Hammond supporters publish alleged list of foreign targets that FBI had him hack

During the sentencing hearing of convicted hacker Jeremy Hammond on Friday, the young Chicagoan began to read from his prepared statement, saying that he had been directed to hack various foreign government websites by Anonymous leader turned FBI informant Sabu.

In court, Hammond said that “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, Iran—” before the judge cut him off and said that the list of targets was to be redacted.

However, shortly after the hearing concluded, Jacob Appelbaum, a well-known American computer security researcher currently living in Berlin, began tweeting what he claimed was the unredacted list of targets, based on a Pastebin post. Appelbaum later linked to that version of Hammond’s statement, which was not redacted.

According to that apparently unredacted version, Hammond wrote:

At his request, these websites were broken into, their e-mails 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.

If Hammond’s supposed allegations are true, it would suggest that the FBI was directing foreign attacks through Sabu. The FBI did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.

The original redacted statement, published on the website of Hammond’s spokesperson, Andy Stepanian of the Sparrow Project, has each target’s name X'd out.

Stepanian declined to confirm or deny to Ars the targets being circulated by Appelbaum and others, as he did not wish to get Hammond or his attorneys in further trouble with the judge.

“[Appelbaum’s] a very smart guy,” he told Ars. “I'm not going to verify which ones are which. But it's at least seven. Based on the sentence structure, it seems as if [Hammond] was going in order of importance. I know I'm being very cryptic and I apologize.”