The prison industrial complex is the latest victim of Anonymous’ #FuckFBIFriday campaign. Hacktivists have compromised data from a massive correctional facility management firm and have defaced their website.
The website for The GEO Group, Inc., a Florida-based management firm with clients worldwide, has been targeted by operatives with the online collective Anonymous. Friday’s hack from the group is the most recent release related to the #FFF campaign that has in past weeks targeted and successfully taken down the sites of the CIA, FBI and US Department of Justice.
Various Twitter accounts affiliated with the loose-knit group confirmed the hack at around 12:30 pm EST on Friday. A statement made by the group has replaced the traditional homepage of TheGEOGroupInc.com and other sites associated with the prison management firm have been “wiped off the net,” says the group.
Additionally, the group has added an image of prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal and the audio of a song about him and the prison system to the company's homepage.
The attack, reads a statement from Anonymous, is retaliation for a corrupt system that immensely profits off of the detainment of Americans across the country. As the prison industrial complex booms, management companies such as GEO have been tied to controversies.
As RT reported last week, Corrections Corporation of America, the largest operator of for-profit prisons in the US, has spent millions of dollars lobbying Washington for stricter laws that would ensure that their facilities are regularly close to total capacity. As these companies spend money to make new laws and expand on others that target non-violent criminals, the companies responsible generate mass income from operating the facilities.
“While most folks are suffering under the economy, many billions of dollars are being funneled into this sinister conniving alliance of capitalist and statist forces to try to build dozens upon dozens of new [p]risons across the world,” reads the Anonymous-penned statement published Friday. The GEO Group, which was founded in 1984, turned revenue of $1.27 billion in 2010, reveals the group’s annual report for that year. According to the report filed at the end of 2008 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, at that time the group has nearly 60 facilities operating under its umbrella, serving accommodations for 53,400 detainees. The group merged with competing prison operators Cornell nearly two years later.
Although the GEO Group has only expanded its operations in recent years, it continues to be marred with controversy. Eight prisoners died in just four years within the walls of a Pennsylvania facility operated by the group, and there have been at least two other reports of detainee deaths occurring after prison officials at GEO-run institutions denied them medication.
“Despite the well documented history of corruption, scandal and atrocities that companies like GEO perpetuate each and every minute our friends are locked behind their prison walls, the private prison industry is still booming,” adds Anonymous.
The Corrections Corporation of America recently appealed to 48 states across America, asking for them to consider selling off their prisons to the privately-run group. In their case, they insist that contracts will only be made if states can guarantee facilities maintain an inmate population close to capacity. Some say that this is accomplished by unjustly imprisoning many Americans.
“We are acting in solidarity with all those who have ever been wrongfully profiled, arrested, brutalized, incarcerated and have had all dignity and humanity stripped from them as they are cast into the gulags of America,” states Anonymous.
No comments:
Post a Comment