CHIC A

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’S FREE W

EEKL Y

|THIS ISSU

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The latest restaurant from

Donna K

nezek, girls in tights, historical fictionabout Patty H

earst, what happens w

hen you cuss at a cop, and more.

PL U

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J.R. Jones on the

Chicago Underground

Film

Festivalp 24 O

ur Town

Fun with phone sex

p 14

Are Chicago police

ready for a terrorattack?p 19 B

ut Can He H

ackPrison?This 20

-year-old antiwar

ac tivist c ould be facin g hard tim

e for online crim

e .

By

Christopher Hayes

August 19, 2005

Section One Letters 3ColumnsHot Type 4Red Streak: free but impossible to find

The Straight Dope 5The facts on inheriting baldness

The Works 8Why’s Wallace Davis in trouble again?

Chicago Antisocial 10Gearing up for Burning Man with Bop Camp

The Sports Section 12The season that might have been

Our Town 14A pair of pranksters ventures into the world ofphone sex; are our cops trained to deal with terror?

ReviewsMovies 24This Revolution; Ears, Open. Eyebrows,Click.; Bound to Lose; Live Freaky! DieFreaky!; and Captain Milkshake at theChicago Underground Film Festival

Music 26My Dad Is Dead at the Empty Bottle, August 13

Theater 28Stockyards Theatre Project’s Henry 4 (part one)

Books 30Christopher Sorrentino’s Trance

PlusInk WellThis week’s crossword: Unlimited Roaming

J ust before 6 AM on March 17 Pong Khumdeeawoke to persistent knocking at the frontdoor of her Pilsen loft. When she opened the

door she saw nine FBI agents, “white guys in jeansand bulletproof vests,” who handed her a searchwarrant and fanned out through the apartment.They were looking for evidence that her boyfriend,Jeremy Hammond, a 20-year-old self-described“hacktivist,” had hacked into a conservative Website called ProtestWarrior and stolen credit-cardnumbers, intending to use them to charge dona-tions to liberal and radical groups such as theACLU and the Communist Party USA.

In the next three hours the agents methodicallywent through every room in the house, confiscat-ing three computers—belonging to Hammond,Khumdee, and their roommate, Chris Shay—anexternal hard drive, an Xbox, even the digitalmemory from Khumdee’s camera. Looking forpasswords, they sifted through the trash andleafed through address books, scraps of paper,and notebooks. They flipped through Khumdee’ssketchbook, complimented her on her drawings,and read her journal. They poked fun at some ofthe radical literature they found around the house and cracked up when they found a BillO’Reilly book, a gift from Hammond’s mother.After reading a lefty diatribe in Shay’s diary

continued on page 20Jeremy Hammond

ON THE COVER: JIM NEWBERRY (HACKER)

But Can He HackPrison?

Jeremy Hammond isaccused of hacking aconservative Web sitein order to get creditcard numbers for apolitical prank. If he’s indicted, he couldbe facing serious time.By Christopher Hayes | Photographs by Jim Newberry

20 CHICAGO READER | AUGUST 19, 2005 | SECTION ONE

one agent told him, “If you watch Fox News you don’t thinkabout this kind of thing.”

“It was really surreal,” saysShay. “I made some tea to calmmyself down, because I was real-ly freaking out. And the wholewhile our two cats are madly for-nicating all over the house, like,Meow! Meow! The agents tookpictures of the cats humping. Ithink they thought it was funny.”

The two lead agents drove overto Hammond’s father’s house insuburban Glendale Heights,where Hammond was in theshower. He heard his father yell,“Jeremy, it’s the FBI!” The agentswere waiting when he emergedfrom the bathroom. “They werelike, ‘OK, Jeremy, you’re fucked,’”he says. “‘We know all aboutProtestWarrior. We know allabout the credit-card numbers.’And they tried to persuade methat it was in my best interests totell them about other people.” Hesays he was scared and felt pres-sured to give them information,but instead he told them hewanted to talk to a lawyer. Tenminutes later they left. “For thenext day or two,” he says, “I wasn’tdoing anything, wondering whatthe hell I should do.”

An FBI spokesperson says thebureau won’t comment on anongoing investigation, and, at therequest of his lawyer, Hammondhas stopped talking about thecase. A Web site he and his friendsset up, FreeJeremy.com, calls theFBI allegations “ridiculous,”though it never explicitly deniesthat he hacked ProtestWarrior,stating only that “Jeremy hasdone no damage to any systemand has not charged anything toany credit card numbers.”

Hammond does say federalagents have told him an indict-ment is imminent. “I’m fuckingscared shitless,” he says. “They’resaying 30 years in jail. They’rethreatening to just ruin my life,essentially.”

