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Transparency is not a two way street for the US Government. While the American Government spies with impunity on US citizens, foreign governments, the United Nations and any other group it deems suspicious, Americans who try to monitor and expose the spying are harshly punished. On Friday, Jeremy Hammond, a 28 year old hacktivist member of Anonymous was given a ten year prison sentence by a federal court in New York for leaking information about the private intelligence company Stratfor.

Stratfor, which is staffed by many former members of the CIA and other government agencies, sells geopolitical intelligence reports and has been called ‘the shadow CIA’. Hammond hacked into Stratfor’s computer systems in 2011 and released 5 million company emails to Wikileaks and obtained over 60,000 customer credit cards which he then used to give money to charitable causes. Among the revelations which emerged as a result of the leak was that Pakistani officials knew the location of Osama bin Laden well before the US raid on the Abbottabad Complex and that Stratfor was secretly monitoring the Occupy Wall Street Movement and Wikileaks, and also activists pursuing compensation for the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal.

Hammond, who has been in custody since March 2012, said a fellow hacker named Hector Xavier Monsegur who went by the name Sabu instructed him on potential hacking targets which included foreign governments. The day after Hammond’s arrest, Sabu was revealed as an FBI informant.

GUEST: Kevin Gosztola, reporter for Firedoglake.com who regularly covers Wikileaks, Whistleblowing, and Secrecy issues

Read Gosztola’s writing at FireDogLake.com.

Find out more about Jeremy Hammond’s case at www.freejeremy.net.