Justin King | The Anti-Media
In what may be the clearest sign of exactly how much of a threat the Anonymous collective has become to the authorities, Hector Xavier Monsegur walked away from a courtroom with a sentence of time served. In the federal court system an individual who provides extremely detailed information about his accomplices will often be given a sentence reduction. It happens so often, that there are legal mechanisms for prosecutors to use to reduce the sentence of an informant. Thumbnail credit: arstechnica.com
Monsegur, known as Sabu online, was widely seen as the leader of the famed Lulzsec. He participated and directed operations against PayPal and Fox as well as companies. Then in 2011, the FBI arrested him. Looking at decades in prison, Sabu switched sides and became an active informant for the feds. In the process he set up his friends to take the fall. Under the watchful eye of federal handlers, he aided Jeremy Hammond’s hack of Stratfor, a crime for which Hammond was sentenced to ten years in federal prison.
Hammond accused of the feds of using its mole inside Anonymous to manipulate the collective into doing the government’s dirty work by attacking foreign governments. At his sentencing, Judge Preska whose husband had ties to Stratfor, stopped Hammond from speaking after he said
“These intrusions, all of which were suggested by Sabu while cooperating with the FBI, affected thousands of domain names and consisted largely of foreign government websites, including those of Turkey, Brazil, Iran.”
Using an opposition force to conduct attacks on a nation’s enemies is a traditional move under false-flag recruitment practices in the intelligence community. However, the disparity between Monsegur’s sentence and the sentence of Jeremy Hammond is almost unheard of outside of major organized crime cases.
Under normal circumstances, a suspect-turned-informant can expect to receive a 50% reduction in sentence when the prosecutors ask for a sentence reduction under the 5k1.1 mechanism. If the suspect provides exceptional assistance to federal authorities, which there is no doubt that Sabu provided by turning over his friends, he would be entitled to an additional 50% reduction under the Rule 35 mechanism. This would give him a total reduction in sentence of 75%. Jeremy Hammond received 120 months, meaning that Sabu should have received at least a 30-month sentence. However, since Sabu was admittedly the leader of the organization, he would have been enhanced a few levels on the sentencing chart above Hammond.
The sentences handed down recently to those associated with Anonymous demonstrate that the Department of Justice has engaged in an undeclared war against the collective. The attacks on Anonymous affiliated hacktivists are just one front in the ever broadening war over the control of information. The United States has openly passed legislation granting itself permission to employ propaganda against the American people and the oldstream media have obediently followed the government’s directives for the last decade.
Even with these controlled outlets, the advanced and unregulated nature of social media negates part of the government’s attempt to control the free flow of information in the United States. In the interests of controlling the American populace, the government needs to control the national discussions. Without the ability to rein in social media discussions, the only hope is to cut off the supply of unwanted information by attacking the hackers, leakers, and journalists who supply it.
The US War on Information will be conducted the same way the war on drugs was conducted. Draconian sentences will be used to coerce people into cooperating with federal authorities and naming people, whether guilty or not, of violations of federal law. Those that choose to send others to prison will walk away free men, while those that do not will languish in the system of American gulags for decades.
This article may be republished freely under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Justin King and TheAntiMedia.org