Whether or not Hammondhad anything to do with

cracking ProtestWarrior, he’sclearly a good hacker. At nine hewas already programming videogames in Qbasic, and by highschool he was obsessively reading

hacker Web sites. In 2003, thesummer after he graduated fromGlenbard East High School, hestarted HackThisSite.org, anonline training camp that offersaspiring hackers challenges ofvarying difficulty that are execut-ed on the site, which has beenprogrammed with many of thecommon security holes found onthe Web. In its first two years thesite got 2.5 million hits and

acquired 110,000 members and avolunteer staff of 34.

HackThisSite stresses on itsfront page that it’s set up for“free, safe, and legal” hacking.Among hackers there’s a Spy vs.Spy distinction between “whitehat” hackers, who, as Hammondputs it, “find a vulnerability,report it to the vendors, and get ajob in IT security,” and “blackhat” hackers, who don’t reporttheir intrusions but deface andvandalize Web sites, take person-al information, or cause othermischief. Hammond says he’sneither; he identifies with hack-tivists, people who use black hattactics but want to further apolitical agenda rather than turna profit, promote themselves, orshow off. “We think we are liter-ally under attack by either right-wing groups, law enforcement,

or oppressive governments,” hesays. “We believe that we need totake direct action to defend theInternet against the forces whoare standing in the way of mak-ing the Internet free and makingour society free.” For example, hesays, in 2004 someone defacedthe D.A.R.E. home page, puttingup arguments favoring the legal-ization of drugs as well as linksto organizations such as the

National Organization for theReform of Marijuana Laws. Thehack was apparently a tribute toan 18-year-old hacker nick-named “Coolio,” who’d pulled off a similar stunt in 2001 andsubsequently served threemonths in federal prison.

Hammond admits that earlierthis year he hacked the Web siteof the Chicago chapter of thehacker group 2600 to bypass alimit someone had put on hisability to e-mail their listserv.Hammond says most membersof 2600 weren’t upset about thehack, but some didn’t appreciatethe tables being turned on them.One irate member posted a com-ment on several Web sites callingHammond a “dim bulb” and a“petulant, willful child” andwishing him “copious buttsex . . . on the receiving end.”

In the spring of 2004, duringhis freshman year at theUniversity of Illinois at Chicago,Hammond hacked the computer-science department’s Web site,identifying a vulnerability in itssecurity system and installing aback door that would allow himunfettered access. “At that point,”he says, “I was still dancing withthe prospect of being a white hathacker. I had found this vulnera-

bility, and I had notified them.‘Here’s how it’s vulnerable, here’show you go about fixing it, here’swhere I put the back door. Youguys can talk with me, andmaybe I can work with the web-master.’ They didn’t take tookindly to that at all. In fact I wascalled before the departmentchair. He said they almost wentto the FBI. I’m pretty sure theguy who developed the Web site,one of the professors there, tookit personally. This was a slap inthe face. Some punk kid was ableto get into the site. So they disci-plined me instead of hiring me.”Peter Nelson, who supervises theundergraduate computer-scienceprogram at UIC, wouldn’t con-firm Hammond’s account, citingprivacy concerns.

Hammond says his politicalawakening—or what he calls,with a hint of self-mockery, his“personal liberation”—came inhigh school. After 9/11 he and histwin brother began reading left-wing Web sites and books likethe anticapitalist manifesto TheRevolution of Everyday Life andAbbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book.They also started a zine. In hissenior year Hammond “launchedwar,” cofounding the StudentLiberation Collective, which dis-tributed radical and anarchistliterature, some of which hewrote, and organized teach-insto oppose the invasion of Iraq.Yet he still went through theproper channels. “We had aschool sponsor,” he says. “It wasofficially sanctioned and every-thing.” On the first day of the warthe collective organized a student

walkout: 100 students marchedthrough downtown Lombardbefore making their way to theprotests in the Loop. Hammondwas quoted in a Daily Heraldstory saying, “I don’t want to besitting locked in my cage whileinnocent people who haven’tdone anything are getting killed.”

In the fall of 2003 Hammondstarted a group called FreeSociety to protest the war and todemand an end to tuitionincreases at UIC. The group post-ed flyers around campus with thephotos and salaries of some of theuniversity’s administrators, andHammond was arrested for thefirst time, for spray paintingBRING THE WAR TO UIC on acampus wall. The next spring hewas arrested for possession of abag of weed, which he calls “astupid arrest that I’m not reallyproud of.” He thinks all thisworked against him when hewent into the disciplinary hear-ing for hacking the computer-sci-ence department. He says that afew weeks after the hearing hegot a letter from administratorstelling him he wouldn’t be welcome at UIC in the fall.

