Supporters Push for Leniency for Stratfor Hacker

Argue stolen e-mails showed the company's complicity in spying on activist groups

Supporters of Anonymous hacker and self-styled online anarchist, Jeremy Hammond, are circulating this online petition aimed at cajoling authorities into granting the 28-year-old leniency. Hammond pled guilty this morning to participating in the December 2011 hacking of online publication Stratfor.

Hammond supporters maintain that e-mails he helped steal from Stratfor and post online exposed Stratfor's complicity in surveillance of anti-corporate activists. Stratfor founder George Friedman strongly refutes such notions as nonsense. He has said that Stratfor is a straight-forward, for-profit online publication that charges subscribers $350 a year for well-researched and written essays on global affairs.