxy for the Israeli government and security forces, seeking to shut down any criticism of the state and its ongoing human rights abuses and violations of international law.”

In August, Shurat HaDin lodged a complaint in the Human Rights Commission against Jake Lynch’s refusal to sponsor an Israeli academic from the Hebrew University because of that institution’s links to the Israeli military and the ongoing Occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza.

This overseas firm now wants to silence this highly regarded academic, by taking their complaint to the Federal Court. This challenges the right to take non violent action in support international human rights law and the rights of the dispossessed Palestinians. Australians for BDS condemns racism in all forms, and specifically anti-Semitism.

“Israel’s occupation and ethnic cleansing machinery continue unabated but the moral force that used to drive that process is fast eroding and, as out of touch as the Abbott government and anti-BDS activists in Australia may be, there is an undeniable shift in the balance of moral power. ..

International civil society is holding Israel to account in a way no government has ever been able to do”......Randa Abdul Fattah, Palestinian lawyer and writer resident in Sydney

Professor Jake Lynch released the following statement which was read at the press conference on Wed Oct 30th in Sydney:

“I am confident we will successfully fight off this despicable attack on freedom of expression, which is backed ultimately by the Israeli security state. The Shurat HaDin law centre has links to the Israeli National Security Council, and the Mossad, and has admitted in the past being directed by them as to which targets to pursue. That makes this attempt to subvert political debate in Australia all the more sinister.

In respect of the claims by Shurat HaDin, the boycott policy I wrote for CPACS, after a public meeting held at the University of Sydney, was carefully conceived to avoid discrimination, being confined to a request to the Vice Chancellor to revoke institutional links with two Israeli universities.

 And when I turned down the request by Professor Dan Avnon, to use my name on his application under one of those same schemes, I was (a) not in a position to prevent his coming to Sydney, since he had only to collect two names as host academics out of 3,000 at the University and (b) using my discretion - in effect, being asked for a favour. The law cannot require me to use my discretion in a particular way or it ceases to be discretion!”


A number of opinion pieces have been published recently outlining the issues raised by this action and we have posted links to them below. 

Your support and pledge to be a co-defendant in this case represents a strong stand against this unfounded and spurious lawfare attack by Shurat HaDin. It is unlikely that this organisation will desire to co-join any other defendants, but your ongoing support is crucial as Australians for BDS fights this foreign organisations’ attempts to gag free speech and academic freedom in Australia.

Please encourage others to sign onto the pledge and leave their comments on the site.


 And if you are an academic, please encourage your colleagues to sign on with their title eg. Prof, Dr., as we will be contacting all academics shortly to sign a statement of support for Professor Jake Lynch.

Thank you for your support. We will keep you posted as this case develops.

Queries: australians4bds@gmail.com
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Antony Loewenstein: To support the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is not anti-Semitic

Prof Stuart Rees: Op Ed in New Matilda – Two Thousand Defendants for Human Rights https://newmatilda.com/2013/10/28/two-thousand-defendants-human-rights

Randa Abdel-Fattah: – Who's afraid of BDS? Israel's assault on academic freedom – Opinion – ABC Religion & Ethics...

Dr Peter Slezak: - Is It Anti-Semitic To Protest Injustice? 
https://newmatilda.com/2013/11/05/it-anti-semitic-protest-injustice

Samah Sabawi: – Israel and the erosion of democracy :  An Australian Story http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/10/israel-erosion-democracy-an-australian-story-2013101511625981682.html

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Received from Mondoweiss on 10 January 2014:


Arab-American scholars back ASA boycott as legal threats start pouring in
Jan 10, 2014 01:38 pm | Alex Kane

The landmark decision by the American Studies Association (ASA) to boycott Israeli academic institutions has lead to legal threats, reports of intimidation aimed at pro-boycott scholars and pushback from those in support of the ASA’s decision. The latest is that a group of prominent Arab-Americans have issued a statement in support of the ASA decision, while an Israeli legal center has said that a lawsuit is in the pipeline.

