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News

German precedent upholds online civil disobedience

Boing Boing has published an excerpt from Molly Sauter’s new book, The Coming Swarm, on Distributed Denial of Service attacks and the way the U.S. government has used the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to portray the attacks as much more dangerous than merely virtual sit-ins. Sauter details the wide disparity in sentences between CFAA or online fraud convictions and physical sit-in trespassing misdemeanors.

As Sauter writes, the German case of Andreas-Thomas Vogel provides a model for how to recognise the political nature of these acts of civil disobedience online. She explains the case:

Andreas-Thomas Vogel … ran the libertad.de website during the 2001 Deportation Class action against Lufthansa Airlines. Vogel had posted a call to action on libertad.de and was arrested on charges on coercion. Initially in 2005, a lower court in Frankfurt found Vogel guilty of using force against Lufthansa, based predominantly on the economic losses the airline had suffered during the campaign, both in terms of lost sales and the costs of acquiring additional bandwidth to soak the protesters’ traffic. Vogel was sentenced to either pay a fine or serve 90 days in jail.

This is essentially the logic that U.S. courts have adopted, though under the CFAA, the penalties are much more severe. The PayPal 14, activists who allegedly launched DDoS attacks against PayPal and other online banking companies in response to those companies freezing WikiLeaks’ assets and incoming donations, were charged under the CFAA, which carries a 10-year prison sentence.

Pierre Omidyar, eBay founder who sat on PayPal’s board at the time of the financial blockade on WikiLeaks, muddied the logical waters further, writing,

If we want to make parallels between real-world protests and online protests, that means that one thousand people can have the effect of six million people demonstrating in front of your office. That seems like an excessive impact in the hands of each person. It’s like each protester can bring along 6,000 phantom friends without going to the trouble of convincing each of them to take an afternoon off and join the protest in the street.

But if financial institutions are allowed to block funds to a legitimate news organisation simply because the U.S. government doesn’t like them, and that action takes place online, protests against those institutions will take place online if they’re to have any impact.

German courts recognised this in the Vogel case, and their reasoning is exemplary:

a higher court overturned the verdict, finding, “. . . the online demonstration did not constitute a show of force but was intended to influence public opinion.” [1] Libertad responded to the ruling with a statement: “Although it is virtual in nature, the Internet is still a real public space. Wherever dirty deals go down, protests also have to be possible.”

As Sauter writes,

The Vogel case was the first international precedent to recognize the legal and philosophical arguments put forth by supporters of DDoS activist actions. The court decision pivots on the point that these actions were oriented to influence the public, and through that avenue, influence the actions of the Lufthansa corporation, rather than badgering the airline into conceding to a set of demands. Specifically, the judge ruled that the protest was not an action of force intended to compel an action from Lufthansa; the action’s intention was to impact public opinion first.

Sauter says, “There has been no such precedent-setting case thus far in the US courts.” In fact, U.S. courts have reversed the German reasoning: not only is this not protected speech, it’s something the U.S. wants to stamp down on harder than it would if it were a physical sit-in, to set an example. The government has sided with Omidyar’s argument, giving corporations the gift of the CFAA to punish virtual activists, having a far greater impact than those activists could ever hope for. “When used to prosecute activist DDoS actions,” Sauter writes, “the CFAA directly gives the targets of protest the ability to extort payments from activists for their dissent and disruption. When coupled with the innovative reality of online activism, the CFAA literally renders the internet a space where you can be charged hundreds of thousands of dollars for participating in a collective protest.”

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Jeremy Hammond News

Jeremy Hammond was in solitary confinement: here is what we know

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Courage News News

Journalist Chris Hedges joins Courage Advisory Board

The Courage Foundation’s Advisory Board, already comprising whistleblowers, tech experts, scholars, and activists, continues to grow. Earlier this week we announced Slavoj Žižek joined our board, and today we are excited to welcome Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges aboard.

Hedges, a former war correspondent for the New York Times, now writes a column for Truthdig, where he covers various topics surrounding threats to our civil liberties and champions those fighting against those threats.

In a debate about Edward Snowden’s actions, Hedges said, “If there are no Snowdens, if there are no Mannings, if there are no Assanges, there will be no free press.”