That summer Hammond wasarrested again, after clashingwith antigay hecklers at the PrideParade. He also attended theDefcon conference in Las Vegas,the nation’s biggest hacker gath-ering. Most attendees are whitehat hackers who work for banks,the government, and Internetsecurity firms. Hammond gave aspeech urging people to use “elec-tronic civil disobedience” to dis-rupt the Republican National

Hacktivist

continued from page 1

Decorating CD-Rs of open-source software, preparing a mailing of Hack This Zine

Hammond gave a speech at Defcon urging people to use “electronic civil disobedience” to disrupt the Republican National Convention. Federalagents who were there asked for a tape, andorganizers told Hammond he was being watched.

CHICAGO READER | AUGUST 19, 2005 | SECTION ONE 21

Convention “by any means neces-sary.” Federal agents who werethere asked for a tape of thespeech, and the conferenceorganizers told Hammond hewas being watched. Khumdee,who has since broken up withHammond, was dismayed thathe’d made the speech and that hewas now on the feds’ radar. “Itwas really bad,” she says. “It alsowas a bragging note—‘Oh, thesemen in suits are interested inwhat I do. I have mad skills.’”

In August, as Hammond wasorganizing buses to take activiststo New York to protest at theRepublican convention, two FBIagents came looking for him athis father’s house—the same twowho would later show up whenhe was in the shower. Hammondwasn’t there, so they went to theMac repair shop in Villa Parkwhere he works, and finally calledKhumdee’s cell. Hammondarranged to meet them at a coffeeshop. “Obviously they were knowl-edgeable about both my hackingstuff as well as my activism stuff,”he says. “They wanted to knowwhat groups I worked with,whether I knew of any actionsplanned. They even went as far asasking me if I was going to bombanything—do you plan on bomb-ing anything or causing any vio-lence or assassinating the presi-dent? Stuff like that. I was like,‘I’m just some college activist.’ Imean, I’m pretty well-balanced inmy head and stuff.” At the conven-tion he would be arrested a fourthtime, during a drum-bangingprotest—an arrest he calls “mybest prison experience.”

In the days leading up to theconvention self-described

“hacker anarchists” kept trying todeface and shut down Republicanand conservative Web sites.Hammond won’t say whether hewas among them, though he doessay he “had affiliations with differ-ent circles, which did somethings.” The hacker anarchists’most dramatic action was hack-ing ProtestWarrior and postingthe names and e-mail addressesof its members, along with thepasswords and phone numbers ofthe site’s administrators, onIndymedia. Indymedia is a loosecollective of sites, administered byvolunteers, that use open publish-ing software and post articles andcommentary from “communityjournalists,” mostly leftists, radi-cals, and anarchists. The hackeranarchists posted the messagethey’d left on the ProtestWarriorsite on nyc.indymedia.org.“ProtestWarriors are fightingagainst the democratic processwhile claiming to uphold the ‘corevalues of this country,’” it stated.“It is unpatriotic to blindly acceptand obey the dogma of the rulingclasses, and to lash out at peaceactivists who are trying to build abetter world is intolerable. We’reshutting you down.”

The ProtestWarriors didn’tblame the Indymedia administra-tors for the hack, but they wereangry that the administrators

hadn’t removed the names and e-mail addresses. A ProtestWarriorwho went by Elac and laterClorox responded by launchingan electronic attack that tookdown the New York IndymediaWeb site. In an online interviewwith a conservative bloggerClorox said, “Their Web site willbe down a long time. I will keep itdown as long as I can, and it willremain down during the RNC.”

In August Clorox started his ownhacktivist Web site, rightwingex-tremist.net, and joined a group ofblack hat hackers called theG00ns, who until then haddirected their version of onlinemayhem at nonpolitical targets.Their reasons, they say on theirWeb site, are “because it’s fun,

because we can, because we wantto, because we fucking hate you.”A battle between left and righthackers was now officially on.

The logo for ProtestWarrior isa scowling, bare-chested, muscu-lar white guy wielding a massivebroadsword in one hand and asign with the group’s name in theother. Founded in San Franciscoin 2003 by two recent collegegrads and now headquartered inAustin, Texas, the group organiz-es conservatives to show up atliberal and radical protests withsigns that say things like “Exceptfor Slavery, Nazism, Fascism, andCommunism, War Never SolvedAnything.” The group, which isfond of pranks and maintains acontinued on page 22

22 CHICAGO READER | AUGUST 19, 2005 | SECTION ONE

snarky tone, has been a big hitamong young right-wingers—itnow has 12,000 members andchapters in all 50 states. “Ourslogans are what have reallybeen the driving force of ourWeb site,” says cofounder KfirAlfia. “They use a lot of sarcasm,and they’re quite witty.”

Alfia says he and otherProtestWarrior administratorshad nothing to do with hackingIndymedia. He admits thatClorox was responsible for shut-ting down Indymedia lastAugust but says he kicked himoff the site when he found out.“That’s not what we are all

about—we’re about taking it tothem ideologically,” he says. “ButI can’t control every member.”