Earlier this week, Palestinian and Arab-American scholars released a missive in support of the ASA boycott, which is part of the larger boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel.  The statement condemned the “hate” that the ASA has been a target of and expressed appreciation at the ASA’s “recognition that BDS is a legitimate, non-violent tool of resistance by peoples enduring settler-colonialism, occupation, and apartheid.”  Some scholars who signed the letter have already reported receiving hate mail because of it.
It was signed by dozens of prominent figures, including Rashid Khalidi, George Bisharat, Ali Abunimah, Noura Erakat, Nadia Hijab and more. Here’s more from the statement:

By broadening the possibility for critical discussion and debate about the US, Palestine, and Israel, the ASA’s stand has created a new opening that will help to challenge the attack on academic freedom that Palestinian and Arab-American scholars and our allies encounter in the US.
We strongly uphold the principles of free speech and association guaranteed in US jurisprudence and demand that the legal protections offered by these guarantees be extended to our colleagues in the ASA without delay.
We urge all of our colleagues of whatever ethnicity to support the ASA by:
-Becoming a member of the ASA and/or making a donation to the organization,
-Encouraging your department to join the ASA.
-Writing a letter of support to the ASA.

A petition has also been set up for those who agree with the statement.

(Image: Carlos Latuff)

Meanwhile, Shurat HaDin, an Israeli legal group, has said that they will sue the ASA if they don’t cancel their boycott.  Yesterday, the Jerusalem Post reported that Shurat HaDin, a group that has links to the Israeli government and the Mossad, sent a letter to the ASA claiming that the academic boycott violates anti-discrimination laws in the U.S. since it targets Israelis and Jews.
That threat has elicited major pushback from the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the ASA.  Today, the CCR issued a statement decrying the threat:

This threat is the latest in a pattern of legal bullying that has escalated in the U.S. as the movement for Palestinian rights has grown. An academic boycott in fact violates no anti-discrimination laws because it does not target any individual or institution based on their Jewish identity or Israeli citizenship. Rather, it is aimed at institutions with direct relationships to the Israeli government. Shurat HaDin’s attempt to paint this principled action as anti-Semitic and discriminatory against Israelis is not only legally bankrupt, but also trivializes important struggles against anti-Semitism and all other forms of racism.

The ASA also released a statement strongly pushing back against Shurat HaDin’s threat. Here’s ASA President Curtis Marez’s statement in full:

We will not be intimidated by Shurat HaDin and its legal threats.
Unlike in Israel, where criticism of the government’s policies towards the Palestinians is increasingly criminalized, our boycott decision is protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution. Thankfully, in the United States we still have the right to speak out against Israel’s racial discrimination against Palestinians. As an organization we have the absolute right to oppose the discriminatory practices of Israeli academic institutions and their complicity in Israeli human rights abuses.  Everyone knows the First Amendment protects not just speech but conduct.  Shurat HaDin’s claims are particularly odious as our interactions with individual Israeli academics are likely to be more frequent rather than less in the years ahead.

 

AUSTRALIAN HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION, VICTORIAN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY AND HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION - OXYMORONS - MORE MORONS THAN OXYS!

There are two organisations in Australia, one a national body and the other a state body, which are supposed to be organisations whose charters enable them to engage in assessing  human rights in our communities, and where there seem to be problems of various sorts, to try to come to a resolution and settle the possible disputes involved.

What do we find?

Australian Human Rights Commission - a new appointee to the board is a political appointee by a government already notorious for its record on human rights abuses.

Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission - a recent appointee to the board is someone from a community organisation which is notorious for its record on hypocrisy - it is a body fortunately not in a position to be able to be guilty of human rights abuses.

UGANDA, NIGERIA, ZIMBABWE, MOST AFRICAN COUNTRIES, IRAN, INDIA, PAKISTAN, RUSSIA - HOMOPHOBES AND MURDERERS AND HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSERS

The list of countries with homophobia as a major component of their human rights abuses grows apace, with countries added to the list on an almost daily basis.

The most obvious ones are Uganda, Nigeria, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, most African countries, now India, also Pakistan, Bangladesh  - and the list keeps growing.

ASYLUM SEEKERS IN AUSTRALIA - NO SUCH CATEGORY!

What does it mean to be an asylum seeker?

Who are asylum seekers and why are people called asylum seekers?

Why do people leave one country to go to another?

When do people decide they have to leave the country in which they live and hope to enter another?

Which countries do people go to in the hope of trying to gain entry and safety and security?

Where are the places where people who leave their own countries or places of permanent residence go to in relation to where they came from?

Australia and Israel have a lot in common - they are two racist societies and both call themselves democracies.

