Chicago activist Jeremy Hammond, 28, was sentenced earlier today to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to participating in the hacking of the private intelligence firm Stratfor.

Prior to his sentencing, Hammond read a prepared statement explaining what motivated his actions. “I felt that I had an obligation to use my skills to expose and confront injustice—and to bring the truth to light,” he told the courtroom, adding that he was inspired by whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

Thanks to Hammond’s courageous work, for which he will spend the next decade of his life behind bars, we now know that Stratfor was being paid by multinational corporations to spy on activists around the globe. As Natasha Lennard, one of the few journalists who’s consistently covered Hammond’s case, put it:

It is indeed in the public interest to know that Dow Chemicals paid a private security firm to follow and low-level harass individuals fighting for recognition and restitution for the Bhopal disaster; it is of public interest too that the Coca Cola company employed Stratfor to spy on PETA activists, that the Department of Homeland Security used the firm to spy on Occupy activities. These details all came out of the Stratfor hack. Our context is such that the intelligence firm’s activity is supported and upheld by the law, Hammond’s work to reveal it is punished with a ten year sentence.

Hammond also revealed that a fellow hacker turned FBI informant, who went   by the internet pseudonym “Sabu”, directed him to hack into Stratfor as well as the websites of several foreign governments.

“I had never even heard of Stratfor until Sabu brought it to my attention. Sabu was encouraging people to invade systems, and helping to strategize and facilitate attacks,” said Hammond. “He even provided me with vulnerabilities of targets passed on by other hackers, so it came as a great surprise when I learned that Sabu had been working with the FBI the entire time.” He continued:

I broke into numerous websites [Sabu] supplied, uploaded the stolen email accounts and databases onto Sabu’s FBI server, and handed over passwords and backdoors that enabled Sabu (and, by extension, his FBI handlers) to control these targets.

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…In one instance, Sabu and I provided access information to hackers who went on to deface and destroy many government websites…I don’t know how other information I provided to him may have been used, but I think the government’s collection and use of this data needs to be investigated.

According to The Guardian‘s Ed Pilkington, “The defendant mentioned specifically Brazil, Iran and Turkey before being stopped by judge Loretta Preska, who had ruled previously that the names of all the countries involved should be redacted to retain their secrecy.”

To summarize, while entrapping Hammond, the US government was using him to do their own hacking dirty work, demonstrating that as long as it benefits state and corporate power, hacking is totally acceptable.

Hammond went on to highlight the hypocrisy of such a system, saying, “The U.S. hypes the threat of hackers in order to justify the multi billion dollar cyber security industrial complex, but it is also responsible for the same conduct it aggressively prosecutes and claims to work to prevent.”

It was this two-teired system, combined with the failure of tame inside-the-system activism to bring about change, that motivated Hammond to do what he did. “The hypocrisy of ‘law and order’ and the injustices caused by capitalism cannot be cured by institutional reform but through civil disobedience and direct action,” explained Hammond. “Yes I broke the law, but I believe that sometimes laws must be broken in order to make room for change.” He followed up with the following quote by Federick Douglas:

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

Keep in mind that not a single multinational that hired Stratfor to conduct potentially illegal surveillance of activists has faced any legal scrutiny. Meanwhile, Hammond has had the book thrown at him. Tell me, what’s the bigger threat to society? All powerful state and corporate entities intruding on the privacy of truth and justice-seeking activists? Or hackers who expose their dirty secrets?

FYI, hours after the harsh sentence was handed down, Wikileaks released all of its remaining Stratfor files.

UPDATE: This is allegedly the uncensored version of Hammond’s statement, which includes the countries whose websites and servers he attacked at the behest of an FBI informant (emphasis mine):

Sabu also supplied lists of targets that were vulnerable to “zero day exploits” used to break into systems, including a powerful remote root vulnerability effecting the popular Plesk software. At his request, these websites were broken into, their emails and databases were uploaded to Sabu’s FBI server, and the password information and the location of root backdoors were supplied. These intrusions took place in January/February of 2012 and affected over 2000 domains, including numerous foreign government websites in Brazil, Turkey, Syria, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Nigeria, Iran, Slovenia, Greece, Pakistan, and others. A few of the compromised websites that I recollect include 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.

Sabu also infiltrated a group of hackers that had access to hundreds of Syrian systems including government institutions, banks, and ISPs. He logged several relevant IRC channels persistently asking for live access to mail systems and bank transfer details. The FBI took advantage of hackers who wanted to help support the Syrian people against the Assad regime, who instead unwittingly provided the U.S. government access to Syrian systems, undoubtedly supplying useful intelligence to the military and their buildup for war.

All of this happened under the control and supervision of the FBI and can be easily confirmed by chat logs the government provided to us pursuant to the government’s discovery obligations in the case against me. However, the full extent of the FBI’s abuses remains hidden. Because I pled guilty, I do not have access to many documents that might have been provided to me in advance of trial, such as Sabu’s communications with the FBI. In addition, the majority of the documents provided to me are under a “protective order” which insulates this material from public scrutiny. As government transparency is an issue at the heart of my case, I ask that this evidence be made public. I believe the documents will show that the government’s actions go way beyond catching hackers and stopping computer crimes.