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Adrian Lamo's side of Wikileaks informant case
Adrian Lamo says he has received death threats since he told federal agents he suspects a U.S. soldier leaked classified information.
On Thursday afternoon, Adrian Lamo sat quietly in the corner of a Starbucks inside the Carmichael Safeway, tapping on a laptop that requires his thumbprint to turn on and answering his cell phone.
The first call, he said, came from an FBI agent asking about a death threat Lamo had received.
On Thursday afternoon, Adrian Lamo sat quietly in the corner of a Starbucks inside the Carmichael Safeway, tapping on a laptop that requires his thumbprint to turn on and answering his cell phone.
The first call, he said, came from an FBI agent asking about a death threat Lamo had received.
The second was from a Domino's pizza outlet. One of his many new enemies had left his name and number on a phony order.
The third was from Army counterintelligence, he said.
In other circumstances, it might be easy to dismiss his claims.
He is an unassuming 29-year-old who lives with his parents on a dead-end street in Carmichael and was recently released from a mental ward, where he was held briefly until doctors discovered his odd behavior stemmed from Asperger's syndrome.
On Thursday, he was dressed in black. A rumpled sport coat covered his bone-thin frame, and a Phillips-head screw pierced his left earlobe – a real screw, not an ear stud made to look like one.
He spoke slowly and methodically, sounding almost drunk, a side effect of medication he takes to treat Asperger's, anxiety and his rapid heartbeat.
But Lamo is the most famous computer hacker in the world at the moment, the subject of national security debates and international controversy – and a target of scorn in the hacker community that once celebrated him.
He first gained notoriety in 2003, when he was charged with hacking into the New York Times computer system, essentially just to prove he could.
"I just wanted to see what their network was like," he said. "It was going to be the Washington Post, but I got distracted by a banner ad."
He has re-emerged in the spotlight following his decision last month to tell federal agents he had reason to believe an Army private in Iraq was leaking classified information. He said the information was going to WikiLeaks.org, a website based in Sweden that publishes information about governments and corporations submitted by anonymous individuals.
The soldier, Pfc. Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old intelligence analyst who was stationed near Baghdad, is reportedly being held by the Army in Kuwait while the case is investigated.
Lamo said Manning contacted him online after reading a profile of him on wired.com, which first reported Manning's arrest and Lamo's involvement last Sunday. Manning, he said, bragged about leaking classified military information to WikiLeaks, including the so-called "Collateral Murder" video of a U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed several civilians in 2007. That video appeared on WikiLeaks in April.
Lamo said Manning also claimed to have leaked other materials to the website, including 260,000 U.S. classified diplomatic cables.
"I couldn't just not do anything, knowing lives were in danger," Lamo said. "It's classified information, and when you play Russian roulette, how do you know there's not a bullet in the next chamber?"
"I am not a traitor," he added, "and I wouldn't harbor a traitor."
Government quick to act
Lamo's allegations brought swift action from the government. He said he has met several times with the FBI, National Security Agency officials and Army investigators, huddling with them at a Starbucks, Rick's Dessert Diner and other area locales.
On Monday, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said during a media briefing that investigators are trying to determine what impact the release of the cables could have.
"The investigation is in its preliminary stages, as you would expect, but we take the reports of the deliberate, unauthorized disclosure of classified State Department cables and materials very seriously. And the security of these materials is our highest priority."
Lamo's decision to go to authorities has made him a hero in some corners. On Thursday, a 59-year-old Fair Oaks man and self-described conservative walked up to him in Safeway and shook his hand.
"That's a hero," James Hamann said. "I'd be proud to have you as my son."
The sentiment has not been unanimous.
WikiLeaks has reviled him on Twitter, calling him a "notorious" felon, informer and manipulator.
"Journalists should take care," WikiLeaks warned.
The website also tweeted that allegations Manning has provided it 260,000 classified cables "are, as far as we can tell, incorrect."
Since the story broke, Lamo has been the target of profane online postings and, he says, dozens of death threats. It is an odd position for Lamo, whose exploits have been chronicled over the years online, in print and in films.
He has been a nomad for much of his life, often labeled the "homeless hacker."
Born in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Arlington, Va., Lamo moved to his father's native Colombia when he was 10. The family returned to the United States a few years later, settling for a while in San Francisco, where he attended Lowell High School, a public magnet school regularly rated as one of the nation's finest.
"He has an enormous curiosity to see how things work," said Douglas Keachie, a former computer science teacher at Lowell who gave Lamo his first – and only – formal computer training before kicking him out of class for infesting class systems with impenetrable viruses.
"At the time he got the formal training from me he already knew more than I did," Keachie said. "He's an unsung genius as far as I can tell."