Israel's racist "democracy" is based on the country being a theocracy and those who are apparently not "Jewish" are seen as "other".

Australia's racist "democracy" is based on the colour of one's skin and one's supposed religion and country of origin. White is good, other is not good or is bad or is unacceptable.

Australia and Israel are both busy demonising asylum seekers as "other" in the sense of their behaviour, and their attempts to be similar to the "settler" population.

Both are failing and are producing tragic circumstances for people who have fled from appalling abuse and persection.


When did Australia and Australians become such an uncaring and callous society?

The following article appeared in The Age newspaper on 21 December 2013:

Scott Morrison's new rules put asylum seekers on notice to behave

Date

December 21, 2013

•  

Tom Allard

National Affairs Editor

New rules to stop refugees being a 'nuisance'

The Coalition delivers a code of conduct for asylum seekers living on bridging visas, which Immigration Minister Scott Morrison says is to stop "anti-social and disruptive activities".
Immigration Minister Scott Morrison has identified asylum seekers congregating in large numbers in apartments as the type of ''antisocial'' behaviour that could see them thrown into detention under a new code of conduct for more than 20,000 irregular immigrants living in the community on bridging visas.

Under previous arrangements, anyone on a bridging visa alleged to have broken the law and facing criminal proceedings was returned to detention while the matter made its way through the courts, but the new code greatly widens the types of behaviour that can lead to the penalty.

These include ''antisocial and disruptive activities that are inconsiderate, disrespectful or threaten the peaceful enjoyment of other members of the community''.

Immigration Minister Scott Morrison. Photo: Steven Siewert

''There have been complaints that have been received about antisocial behaviour in terms of overcrowding in particular accommodation that have caused a nuisance to nearby residents and distressed elderly residents as well,'' Mr Morrison said on Friday.

''Currently there's no provision to really manage that behaviour.''

People on bridging visas have extremely limited work rights and receive less than $250 a week in welfare payments. They can wait up to five years to have their refugee status determined under the ''no advantage test'' introduced by the former Labor government.

As a result, many can be crammed into accommodation to help save money, although Mr Morrison said this was not necessarily the type of overcrowding that would be deemed antisocial.

He pointed to ''large numbers of people turning up to particular places and places that are being rented, and that is not where they were living''.

The new code, and the example cited by Mr Morrison of antisocial behaviour, was attacked by the opposition, with Labor's immigration spokesman, Richard Marles, saying ''it reeks of being mean for the sake of it''.

''If people are breaking the law, there should be consequences,'' Mr Marles said.

''But one of the key standards in Australia is the standard of fairness.

''A situation where you don't break the law but you have simply upset someone and, without being tested, a person is put in detention or even sent off shore is concerning. That is not fair.''

Disobeying road rules, failing to comply with an instruction to undertake health treatment, or refusing to co-operate with officials as they review their refugee claims are also deemed to be breaches of the code.

Mr Morrison confirmed that asylum seekers on bridging visas could be sent back to detention without breaking the law, but he said it would require serial breaches.

''I think it is quite helpful to be quite specific with people who are given the opportunity to live in the community what is expected of them. To assume they just know is naive,'' he said.

He noted that in serious cases, asylum seekers in the community could be sent to Nauru and Manus Island.

Mr Morrison said the government wasn't contending that asylum seekers on bridging visas were more likely to commit crimes than the rest of the community but he pointed out that since the election, ''two illegal maritime arrivals have been charged with criminal offences each week''.

These include charges and convictions relating to murder, theft, indecent assault of a minor, assault with a weapon, driving under the influence, attempting to procure drugs, and people-smuggling.

Meanwhile, Mr Morrison said he didn't ''backflip'' when reversing his freeze on new protection visas for asylum seekers, arguing the regulation was no longer necessary because he has since introduced stronger rules.

But legal experts and the Greens say Mr Morrison is engaged in legal ''trickery'' and his new regulation would either be struck down by the High Court or reversed when the Senate reconvenes in February.

With ALEXIA ATTWOOD and JONATHAN SWAN

TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP UPDATE AND OVERLAND AND ARENA MAGAZINES

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) issue is causing more and more alarm as information about its secrecy and leaks about what it contains manage to emerge into the public consciousness.

In order to get left-wing journals involved in an issue with which they ought to have been leading and not lagging, I contacted the editors of both magazines and neither knew anything about the issues which would affect them rather deeply.

