Hammond attended the University of Illinois at Chicago on a full scholarship. In the spring of 2004, during his freshman year, he pointed out a security flaw on the computer science department’s website to department administrators, offering to fix it. For pointing out the flaw, Hammond was called before the department chair and ultimately banned from returning for his sophomore year.
He was absolutely convinced that hacking was going to be the way that we protest in the future. He likened it to doing a sit-in of a restaurant, protesting outside of a business, or chaining yourself to a tree.
Everything he did was focused on this goal. Helping people learn to hack was going to be a required part of a functioning society. He led by example and some people followed.
I can't help but wonder if he is the first of his kind: a political prisoner of the Internet age.
He created a whole site like Stripe's Capture the Flag back in 2003: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HackThisSite
This part of his history is also sad:
Hammond attended the University of Illinois at Chicago on a full scholarship. In the spring of 2004, during his freshman year, he pointed out a security flaw on the computer science department’s website to department administrators, offering to fix it. For pointing out the flaw, Hammond was called before the department chair and ultimately banned from returning for his sophomore year.