In February, Hedges wrote ‘Edward Snowden’s Moral Courage,’ a speech praising the NSA whistleblower’s conscientious efforts, and expanding on why we need whistleblowers if we want a free press:

There is no free press without the ability of the reporters to protect the confidentiality of those who have the moral courage to make public the abuse of power. Those few individuals inside government who dared to speak out about the system of mass surveillance have been charged as spies or hounded into exile. An omnipresent surveillance state—and I covered the East German Stasi state—creates a climate of paranoia and fear. It makes democratic dissent impossible. Any state that has the ability to inflict full-spectrum dominance on its citizens is not a free state.

In 2013, Hedges lauded Courage beneficiary Jeremy Hammond for exposing the state’s plan to criminalise democratic dissent. He attended and reported on Hammond’s sentencing, which he called “draconian.”

Earlier that year, Hedges attended and reported on Chelsea Manning’s trial, and wrote in solidarity of the US Army whistleblower here and condemned the “judicial lynching” of Manning here.

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Courage News News

Courage welcomes Slavoj Žižek to our Advisory Board

The Courage Foundation is excited to announce and welcome internationally renowned philosopher and author Slavoj Žižek to our Advisory Board. A senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, in Slovenia, and the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, in London, Žižek has written more than eighty books, and he’s written and starred in several documentaries about his own philosophy.

In June 2014, Žižek wrote “How WikiLeaks opened our eyes to the illusion of freedom”, in which he said:

Not only have we learned a lot about the illegal activities of the US and other great powers. Not only have the WikiLeaks revelations put secret services on the defensive and set in motion legislative acts to better control them. WikiLeaks has achieved much more: millions of ordinary people have become aware of the society in which they live. Something that until now we silently tolerated as unproblematic is rendered problematic.

In September 2013, Žižek wrote an op-ed declaring Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange “our new heroes” and whistleblowing “an essential art.”

He explains why he supports these truthtellers:

…whistleblowers play a crucial role in keeping the “public reason” alive. Assange, Manning, Snowden, these are our new heroes, exemplary cases of the new ethics that befits our era of digitalised control. They are no longer just whistleblowers who denounce the illegal practices of private companies to the public authorities; they denounce these public authorities themselves when they engage in “private use of reason”.

Žižek says we “need Mannings and Snowdens in China, in Russia, everywhere,” and foresaw the need for an organisation like Courage:

…we need a new international network to organise the protection of whistleblowers and the dissemination of their message. Whistleblowers are our heroes because they prove that if those in power can do it, we can also do it.

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Journalism News

British journalists call for an end to “routine” surveillance

In the summer of 2013, many wondered why journalists in the UK, one of the countries most implicated in mass surveillance, didn’t pursue Edward Snowden’s revelations more aggressively. Even when the British government began to directly intimidate those who were reporting on the Snowden documents – by detaining David Miranda under anti-terrorism legislation and insisting that they should be able to destroy computer equipment within the Guardian offices – protest against these actions in the UK media was muted, with a significant section of the UK press deciding to stand up for the rights of the UK state rather than the freedom to report.

That may now, belatedly, be changing. A new scandal has demonstrated that journalists have a real interest in fighting surveillance – and that current UK practices put source protection right in the firing line. This month, London’s Metropolitan Police published a report that confirmed they had used surveillance powers to obtain the phone records of Sun journalist Tom Newton Dunn without his knowledge in order to find out who his source was.

This direct threat to journalists’ interests has focused attention on just how routine communications data (metadata) orders are in the UK. Unlike ‘live’ intercepts of data or content, which require a court order, British public bodies can obtain historical metadata simply by making a request to a telecommunications provider for any data they hold. There is no judicial involvement in these orders, about half a million of which are made in the UK every year. Even the official charged with overseeing these orders has admitted that the 514,608 requests made in the UK in 2013 “seems to me to be a very large number. It has the feel of being too many.”

There are few safeguards on the use of these orders under the UK’s Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). In particular, RIPA makes no provision for the protection of information that might relate to journalists’ communication with sources, or indeed communications with lawyers. The ability of police to effectively obtain metadata at will means that many, if not most, journalists in the UK are no longer able to offer their sources an assurance of confidentiality. Recent changes to UK surveillance laws suggest that journalists and lawyers should now treat online services and webmail with a similar degree of caution.

Journalists have responded to the Metropolitan Police’s report with op-eds and  a Save our Sources campaign. The absence of safeguards in the law is now also the subject of a legal challenge launched in the European Court of Human Rights by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the third such challenge to be made to the UK’s surveillance practices since the start of reporting on Edward Snowden’s revelations.

Gavin Millar QC, who is aiding the Bureau of Investigative Journalism with the case, has said that police “routinely” use RIPA powers to obtain journalists’ metadata and identify their sources:

This circumvents the rights of a journalist to protect a source and to a hearing before a judge before any order is made to disclose such information.