They invited me to give them more information and I gave them the names of writers and journalists who would be able to tell them a great deal more than I would have been able to.

The latest issues of Overland and arena have just been published and neither of them has anything about TPP in its contents.

If this is the best that left-wing journals can achieve then that says a lot about the state of left-wing politics in Australia.

The main-stream media have not had a great deal in their pages, but certainly more than nothing, and so far some of what has been written is not extreme in its right-wing views on the topic.

So, the only way to make TPP known better is to keep on publishing on my web pages all that we are able to gather from online journals and writers around the world.

To keep you up-to-date, look at our web pages:

Trans-Pacific Partnership Part 1
Trans-Pacific Partnership Part 2
Trans-Pacific Partnership Part 3
Trans-Pacific Partnership Part 4

JEREMY HAMMOND SHARES FATE OF CHELSEA MANNING, EDWARD SNOWDEN, JULIAN ASSANGE, AND MANY OTHERS!

This report is from the New Yorker and tells some of the story of Jeremy Hammond and other "Hactivists" who have helped expose the secrecy of the United States and other governments around the world, who do not carry out their nefarious deeds and acts in our names, but purely in the interests of big business and other like-minded governments.

And furthering the "cause" of the US justice system, the sentencing judge had a conflict of interest, but refused to recuse herself!

November 21, 2013

Hacker with a Cause

Posted by Joshua Kopstein

In 2004, a few years before the rise of Anonymous, the notorious online collective of hackers and activists, a seventeen-year-old named Jeremy Hammond gave a talk on “electronic civil disobedience” at the annual Def Con hacking conference. “We believe that hacking is a tool. It is a means to an end,” he said, shaking his head of bleached-blond hair as he spoke. He rejected those who hack for personal gain or to improve corporate security. He advocated hacktivism, which he defined as “a practical application of network insecurity skills … as a means of fighting for social justice by putting direct pressure on politicians and institutions.”

This past Friday morning, Hammond, now twenty-eight, stood before a federal judge wearing a smirk and a black prison jumpsuit. He was about be sentenced for a string of computer crimes, making him the latest hacktivist to be punished for disrupting computer systems. Hacktivists, unlike the standard criminal hackers, claim to seek political change rather than financial gain—a distinction that rarely earns them much sympathy before the law. But, like his talk at Def Con, Hammond’s final speech in court was unrepentant. “I also want to shout out my brothers and sisters behind bars, and those who are still out there fighting the power,” he began.

Hammond isn’t as widely known as Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, but his reputation precedes him: in 2011, he worked with members of Anonymous to break into the systems of the U.S.-government-intelligence contractor Strategic Forecasting, Inc., better known as Stratfor, and to leak millions of its internal e-mails to WikiLeaks. The trove revealed, among other things, surveillance of political groups in the U.S. and abroad, from Occupy Wall Street to activists who campaigned in Bhopal, India, following a deadly gas leak in 1984 that killed thousands of people.

Hammond also aided in the theft of sixty thousand credit-card numbers from Stratfor, which were leaked online after they were used by Anonymous to make more than seven hundred thousand dollars’ worth of fraudulent charges, which included large donations to charities and nonprofits—although, as the security researcher Mikko Hypponen explained shortly after the leak, none of the intended recipients could make use of the money. The group then defaced Stratfor’s Web site, wiped its client database clean, and destroyed its e-mail server. Hammond, using the alias “sup_g,” told one of his comrades at the time that he was “hoping for bankruptcy, collapse.”

Hammond was caught after he teamed up with Hector Xavier Monsegur, known as Sabu, the leader of the Anonymous splinter group LulzSec and, unbeknownst to Hammond at the time, an F.B.I. informant. Sabu, at the F.B.I.’s request, provided Hammond with a server on which to store stolen data—including what he had obtained from Stratfor—and fed Hammond a list of Web sites to attack.
Hammond had not only been caught in the sting; he had also become an unwitting pawn in the government’s electronic spy games. Hammond claimed that his intrusions, made during January and February of last year, “affected over 2000 domains” and included the government Web sites of Brazil, Turkey, and Syria, among other countries, as well the “official website of the Governor of Puerto Rico, the Internal Affairs Division of the Military Police of Brazil, the Official Website of the Crown Prince of Kuwait, the Tax Department of Turkey, the Iranian Academic Center for Education and Cultural Research, the Polish Embassy in the UK, and the Ministry of Electricity of Iraq.”

