Christopher Doyon, aka Commander X, faces 15 years in prison for assaulting the county website of Santa Cruz, California to protest the forcible removal of a homeless encampment on the courthouse steps.
Doyon is currently hiding out in Canada to avoid prosecution, courtesy of what he describes as a new “underground railroad,” or a network of safe houses across the country.
“I think the general public is beginning to learn the value of information. To give an example, for a very long time nobody in the US or the world was allowed to know the number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan or Iraq,” Doyon told Canada’s National Post.
“There were wild guesses and they were all over the ballpark figures, until a young army private named Bradley Manning had the courage to steal that information from the US government and release it. Now we know that despite their smart munitions and all their high-technology they have somehow managed to accidentally kill 150,000 civilians in two countries.”
Doyon – who participated in a number of other high-profile Anonymous campaigns – also claimed the collective has access to “every classified database” in the US government. According to Doyon, the digital keys were handed to Anon operatives by the very same “people who run the systems.”
“It’s the pimply-faced kid in the basement who controls the whole game, and Bradley Manning proved that. The fact he had the 250,000 cables that were released effectively cut the power of the US State Department in half,” he said.
“The Afghan war diaries and the Iran war diaries effectively cut the political clout of the US Department of Defense in half. All because of one guy who had enough balls to slip a CD in an envelope and mail it to somebody.”
Doyon emphasized that it was only a matter of time before the collective chose to disseminate the databse contents.
“Now people are leaking to Anonymous and they’re not coming to us with this document or that document or a CD, they’re coming to us with keys to the kingdom, they’re giving us the passwords and usernames to whole secure databases that we now have free reign over,” he added.