The sheer volume of data being harvested by GCHQ under RIPA means that confidential journalistic material is also being covertly accessed and analysed by security and intelligence all the time. Again sources are being identified – but on a much larger scale.

Yet there is no word in RIPA or the government’s code of practice under it about these key journalistic rights. The UK simply flouts the Convention.

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Courage News News

Press release: Known Unknowns Fund launched to protect alleged sources under investigation

  • New fund will be the first to aid suspected sources before they face charges
  • An alleged source under investigation by the US government has already reached out to Courage for assistance
  • Courage Advisory Board members Daniel Ellsberg and Thomas Drake underline the importance of the new fund
  • Donations can be made online at https://staging.couragefound.org/known-unknowns-fund/#donate

Courage, the international organisation dedicated to the protection of truthtellers, today announces the launch of the Known Unknowns Fund to support suspected sources under investigation. The Fund is the first specifically designed to assist individuals who are alleged to have disclosed information of significant public value but do not yet face formal charges. The name of the fund, a play on former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s notorious defence of inadequate sourcing, acknowledges that many who find themselves in this situation will not be in a position to confirm their identity to the public.

Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower and a member of Courage’s Advisory Board said:

In the US, the administration of injustice against whistleblowers under President Obama serves to intimidate potential truth-tellers by the prospect of ruinous legal costs defending themselves under investigation, even if no indictment follows. The Known Unknowns Fund will benefit not only those who may earn suspicion of telling wrongly-withheld truths; it also serves the public interest in being so informed.

By providing support at the pre-indictment stage, Courage hopes to limit the number of cases that proceed to prosecution. The organisation has already received a request for assistance for an alleged source who is currently under investigation by the US government.

Courage’s Acting Director Sarah Harrison explained:

Courage has decided to launch the Known Unknowns Fund because there is a real and pressing need that no one else is in a position to fulfill. We have already received a request regarding someone who needs our help, as they are under investigation by the US government for being the alleged source of some important stories in the US media regarding botched counter-terrorism programmes. Up to this point, Courage has advocated for whistleblowers the public already knows about and who have been wrongly retaliated against. Alleged sources who haven’t yet been charged are in a different situation and a really difficult one – they are often in desperate need of financial and other support, but requesting it publicly can harm their legal situation. Even speaking about an investigation in public can put an individual at risk of additional prosecution. Courage’s Known Unknowns Fund aims to help those who can’t ask openly. We want to make sure that the public has an opportunity to support and protect alleged sources ahead of time, so they can get legal advice and prepare a legal team before potential charges are brought.

The experience of whistleblowers shows a clear need for this new initiative. NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake was charged under the 1917 Espionage Act and faced 35 years in prison. By the time the US government’s case fell apart, Drake had spent several years under investigation and another awaiting trial. At the sentencing hearing Judge Richard D. Bennett said that the conduct of the investigation against Drake had been “unconscionable”, likening the experience to “four years of hell.”

Thomas Drake, who is also a member of the Courage Advisory Board, said:

During my pre-trial criminal proceedings, I was advised by private counsel that my criminal defense prior to public trial would cost at least a million dollars and perhaps as much as three million. I had to prepare a legal defense from my own resources against a government criminal investigation and prosecution which had no such limitations. I went virtually bankrupt, emptied all my liquid assets, took out a second mortgage on my residence and went into severe debt paying for my private attorney over two years. I ended up declared indigent before the Court and represented for criminal defense by public defenders and by attorney Jesselyn Radack, who represented me in the court of pubic opinion as well as whistleblower advocacy and media outreach. She was my voice when I had none. If something like the Known Unknowns Fund had existed before I was indicted, I’d have been in a much better position to defend myself.

Donations to the Known Unknowns Fund can be made at https://staging.couragefound.org/known-unknowns-fund/#donate

___

The following people are available for interview and comment by emailing courage.press@couragefound.org

Daniel Ellsberg, Courage Advisory Board Member and whistleblower
Thomas Drake, Courage Advisory Board Member and whistleblower
Ray McGovern, Courage Advisory Board Member, veteran intelligence analyst and whistleblower champion
Sarah Harrison, Courage Acting Director

Categories
News Whistleblowing

Germany’s whistleblower protection among the worst in the G20, says new report

A new report on the state of whistleblower protection in some of the world’s richest countries has found that Germany ranks alongside Argentina, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey as one of the countries that does the least to ensure that whistleblowers can speak out without fear of retribution.