At Hammond’s sentencing, when he began reading the names of the countries that Sabu had told him to attack, which the government had redacted from court documents, he was silenced by the judge.
The defense did its best to portray Hammond’s crimes as acts of electronic civil disobedience—the same kind of acts that he’d described years ago at Def Con. They read selections from the hundreds of letters of support that Hammond had received, including one from Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistle-blower. They blasted the government’s “one-dimensional view” of Hammond’s actions, saying that his motivations for exposing powerful institutions like Stratfor were the same as those that had inspired his community service in his native Chicago, where he frequently volunteered at soup kitchens and taught disadvantaged kids how to use computers.

The U.S. district judge Loretta Preska was unmoved, focussing on statements made by Hammond in online chat logs, where he encouraged his fellow Anonymous members to cause “maximum mayhem” with Stratfor’s credit cards. Besides, Preska reasoned, Hammond was a repeat offender who had already served a two-year sentence for hacking the Web site of Protest Warrior, a right-wing group known for crashing anti-war rallies. “These are not the actions of Martin Luther King, of Nelson Mandela … or even Daniel Ellsberg,” she said.
Even if Preska had been sympathetic to Hammond or to his cause, it would have been difficult for her to hand down a particularly lenient sentence. The Supreme Court has instructed judges to ignore sentencing guidelines at their own peril, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, an anti-hacking law that was enacted in 1986 and was modelled on a wire-fraud statute from 1952, which was itself based on a 1948 mail-fraud statute, engenders restrictive sentencing guidelines.

General federal sentencing guidelines establish forty-three levels of “offense seriousness.” The higher the level, the more severe the punishment. In a hacking crime, prosecutors can do a number of things to increase the level of offense, including deconstructing a single act of hacking into multiple charges: unauthorized computer use, wire fraud, damaging “a protected computer,” stealing protected information, and sometimes even aiding and abetting other crimes. They can calculate the damages caused by the hack—“the loss”—at a high rate, and they can present evidence that the defendant is not taking responsibility for what he has done.

In Hammond’s case, his plea agreement notes that the “base offense level” for his crime was six, which would typically carry a sentence of six to twelve months. But the prosecutors calculated that he had caused more than a million dollars in damage and harmed more than two hundred and fifty people. Taking into account his prior convictions, his “adjusted offense level” was thirty-one, for which the minimum penalty is twelve years. To avoid such a long sentence, Hammond pleaded guilty to one count of a conspiracy to violate the C.F.A.A., which carries a maximum of ten years, and he asked the court for lenience because he had used “his abilities to potentially unmask unlawful surveillance and intelligence-gathering efforts and seek out hidden truths.”

Declaring a need to “promote respect for the rule of law,” Preska gave Hammond the maximum sentence of ten years. His jail time will be followed by three years of supervised release, during which all of his devices will be monitored by police software, his property will be subject to warrantless searches, and he’ll be forbidden from using encryption or anonymity tools.

In a letter to the court on Hammond’s case, Hanni Fakhoury, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, points to a defendant who was recently convicted in a hundred-million-dollar welfare-fraud scheme and received a hundred and twenty-five months in prison—only five months longer than Hammond’s sentence, despite inflicting far greater damages. Hammond’s collaborators in the U.K. received dramatically lighter sentences than he did, ranging from two hundred hours of community service to thirty-two months in prison.

The disparity is even more apparent in the case of the Paypal Fourteen, the group charged for participating in the distributed-denial-of-service attack (D.D.O.S.) that disrupted the online-payment Web site in retaliation for its refusal to process WikiLeaks donations. D.D.O.S. attacks don’t involve breaking security or stealing information; instead, they flood Web sites with hundreds of thousands of requests, overwhelming the servers and making them temporarily unavailable. Stanley Cohen, an attorney for one of the Paypal defendants, described the tactic as an “electronic sit-in”—a twenty-first-century salute to the legacy of Birmingham, Alabama. Others argue that D.D.O.S. attacks are a form of censorship—noting that it has been appropriated by corporations and governments as a weapon of cyberwarfare.

