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Adrian Lamo has died

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31–40 of 248 posts

Re: Adrian Lamo has died

#31
post #5

I'm conflicted about this news. On one hand, he was one of us, and he shared his knowledge. On the other hand, he was a traitor, and he betrayed the trust of a true hero in order to put more unaccountable government power in the hands of people like Donald Trump. Who would have expected that Adrian Lamo would outlive Chelsea Manning? Did he commit suicide — as she nearly did?

Manning is no hero, let's not go overboard. At best, she made a well-intentioned but horribly reckless mistake.

Re: Adrian Lamo has died

#32
post #11

This guy was seriously mentally troubled, and that's too bad. Chelsea Manning (Bradley/Bradass at the time) confieded in Adrian, Adrian snitched, and the rest is history. He did what he thought was right, but the consequences were absolutely disastrous. Kids, don't be a snitch.

> Kids, don't be a snitch.

I hope you don't give your kids that advice when they see someone at school with a gun in their backpack.

Re: Adrian Lamo has died

#33
post #5

I'm conflicted about this news. On one hand, he was one of us, and he shared his knowledge. On the other hand, he was a traitor, and he betrayed the trust of a true hero in order to put more unaccountable government power in the hands of people like Donald Trump. Who would have expected that Adrian Lamo would outlive Chelsea Manning? Did he commit suicide — as she nearly did?

On a personal note, a year or two before that happened Adrian helped my family recover our AOL/AIM accounts after they were compromised. Someone got control of the master account for all my family's AOL accounts, which we created back in ~1995. Because we hadn't been paying customers for over a decade, AOL was unresponsive to support requests. One of my acquaintances knew Adrian though, and got him in touch with me and my mom. Adrian still knew a bunch of people at AOL, and got them to restore access to our accounts and flagged them for an extra layer of security. I remember thanking him on the phone and him replying, "I strive to provide better service than the people I hack."

It was a fun story to tell until the news came out, at which point I stopped.

Re: Adrian Lamo has died

#34
post #5

I'm conflicted about this news. On one hand, he was one of us, and he shared his knowledge. On the other hand, he was a traitor, and he betrayed the trust of a true hero in order to put more unaccountable government power in the hands of people like Donald Trump. Who would have expected that Adrian Lamo would outlive Chelsea Manning? Did he commit suicide — as she nearly did?

> On the other hand, he was a traitor, and he betrayed the trust of a true hero

I used to agree with this but honestly, the second Manning contacted him, he was complicit with the crime being committed and would have been sent to the same horrible hole Manning was sent to. It was irresponsible of Manning to put Lamo in this situation, as an ex-convict he would have gotten life in prison, probably solitary confinement if not worse. I don't think I can blame Lamo for doing what he did. It was a horrible situation for both of them. When you're about to commit a crime as severe as treason or murder, you don't call a friend or let alone a stranger and tell him "I'm about to commit the most severely punished crime in the country, could you advise me please?" and expect that person to be complicit.

Re: Adrian Lamo has died

#35
post #24
post #11

This guy was seriously mentally troubled, and that's too bad. Chelsea Manning (Bradley/Bradass at the time) confieded in Adrian, Adrian snitched, and the rest is history. He did what he thought was right, but the consequences were absolutely disastrous. Kids, don't be a snitch.

Snitching has a very specific definition here, i think: it's telling on someone to power. You can't snitch on the US government's secret abuses of power because the people deserve to know.

well the US is predicated on the principle that the power of the government is derived from the people, so in principle (and ultimately de facto) the people of the US have more power than the government, and telling on the abuses of power is a means to get the problem rectified (or else why would Manning have done it?)

Re: Adrian Lamo has died

#36
post #13
post #11

This guy was seriously mentally troubled, and that's too bad. Chelsea Manning (Bradley/Bradass at the time) confieded in Adrian, Adrian snitched, and the rest is history. He did what he thought was right, but the consequences were absolutely disastrous. Kids, don't be a snitch.

>Kids, don't be a snitch. Simplistic. Kids, please be a snitch sometimes, like Manning.

But when you're being a snitch, don't snitch out the people that were snitches for you. Manning released the identities of Afghan nationals who helped the counterinsurgency, leading to their deaths at the hands of the Taliban.

Re: Adrian Lamo has died

#37
post #3

Wow. I remember, long before he became famous (I think he went by ill at the time), discovering his Inside-AOL site that delved into the workings of AOL. It was really fascinating to me to find out how so much of it worked (that was the first place I heard of Rainman). I've always loved reading about how complex systems work, and that site was like crack to me. I know that most people here will probably remember him…

He was Magus on aol https://mattmazur.com/2010/06/26/adrian-lamo-aol-files-profi...

Re: Adrian Lamo has died

#38
post #11

This guy was seriously mentally troubled, and that's too bad. Chelsea Manning (Bradley/Bradass at the time) confieded in Adrian, Adrian snitched, and the rest is history. He did what he thought was right, but the consequences were absolutely disastrous. Kids, don't be a snitch.

> Kids, don't be a snitch.

No good group of people has that rule. I've seen/heard about that rule so far from the mafia, drug dealers, and bad cops.

Re: Adrian Lamo has died

#39

So, I'm gonna lay it out here as I am having a bad day and don't feel like censoring myself. I'd known Adrian since 1998. He came to 2600 meetings in SF and was a fixture there. In that time, he generally didn't make any friends. While he was gay, he was also stalking a lady at the meetings, and being super creepy about it. Eventually, he left SF and was homeless. He got in trouble for hacking the NYT and making hims…

Thanks for opening up. How much weight do you put in the theories (stated in other comments) that Adrian thought he was under FBI surveillance, and reported Manning's leaks out of fear?

Re: Adrian Lamo has died

#40

So, I'm gonna lay it out here as I am having a bad day and don't feel like censoring myself. I'd known Adrian since 1998. He came to 2600 meetings in SF and was a fixture there. In that time, he generally didn't make any friends. While he was gay, he was also stalking a lady at the meetings, and being super creepy about it. Eventually, he left SF and was homeless. He got in trouble for hacking the NYT and making hims…

I only had a couple run-ins with him online, but this doesn't surprise me at all. I've been an administrator on the English Wikipedia for over a decade now, and used to have a bit of a high profile on there. He would privately contact me occasionally trying to get me to make questionable edits to Wikipedia on his behalf. He came off as smarmy, manipulative, and his messages would occasionally veer into oddly sexual, inappropriate territory. I was sort of in awe of his "hacker" status at the time, which was why I put up with it for as long as I did, though I did eventually stop responding to him. This was well before the Manning stuff.
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