The report, which was co-authored by researchers from Australian NGO Blueprint for Free Speech, Transparency International Australia, Griffith University and Melbourne University, compares G20 countries’ legal frameworks with the commitments they signed up to in the G20’s 2013-14 Anti-Corruption Action Plan, where they agreed:

to ensure that those reporting on corruption, including journalists, can exercise their function without fear of any harassment or threat or of private or government legal action for reporting in good faith

The report sets out 14 separate criteria based on the G20 agreement, other international agreements on whistleblower protection and best practice documents drawn up by intergovernmental organisations and NGOs.

What the report found

The report found that, while there had been real improvement over the past decade, serious shortcomings remained in the legal systems of most G20 countries – and those shortcomings affected most of the areas potential whistleblowers would be concerned about. Provisions for whistleblowers to remain anonymous when using internal channels to express their concerns were identified as a particular weakness across the G20, as were the rules around disclosure to third parties – including, where appropriate, the media.

The provision of independent bodies and mechanisms to deal with whistleblower complaints and to report on how legal protections were being used were also seen as poor across the countries surveyed. In addition, the authors note that where regulations exist, they tend to apply to the public sector only – governments have been much less active in ensuring that private sector whistleblowers can speak out in confidence.

Legal regimes, of course, only tell part of the story. As the report’s authors point out, the formal presence of adequate whistleblower protection laws does not in itself tell you whether they are implemented consistently, or whether “cultural or other norms [in a particular country] indirectly assist in practical protection of whistleblowers.”

As we’ve noted previously, legal frameworks are a particularly poor guide to what might happen in difficult cases, especially those where disclosures have a national security dimension. Some G20 countries, like the UK and Canada, explicitly exclude military and intelligence personnel from their ‘whistleblower’ definition and all the protections in law that derive from that (the report calls this “a glaring gap”). Others, like the United States, have a legislative framework that is well rated – and in theory extends to its intelligence agencies – but in practice apply very different rules, and extreme anti-whistleblower measures, when classified information is involved.

Why did Germany score so badly?

Germany’s poor score in the report might come as a surprise to some, given the country’s renowned worker representation laws and positive reaction to Edward Snowden’s revelations. But in July 2011, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Germany’s protection of its own whistleblowers was inadequate.

Brigitte Heinisch und das Urteil des EGMR
The case was brought by Brigitte Heinisch, a nurse who brought the systematic mistreatment of elderly patients to the attention of the healthcare company she worked for. When appeals to management proved ineffective, Heinisch brought legal action against her employers and wrote a leaflet to explain what was happening in the case. The European Court ruled that the public interest in Heinisch’s disclosures outweighed her employers’ right to protect their business reputation and that her summary dismissal had been “disproportionately severe.” She was later awarded compensation by a German court.

In fact, the German legal code only offers limited protection for public officials who are reporting suspicions of corruption – and this came only after a change of the law in 2009. Germany’s employment courts offer limited redress to those who report wrongdoing in good faith, but there remains a strong bias against anonymous reporting and public disclosure. None of the legislative proposals made since the 2011 judgment have attracted the support necessary to secure a change in the law.

Read the full report here

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News Whistleblowing

Why the world needs more whistleblowers

This article was first published here by the EFF, with whom we’re collaborating for their week of action around the Necessary and Appropriate Principles

by Sana Saleem, Courage Foundation Advisory Board

During the Stockholm Internet Forum this year, a State Department representative was quick to flaunt reforms put in place by the US Government to ‘counter US mass surveillance programmes.’ However, he was unwilling to respond when faced with the simple question “If you are willing to reform laws and mend things, why not honor the man who triggered it, why not bring Edward Snowden home?”

Too often, whistleblowers aren’t valued for the reforms they instigate. Even as government worldwide are considering new ways to limit mass surveillance, there is scant discussion about the need to honor and protect whisteblowers.

The world needs more whistleblowers because those in positions of power are often expert at hiding corruption from the public. People with integrity and a desire for truth and justice within the political system are often our best hope for bringing light to this corruption.

But as much of the world’s press extensively reports on Wikileaks and the Snowden revelations, we must not dismiss the trepidation that comes with reporting the truth and exposing misuse of power. This trepidation will not dissipate unless there is a collective effort to protect and defend whistleblowers, and reform laws that allow for prosecuting them.