But the C.F.A.A.’s broad guidelines for calculating “loss” mean that digital protests often result in much harsher penalties than their real-world analogues in the U.S. For example, most of the seven hundred Occupy Wall Street protesters who were arrested for blocking off the Brooklyn Bridge in October, 2011, received a night in jail plus a small fine. But for their D.D.O.S. disturbance, the Paypal Fourteen are each facing up to fifteen years in prison, with a plea deal possible only if thirteen members of the group comply.

Not long ago, a young activist named Aaron Swartz sat before a different judge in a similar situation. His transgressions were far more innocuous: Swartz, whom Larissa MacFarquhar wrote about in March, was indicted for downloading millions of academic articles from JSTOR, a pay-walled service he had free access to on M.I.T.’s campus. JSTOR dropped its charges, but the government chose to pursue the case aggressively, in a move that was widely condemned as prosecutorial overreach by lawyers, friends, and fellow-activists.

As with Hammond’s hearing, the broad language of the C.F.A.A. statute allowed prosecutors to pile on charge after charge, threatening Swartz with up to thirty-five years in prison and pressuring him to accept a guilty plea rather than undergo an expensive trial. In January, Swartz committed suicide.
Another similar case is that of Barrett Brown, a journalist and online activist. Sometimes known as a former “unofficial spokesperson” for Anonymous, he is currently facing fifteen years in prison for copying and pasting a public link to the Stratfor documents that Hammond stole into an online chat room; he faces an additional thirty years for aiding and abetting those crimes. The government argues that sharing the link is a crime simply because he knew that the link contained credit-card information and it “caused the data to be made available … without the knowledge and authorization” of Stratfor.

Judge Preska refused to recuse herself from the case after Hammond’s attorneys filed a motion last year requesting that she do so, noting that her husband, Thomas Kavaler, was a partner at a law firm whose information was compromised in the Stratfor leak. At a rally of Hammond supporters in Foley Square after the sentencing, the former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges told the crowd, “She never, ever should have been allowed to sit this case …. The danger of what happened today is that the assault on figures like Hammond, like Barrett Brown, like Edward Snowden … is essentially attempting to crush any possibility that the public can be informed about what the centers of power are doing.”

Other examples of this form of activism abound: in 2011, the artist and activist Ian Paul organized an action called Border Haunt, in which hundreds of participants spammed a police database with the names of immigrants who have died crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. That same year, hacktivist groups provided Arab Spring protesters who had been cut off from the Internet with dial-up connections, mesh networks, and guides on how to properly treat tear gas. They also shut down government Web sites in Egypt and Tunisia in retaliation.

Hammond is perhaps another example of how hacktivism and leaking have created a new type of political dissenter. His tactics, of course, are the same as those used by criminals seeking personal gain, which is why they’re sometimes described as “cyberterrorism.” But as Hammond explained it in 2004, hacking can be a tool and hacktivism just one component in a comprehensive program of political engagement. Whether and to what extent the U.S. government will recognize it as such remains an open question
.
Joshua Kopstein is a cyberculture journalist from New York City.
Correction: Aaron Swartz’s case was not heard in the same court as Hammond’s.
Above: The Codehack conference. Photograph by Fabrizio Giraldi/LUZ/Redux.

VLAD THE IMPALER - CLOSET QUEEN OF ALL RUSSIA!

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, is passing homophobic laws and ensuring the Sochi winter olympics should be homo-free.

At the same tile he has also made a new media controller who is as homophobic as they come.

All of this from a man who doesn't miss a photo opportunity which exposes his torso for all his admirers - gay and straight alike.

Just look at the samples of photos in international collections who have made the connection between Putin's bodily appearances and his closet gay persona.

When is the rest of the world going to make the connection and "expose" this man for the charlatan that he indubitably is?

Pictures of Vladimir Putin Looking Like a Complete Badass!


The laws that have been passed in Russia in recent times are draconian human rights abuses against people who have different sexualities from the mainstream, and ever since the fall of Gorbachov's regime and the re-introduction of religious fanatics into the Russian mainstream, gays, lesbians, transgenders and HIV/AIDS members of the communities have suffered - and will continue to suffer - indignities, assaults, bashings, abuses - and murders.

We all need to raise our voices in protest, and those supporters of our communities in the rest of the world should be boycotting the winter games in Sochi in 2014.

If they don't boycott, they are as bad as those who don't support BDS in support of the Palestinians.

"AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL"