In what’s become an annual tradition, activists gathered in downtown Austin on Friday to celebrate the birthday of a political prisoner and hacktivist nearly forgotten and ignored by the mainstream media: Jeremy Hammond.
In 2012, Hammond, along with other members of the Anonymous-associated group Lulzsec, hacked millions of emails from the servers of the Strategic Forecasting, also known as Stratfor, a private intelligence corporation located in the city, and leaked them to WikiLeaks, where they became known as the “Global Intelligence Files.” Among other revelations contained in the emails, the files showed that Stratfor had been spying on activists on behalf of corporations like Dow Chemical and working with the Texas State Troopers to infiltrate Occupy Austin.
For Leah Burris, an organizer from Prison Abolition and Prison Support (PAPS), an Austin-based group which organized the protest on Hammond’s birthday, the worst thing about Stratfor is that they are supported by our tax dollars in addition to their corporate clients. “What I wish people know most about them is that basically our government is giving Stratfor money that we give them to spy on us.”