There’s also the pressing need to keep using the information provided by whistleblowers to push for necessary reforms and protections. Today is Day 4 of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) ‘Necessary and Proportionate’ week of action. The EFF is calling on governments to ensure surveillance law reform is guided by key principles. Today we focus on principle 4: the ‘Integrity of Communications and Systems, Safeguards Against Illegitimate Access, Protection on Whistleblowers, and Right to An Effective Remedy’.

What is meant by the ‘Integrity of Communications and Systems’ in practice? The NSA, or any other government for that matter, should not be able to compel service providers or hardware or software vendors to build surveillance or backdoors into their systems. These companies also should not collect or retain particular information purely for state surveillance purposes.

We now have confirmation that governments are going above and beyond compelling companies to build backdoors into their services. In an article posted on the Intercept this week journalist, documentary maker and Intercept co-founder Laura Poitras documents how the NSA is tapping into Germany’s largest telecommunications providers by accessing the passwords of the system administrators. This revelation was greeted with both shock and deep anger by the telco engineers. Governments need to go beyond merely not forcing companies to comply with backdoor requests, they must put an immediate stop to the accessing whole systems covertly. This point addresses the second element of principle 4, when state authorities illegitimately access personal data.

There is no possibility of protecting against this when it’s happening behind the backs of service providers and hardware and software vendors. This leaves the onus on governments, who, in democratic societies, are accountable to their citizens. The third part of this is an onus on government to protect their whistleblowers. The Obama administration, in what the Nieman Reports has labeled the “Big Chill”, is operating amid unprecedented secrecy—while attacking journalists trying to tell the public what they need to know

Former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson:

Several reporters who have covered national security in Washington for decades tell me that the environment has never been tougher or information harder to dislodge,

Abramson said

One Times reporter told me the environment in Washington has never been more hostile to reporting.

Protection of whistleblowers is critically important for the protection of a just society. But it’s not just whistleblowers under attack: it is also increasingly difficult to advocate for whistleblowers given the government and the media’s treatment of those who seek to protect whistleblowers.

The Courage Foundation was set up to provide legal and policy support for those who have made a decision to stand up to the abuse of power, risk their career and, in some cases, family life, so that our liberties are protected. It is for this reason that the need to provide stronger protections for whistleblowers, in such a difficult climate, is incredibly important.

Finally, what happens when the state conducts illegal and warrantless surveillance against its citizens? Snowden’s revelations have revealed state intrusion into the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans and citizens around the world, without proof for suspicion. Does the legal system allow us to challenge such surveillance in court? If it does, what would happen to the US government if they were found guilty of illegally surveilling you or me? The Necessary and Proportionate principles argue for civil and criminal penalties imposed on any party responsible for illegal electronic surveillance and those affected by surveillance must have access to legal mechanisms necessary for effective redress.

Tomorrow is Friday, day 5, in which the EFF and its supporters around the world will call on governments to improve safeguards for International Cooperation and Extraterritorial Application of Human Rights Law. The Courage Foundation stands beside the EFF’s campaign and calls on all rights groups and activists seeking to preserve an Internet free from surveillance to support this campaign.

It was little over a year ago when Edward Snowden performed an act of remarkable conscience. Snowden’s actions have empowered a generation of us to stand up to abuses and to do the right thing, even when it’s not convenient. With the increasing power and resources of state surveillance programs, the world is in dire need of more whistleblowers to continue this fight.

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Courage News News

Courage joins ‘Necessary and Appropriate Principles’ week

np-logo-2The Courage Foundation is proud to announce our support and involvement with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Necessary and Proportionate Week of Action, leading up to the first year anniversary of the 13 Necessary and Proportionate Principles, which were first launched at the 24th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on 20 September 2013. The full text of the principles is here.

The EFF has a series of articles and campaigns for various subcategories of the week, on secrecy, transparency, public oversight, combating surveillance and whistleblower protections. Join discussion of the week of action on Twitter with the hashtag #privacyisaright

The Courage Foundation is the predominant partner on today’s topic: ‘Integrity of Communications and Systems, Protection on Whistleblowers, Safeguards Against Illegitimate Access and Right to An Effective Remedy,’ advancing the tenet that “strong protection should be afforded to whistleblowers who expose surveillance activities that threaten human rights.” The United States government has cracked down on those who expose wrongdoing more than ever under the Obama Administration, with Chelsea Manning and Jeremy Hammond in prison, Thomas Drake fired and prosecuted under the Espionage Act, and Edward Snowden in Russian asylum, all for revealing important truths in the public interest about what their government does in secret and against our will.