Lamo said he taught himself much of what he knows about computers, starting out on a Commodore 64 his father bought when Lamo was about 7.
After high school, he found himself in the midst of the 1990s dot-com boom in the Bay Area, paying $2,000 a month in apartment rent and providing computer security services for a legal assistance group.
Then, he says, he decided to hit the road.
"Back then, Greyhound didn't ask for ID," he said. "It was the perfect anonymous form of travel."
Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2010/06/13/2818601/famous-hacker-suddenly-finds-himself.html#ixzz0qkK0rE8l
The third was from Army counterintelligence, he said.
In other circumstances, it might be easy to dismiss his claims.
He is an unassuming 29-year-old who lives with his parents on a dead-end street in Carmichael and was recently released from a mental ward, where he was held briefly until doctors discovered his odd behavior stemmed from Asperger's syndrome.
On Thursday, he was dressed in black. A rumpled sport coat covered his bone-thin frame, and a Phillips-head screw pierced his left earlobe – a real screw, not an ear stud made to look like one.
He spoke slowly and methodically, sounding almost drunk, a side effect of medication he takes to treat Asperger's, anxiety and his rapid heartbeat.
But Lamo is the most famous computer hacker in the world at the moment, the subject of national security debates and international controversy – and a target of scorn in the hacker community that once celebrated him.
He first gained notoriety in 2003, when he was charged with hacking into the New York Times computer system, essentially just to prove he could.
"I just wanted to see what their network was like," he said. "It was going to be the Washington Post, but I got distracted by a banner ad."
He has re-emerged in the spotlight following his decision last month to tell federal agents he had reason to believe an Army private in Iraq was leaking classified information. He said the information was going to WikiLeaks.org, a website based in Sweden that publishes information about governments and corporations submitted by anonymous individuals.
The soldier, Pfc. Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old intelligence analyst who was stationed near Baghdad, is reportedly being held by the Army in Kuwait while the case is investigated.
Lamo said Manning contacted him online after reading a profile of him on wired.com, which first reported Manning's arrest and Lamo's involvement last Sunday. Manning, he said, bragged about leaking classified military information to WikiLeaks, including the so-called "Collateral Murder" video of a U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed several civilians in 2007. That video appeared on WikiLeaks in April.
Lamo said Manning also claimed to have leaked other materials to the website, including 260,000 U.S. classified diplomatic cables.
"I couldn't just not do anything, knowing lives were in danger," Lamo said. "It's classified information, and when you play Russian roulette, how do you know there's not a bullet in the next chamber?"
"I am not a traitor," he added, "and I wouldn't harbor a traitor."
Government quick to act
Lamo's allegations brought swift action from the government. He said he has met several times with the FBI, National Security Agency officials and Army investigators, huddling with them at a Starbucks, Rick's Dessert Diner and other area locales.
On Monday, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said during a media briefing that investigators are trying to determine what impact the release of the cables could have.
"The investigation is in its preliminary stages, as you would expect, but we take the reports of the deliberate, unauthorized disclosure of classified State Department cables and materials very seriously. And the security of these materials is our highest priority."
Lamo's decision to go to authorities has made him a hero in some corners. On Thursday, a 59-year-old Fair Oaks man and self-described conservative walked up to him in Safeway and shook his hand.
"That's a hero," James Hamann said. "I'd be proud to have you as my son."
The sentiment has not been unanimous.
WikiLeaks has reviled him on Twitter, calling him a "notorious" felon, informer and manipulator.
"Journalists should take care," WikiLeaks warned.
The website also tweeted that allegations Manning has provided it 260,000 classified cables "are, as far as we can tell, incorrect."
Since the story broke, Lamo has been the target of profane online postings and, he says, dozens of death threats. It is an odd position for Lamo, whose exploits have been chronicled over the years online, in print and in films.
He has been a nomad for much of his life, often labeled the "homeless hacker."
Born in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Arlington, Va., Lamo moved to his father's native Colombia when he was 10. The family returned to the United States a few years later, settling for a while in San Francisco, where he attended Lowell High School, a public magnet school regularly rated as one of the nation's finest.
"He has an enormous curiosity to see how things work," said Douglas Keachie, a former computer science teacher at Lowell who gave Lamo his first – and only – formal computer training before kicking him out of class for infesting class systems with impenetrable viruses.
"At the time he got the formal training from me he already knew more than I did," Keachie said. "He's an unsung genius as far as I can tell."
Lamo said he taught himself much of what he knows about computers, starting out on a Commodore 64 his father bought when Lamo was about 7.
After high school, he found himself in the midst of the 1990s dot-com boom in the Bay Area, paying $2,000 a month in apartment rent and providing computer security services for a legal assistance group.
