ThrowFarAway

And why does education/intelligence/morality not keep others from constantly seeking out the perceived inner devil of others?

I'm being serious. You make an awful lot of assumptions about real people there, and ascribe to them the worst possible motives. That's a risky default behavior.

He's pretty clearly implying that the investigation is rigged, and therefore uninteresting.

The money comment is a pretty insensitive. That said, a lot of time spent on any particular thing tends to result in serious desensitization to the subject. Go have dinner with a few EMTs and listen to their shop talk. ("He was tasting for air, saying, 'dudegaspam Igaspgonnagasplive?', and all I could muster was, 'dudemock gasp, mock gasp no, mock gasp you aren't mock gasp gonna live!'" Followed by a few rounds of laughter. Got to hear that little gem said just the other night by one of the top Search & Rescue professionals in the world.)

This kind of thing isn't uncommon, or even that big a deal. Few people can withstand the scrutiny of a public life-dump.

Tackiness aside, I don't think it's sufficient evidence for us to call for anyone's hanging or jailing, like some seem to be advocating here.

If anyone who wants to somehow argue that Stratfor is evil incarnate thus rendering Hammond's sentence unjust, I invite you to first read some of their stuff:

http://www.stratfor.com/free-reports

Disclosure: I'm a subscriber, and have been for a number of years now, and find most of the Stratfor-bashing that inevitably (and predictably) happens in these discussions to be void of any understanding of what they actually produce. So, please read up and then tell us why the fact that he attacked a private forecasting company somehow makes his sentence unjust.

The mob mentality that surfaces here whenever a so-called "hacktivist" actually has to do jail time for something they knew full well was a crime when they did it, is just astounding.

Just wanted to say that as a fellow subscriber who also had the royal inconvenience of having my email/password/CC leaked, you're spot-on. Spend enough time reading their analysis and even The Economist starts to feel like People Magazine.

And the format of: Summary / What Happened / Historical Background / Restated Summary should be made standard journalistic procedure.

I know you're just clarifying it and not necessarily advocating it, but just want to state that it's a pretty lousy justification. For example:

(1) Mike Smith pays taxes to the powers that be, and therefore works 3-4 months out of the year for the powers that be; (2) The powers that be are bad; Therefore (3) murdering Mike hurts bad people.

Agreed. I have a number of clients who are subscribers. They made better business decisions by virtue of reading the output of a group of talented forecasters.

These weren't businesses looking to crush people who voted a certain way, these were businesses who may have had a supplier in Japan and wanted more rational, reasoned coverage of Fukushima than most everyone else was providing. Or, companies that employ Latin American immigrants and wanted a more nuanced view of the future than the standard "instant voting blocs good!/evil brown people bad!" narrative.

There's a lot of certainty and knee-jerk moralizing on display here (hacker in trouble! He deserves our unhesitating support!), but there's shockingly little justification to accompany strong sentiment. Put another way: what's with the mob mentality, HN? This place is normally better than that.

He did a significant amount of damage to a legitimate business. Some people seem to hate STRATFOR, without articulating any reasoning for feeling that way, other than using certain triggers for up votes, "government," "CIA," "evil," etc.

The files posted to Wikileaks largely showed them to be a surprisingly competent private forecasting company. The outcry over telling an attractive intelligence collector to use her looks as a means by which to get people to be more pliable? Welcome to the real world. Sex sells, and it also buys.

Many subscriber's identities were stolen in the process. My personal information was leaked, and it was difficult and costly to deal with. Some will never be able to fully undo the damage personally done to them by Jeremy Hammond. I'm not sure how his actions bettered the world, or even sought to.

Activism is valid, and a discussion of hacktivism as a form of civil disobedience that can effect necessary change, would be welcome.

A guy who selected a target while being almost completely ignorant of the work they do, a guy who, rather than going to some effort to minimize collateral damage, actually worked to inflict as much collateral damage as possible, is not a hacktivist, but a criminal, and a pretty inconsiderate criminal, at that. Doing harm for the sake of ego isn't hacktivism, it's mayhem.

I'm OK with people like that being segmented from civil society, no matter how just the cause he thought it would further. If a guy walked around keying cars in the parking lot because he wanted to achieve world peace, I'd respect his desire to achieve world peace, but also want him prevented from doing so again until he demonstrated some understanding and therefore the necessarily resultant remorse.

I subscribe to STRATFOR's informative, insightful, and apolitical news service, and think most people who wax lyrical about how evil they are probably don't, or they'd realize they tend to write things like "Germany's Problematic Trade Surplus," or "Colombia's River Revitalization Plan."

A hacktivist picked a bad target and sought maximum collateral damage of innocents. People like that need to demonstrate that they understand why that's incompatible with living in a civilized society before they get to sit at the big kid's table again.

I'll get down voted for this, but if Jeremy Hammond still thinks the same way when his 10 years are up, he will have been released too soon. Sometimes prison is about rehab and reform, sometimes it's about damage control.