In February Alfia started“noticing some really strangeactivity” on the site’s chat server:a user named Weareeverywherekept logging on to ports on theserver he shouldn’t have hadaccess to. Alfia also discovered afile that had been uploaded tothe server that displayed themessage “Hacker anarchists areeverywhere!” above a commandprompt where a user could putexecutable code. “That’s when allthe alarm bells went off,” he says.

Soon after this Alfia started anonline chat with a suspiciously

named user. He says the userturned out to be a disaffectedmember of a group that washacking ProtestWarrior: “He wasnot necessarily happy with thedirection the hack was going.”According to Alfia, over the nextseveral weeks the disaffectedhacker informed on his cocon-spirators, naming Hammond,among others, and saying they’dgained access to the databasestoring the credit-card numbersof people who’d boughtProtestWarrior merchandise.The informant also said mem-bers of the group were planningto go to an Internet cafe and exe-cute a script that would bill all

the credit cards for donations toliberal organizations, then sendout press releases to Indymediaand other hacker sites from the“Internet Liberation Front”claiming responsibility.

“I asked for proof and said,‘Could you send me some snip-pets of credit-card information?’ ”Alfia says. “It all checked out.That’s when I knew it wasbreached.” Instead of shutting theserver down Alfia called the cred-it-card companies and notifiedthe FBI. Agents asked him tosend all the evidence he’d gath-ered, and a short while later theyraided Hammond’s apartment.

A few weeks after his apart-

ment was searched Hammondand his lawyer went to talk to theagents, who said they had chatlogs and informants who wouldfinger him. They urged him tocooperate and turn over otherhackers, but he refused. “Theysay that whoever hacked the Website bounced through, like, fiveor six proxies all over the world,”he says, “so they probably don’thave much electronic evidence.”Alfia seems confident thatHammond will be indicted, butChris Shay, who’s been ques-tioned a few times by the agentsinvestigating the case, isn’t sosure. “They seemed like theywere really reaching,” he says.

Hacktivist

continued from page 21

CHICAGO READER | AUGUST 19, 2005 | SECTION ONE 23

“They were basically trying to saythey had everything, and theycould arrest him right now, butthey don’t want to.”

Soon after ProtestWarriorannounced that its site had

been hacked, pundit MichelleMalkin, who defended wartimeinternment in a 2004 book,linked to a ProtestWarrior letterabout the scheme on her blog,prompting an avalanche of scornfor Hammond. “The slightly-built, pouty-lipped JeremyHammond will probably be quitepopular inside the cell blockafter lights-out,” wrote one blog-ger. “I hope he doesn’t bruiseeasy.” Others rallied to supportHammond. Hundreds of peoplefrom as far away as Turkey andthe Netherlands have signed thepetition on FreeJeremy.com.“Jeremy is one of the best, mosthelpful guys I have ever talked to,”wrote HackThisSite user BrandonPerry of Texas. “He is a good guythat only taught ethical hacking.”

In April Clorox and some fel-low G00ns exploited a securityvulnerability in the Indymediapublishing software, one that,ironically, Hammond had founda month earlier when conductinga security audit for the Chicagosite. He’d notified Indymediaadministrators, warning themnot to make the vulnerabilitypublic until all the sites had anopportunity to fix it. Chicago’sadministrators patched the holeimmediately. But then someoneposted the vulnerability on apublicly accessible bulletin boardfor Indymedia administrators,and Clorox found it. Within twodays he reportedly took downmore than 16 Indymedia sites, insome cases erasing their archivesand displaying messages on theirhome pages that said things like“Our soldiers are dying over seesto give men, women, and chil-

dren a taste of freedom and youcall them imperialists. You arenothing but pigs.” In retaliationIndymedia users posted whatthey’d deduced was Clorox’sidentity and college, along withthe phone number of the head ofthe school’s computer-sciencedepartment. According to anarticle in the Boulder Weekly, afew days later he was called intothe dean’s office and suspended.The FBI also paid him a visit,and apparently he too is now lay-ing low. (He didn’t respond tothe e-mails I sent.)

These days Hammond spendsmost of his time at his Mac tech-nician job and working on thenext issue of “Hack This Zine,” aprint and online zine he started

earlier this year for hacktivists.He says his days of scuffles andhandcuffs are behind him. “I’mstill raising a ruckus,” he says,gamely raising a fist, but thenadds, “I’m not, like, involved inany direct action or any illegal orquestionable activities.”

He says he’s focusing insteadon teaching fellow hacktiviststechnical tricks to “protect them-selves,” so that if they choose to“play the game” they “don’t findthemselves in a situation like I’min.” Then he adds, “I knew what Iwas getting involved with. Iknow if you’re going to beinvolved in more sensitive thingsyou have to be prepared toaccept the consequences. AndI’ve accepted that.” v