Then, he says, he decided to hit the road.
"Back then, Greyhound didn't ask for ID," he said. "It was the perfect anonymous form of travel."
Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2010/06/13/2818601/famous-hacker-suddenly-finds-himself.html#ixzz0qkK0rE8l
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1) First and foremost, there needs to be more discussion about the potentially enormous ethics violations that seem to have been committed at Wired Magazine. Everyone knows Kevin Poulsen & Adrian Lamo are friends. It is obvious they worked their target, Bradley Manning, for days -- in co-operation with the FBI and US Army CID. This hearkens back to COINTELPRO tactics. How likely is it that Lamo worked entirely on his own with no involvement from Poulsen, who only found out about it all after-the-fact, in time to "break the story" for Wired? There is no disclosure provided in the original article and it is written as if Poulsen wasn't involved at all. Could it really be that, in pursuit of breaking a big story, Wired magazine staff helped set up a situation where the FBI/USACID got to use proxy interrogators, who misled a suspect into believing that he was only answering questions from someone he could trust, instead of federal/military law enforcement, without any Constitutional protections in place? This needs to be more critically examined.
2) Would Lamo have snitched out Daniel Ellsberg in 1970, hypothetically speaking? Based on the justifications he's publicly offered to date, it seems so. This isn't something to be admired. The US War Machine rolls on exactly because of mass media complicity, the lack of information about US militarism around the world and the witch-hunt persecution of everyone from the Dixie Chicks to Valerie Plame to Cindy Sheehan to the millions of Americans who protested this war BEFORE it began and were subjected to scrutiny, harassment and intimidation by law enforcement (an under-reported story). In the 70s, the persecution of Daniel Ellsberg only caused support for him to increase. Somehow, it seems like the same will not be true for Bradley Manning unless thoughtful & concerned citizens do something about it.
3) We don't know for sure but Lamo claims that PFC Manning finally decided to be a whistleblower when he was ordered to process the arrest of Iraqi civilians who did nothing more than publish an academic paper about corruption in the Iraqi Provisional Government. He leaked the Collateral Murder video which was so shocking to so many because of how little the US public understands about the US war machine. And, he allegedly leaked diplomatic reports that demonstrate a pattern of lies and, we can only imagine what else. Possibly the details of US support for Middle East dictatorships, Israeli occupation and settlement expansion, etc. In other words, business as usual -- just like the US supported dictatorships in Latin America, Southeast Asia, Iran and anywhere that corporate interests demanded market access at gunpoint. Leaking this information is the act of a hero. If only US support of Operation Condor in Latin America had been leaked in 1972 instead of years later.
4) Now, instead of publishing important leaks and building on the momentum from the Collateral Murder release, key Wikileaks volunteer Julian Assange is on the run from the retaliatory actions of the US State Department, who have a menu of options made possible by years of "extraordinary rendition" kidnappings. Would we even KNOW if US operatives have gotten hold of Assange? Are we supposed to be proud of this global gestapo that was put in place by the Bush Administration and continued by the Obama presidency? Is Lamo proud to have made it all possible?
5) I must reiterate what others have said here: the assertion that "innocent lives are risked" by the release of what was leaked so far is a falsehood. And, the only reason to even think that PFC Manning was "risking lives" is the unconfirmed innuendo made public by Adrian Lamo, who has every reason in the world to justify the breach of trust he committed by willfully initiating a clandestine interrogation of PFC Manning. Certainly, the Collateral Murder video doesn't put any lives at risk. The analysis by Ellsberg on this is probably the most accurate: these alleged leaks would greatly embarrass the US Government by forcing the media to report on even further evidence that supports allegations made by opponents of US foreign policy. That doesn't RISK lives -- it does the exact opposite.
Daniel Ellsberg is a hero. PFC Manning came to a realization about US foreign policy; it's well-documented that thousands of enlisted soldiers have had the same realization after being on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. The difference is that PFC Manning was willing & able to actually DO something about it, beyond participating in a Winter Soldier event or going to protests. To that extent, PFC Manning is also a hero.
Wired Magazine, Kevin Poulsen and Adrian Lamo should be viewed with skepticism, as they are potentially the proud participants in one of the most scandalous breaches of journalist ethics in recent history. Adrian Lamo is now engaged in a public campaign to discredit PFC Manning as a "dangerous spy" and Poulsen continues to report on the story for Wired.
This is an extremely important case and I urge all citizens to do what they can to support PFC Manning and any other soldier who disobeys orders/regulations to expose war crimes and/or the truth about US foreign policy.
"I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism [...] Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. [...] I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. [...] Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."
- Major General Smedley Butler, US Marine Corps, 1933