An admitted member of the online hacking group Anonymous received the maximum sentence Friday from a judge in U.S. federal court in New York City.
U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska sentenced 28-year-old Jeremy Hammond of Chicago to 10 years in prison for his role in hacking the servers of the Texas-based intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting, Inc., or Stratfor, in December 2011. Hammond pleaded guilty to violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in May of this year.
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"I did this because I believe people have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors," Hammond said in a statement posted on his support website in May. "I did what I believe is right."
FBI documents state that Hammond and his co-conspirators stole credit card information from 60,000 people during the Stratfor attack. They then used the credit cards to make $700,000 worth of unauthorized charges. Wired reports these charges consisted of "fraudulent donations to non-profit groups" at Hammond's behest.
Hammond was also charged with stealing millions of internal emails from hundreds of thousands of Stratfor users. WikiLeaks has since published some of those emails in its "Global Intelligence Files" series.
The FBI tracked down Hammond with the help of hacker-turned-informant Hector Xavier Monsegur, also known as Sabu. Monsegur was the leader of the hacking group LulzSec, an offshoot of Anonymous. He was first arrested in secret in June 2011; his arrest wasn't announced so he could be used as an informant.
In addition to Hammond, Monsegur helped the FBI track down four members of LulzSec. Those four received a combined sentence of seven years in prison in a London court in May.
Hammond would have faced some 30 years in prison had he not accepted a plea agreement.
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Image: Facebook, Free Jeremy