Jeremy Hammond, a hacker affiliated with the controversial anti-government secrecy organization, WikiLeaks, received a maximum prison sentence of 10 years on Friday for his role in a high profile hack of the global security company, Stratfor. In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Hammond expressed a feeling that the government was exaggerating  the seriousness of his crime and making an example of him in an effort to scare off potential political hackers and WikiLeaks supporters in the future.

Hammond has been in federal custody since March of 2012, after he was arrested and charged for the hacking and leaking of millions of Stratfor emails. Eventually, Hammond pleaded guilty to the crime – a single count offense under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. However, the fact that Hammond plead guilty and only had one offense didn’t stop the government from sentencing him to 10 years in prison and three more years of “supervised release.”

For his part, the hacker wasn’t surprised at the lengthy nature of his sentence, calling his role with the hacking organization Anonymous the kind of experience he knew all along might land him in jail. He did, however, criticize the government verdict as a “vengeful, spiteful act” with an unveiled goal of sending a message of punishment to political “hactivists” all around the globe.

The Strafor (or Strategic Forecasting, Inc.) email leak – published and dubbed by WikiLeaks as “the Global Intelligence Files” – painted the company as a corrupt and unethical organization that paid informants around the globe, including numerous government insiders or former federal employees, for insider information leaks. As a result of the company’s pay-off structure, it has been able to publish information on national and global security before said information became public knowledge.

Stratfor has often been used by major global publications, from Reuters to the New York Times, as an information source. The company was also going after WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, around the time of Hammond’s hack, crusading as a stalwart of national security even whilst leaking information of its own and using unethical practices to collect that information. Ironically, WikiLeaks and Anonymous fought back, attacking Stratfor and showing it as the shady organization it is.

For Jeremy Hammond, though, that victory won’t come without a price. While the newly sentenced hacker claims he was manipulated into the Stratfor hack by a fellow hacker who turned out to be an FBI informant, his conspiratorial claims that the FBI orchestrated the whole attack as a trap for Anonymous and WikiLeaks did little to reduce his criminal conviction.

From the Guardian interview, it sounds like Hammond is reserved and level-headed in regards to his sentence. He expressed sadness and regret for fellow hacktivists who had killed themselves after similar criminal sentences, and vowed to get through his prison years “reading, writing, working out, and playing sports.” However, Hammond did state that his days of hacking are done and that he won’t return to old habits upon his eventual release from prison.