- published: 24 Apr 2015
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Jeremy Hammond (born December 1985) is a political activist from Chicago charged in a criminal complaint with crimes relating to the December 2011 hack of Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (Stratfor). He is the founder of the computer security training website HackThisSite, created in 2003 following his graduation from Glenbard East High School.
On March 5, 2012, Hammond was arrested by FBI agents in Bridgeport, Chicago ahead of an indictment unsealed the following day in the Lower Manhattan federal district court. He is one of six individuals from the United States, England and Ireland indicted, due to a cooperating witness known online as Sabu.
Fox News in Manhattan was first to break the story based on "access to Sabu's handlers" of three arrests "on two continents," a sealed federal indictment for six, and a "separate indictment" for Hammond. The story was later confirmed by other news agencies when the court papers were unsealed.
The case is being prosecuted by the office of Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Hammond is represented by Elizabeth Fink, "a firebrand attorney" with the National Lawyers Guild who won a settlement of $8 million against the Government of New York for ex-inmates of the Attica Prison riot.
Julian Paul Assange ( /əˈsɒnʒ/ ə-SONZH; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian computer programmer, political/internet activist, publisher, and journalist. He is best known as the editor in chief and founder of WikiLeaks, a media website which publishes information from whistleblowers. The site acts as a conduit for worldwide news leaks, with a stated purpose of creating open governance.
WikiLeaks has published material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya, toxic waste dumping in Côte d'Ivoire, Church of Scientology manuals, Guantanamo Bay procedures, and banks such as Kaupthing and Julius Baer. In 2010, WikiLeaks published Iraq War documents and Afghan War documents about American involvement in the wars, some of which was classified material. On 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks and its five international print media partners (Der Spiegel, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian and El País) began publishing U.S. diplomatic cables.
Assange was a hacker-activist in his youth, before becoming a computer programmer and then becoming internationally renowned for his work with WikiLeaks. He has lived in several countries and has made public appearances in many parts of the world to speak about freedom of the press, censorship, and investigative journalism. He has received numerous awards and nominations, including the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award, Readers' Choice for TIME magazine's 2010 Person of the Year, the 2011 Sydney Peace Foundation gold medal and the 2011 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.Snorre Valen, a Norwegian parliamentarian, nominated him for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.