Courage steps in to protect these conscientious people who deserve our support. We fund legal defense teams for truthtellers, keep their cases in the public light, and advocate for the public’s right to know and whistleblower protections generally. Stay tuned for Courage Advisory Board member Sana Saleem’s article: “Why the World Needs More Whistleblowers.”

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Courage News Jeremy Hammond News

Press release: Jeremy Hammond announced as second Courage beneficiary

  • Imprisoned hacktivist media source Jeremy Hammond becomes Courage’s second beneficiary, in addition to Edward Snowden
  • Tax deductible donations to Jeremy’s defence fund can now be made throughout the EU, via the Wau Holland Foundation
  • Jeremy Hammond’s official support site will be relaunched at freejeremy.net, with the current support team still fully involved

Courage, the international organisation dedicated to the protection of truthtellers, has announced that its new beneficiary will be Jeremy Hammond.

Jeremy was sentenced to ten years in prison for being the alleged media source for documents from the private US intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (Stratfor), which included revelations that they had been spying on human rights defenders, for example Bhopal activists and members of PETA, at the behest of corporations and governments.  WikiLeaks published these documents in partnership with 29 media organisations worldwide as the Global Intelligence Files, which are still being used for news stories around the world. Despite hundreds of pleas, including a letter submitted by WikiLeaks from itself and its media partners – “newspapers, TV networks, and magazines with a combined audience of 500 million” – asking for leniency for Jeremy, the maximum possible sentence was given.

thegifiles

Jeremy Hammond, a political dissident and former member of the hacktivist network Anonymous, was sentenced to a decade in prison after he refused to inform on others and defended his actions in service of the truth and the  public’s right to know. The judge in his case refused to recuse herself despite a glaring conflict of interest: her husband was a former Stratfor client and had his information revealed in the Global Intelligence Files.

Since March 2012, Jeremy has been cut off from his friends and family, and punished with extensive stays in solitary confinement. By hosting his defence fund, Courage will raise donations to enable Jeremy’s defence team to continue advocating on his behalf, monitoring his condition and fighting for his rights while in prison.

Sarah Harrison, Acting Director of Courage and WikiLeaks Investigations Editor, said:

Courage supports and defends truthtellers who take risks and need our help, wherever they are. We traditionally think of whistleblowers as insiders disclosing their employers’ abuses, but those on the outside who work to make public the secret wrongdoing of the powerful are just as vital in the effort to hold them accountable. Thanks to Jeremy, we now know the inner workings of the private intelligence sector which runs much of US intelligence activities including more than 80% of the NSA’s operations. Jeremy has found himself at the sharp end of the US government’s crackdown on the media so it’s important that he knows he has our support.

Grace North, who has been coordinating support efforts for Jeremy Hammond since June 2013, said:

This is an exciting new partnership for those of us who have worked so tirelessly to support Jeremy through this journey. Jeremy believes that one of the most important things a person can do to combat the injustices of the world is to educate themselves and others. Joining with the Courage Foundation is the next step in getting information and education to as wide an audience as possible. The more people we can reach with Jeremy’s message, and with the information Jeremy so bravely sacrificed his freedom to disclose, the more people we can have fighting on the front lines for not only Jeremy’s freedom, but the freedom of humanity.

In addition to hosting the defence fund, Courage will publicly advocate for Jeremy Hammond and build his network of support. A relaunched website at freejeremy.net will keep the public updated on Jeremy’s case, raising awareness about the importance of his revelations and publishing Jeremy’s writing from prison.

Donations to Jeremy’s defence fund can be made at freejeremy.net/donate.
Tax-free donations can be made throughout the EU via the Wau Holland Foundation at http://www.wauland.de/en/projects/07.html#JH

Courage originally began in August 2013 as The Journalistic Source Protection Defence Fund and has run Edward Snowden’s official defence fund since that time. Jeremy Hammond is Courage’s next beneficiary; his official support site is located at https://www.freejeremy.net and the related twitter account at @FreeJeremyNet

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For the Courage launch of Jeremy Hammond becoming a beneficiary, the following people are available for interviews and comment by emailing courage.press@couragefound.org:

Sarah Harrison, Courage’s Acting Director
Renata Avila, Courage Advisory Board Member and human rights lawyer
Kevin Zeese, Courage Advisory Board Member and cofounder of popularresistance.org
Bernd Fix, of the Wau Holland Foundation who now collect EU wide tax deductible donations for Jeremy Hammond
Margaret Ratner Kuntsler, Attorney for Jeremy Hammond
Grace North, Support network coordinator for Jeremy Hammond