Top 200 Photos: #163

By EricMesa

March 17, 2011 - 2 minutes read - 214 words

To a hacker conference in NYC for today’s Top 200 Photos.

photo #163 is:

Adrian Lamo is an ex-cracker (criminal hacker). He gained notoriety in 2010 for outing soldier Manning as the guy who’d leaked a bunch of info to Wikipedia. The funny thing is that, even though Manning mentioned leaking the State Department cables, it was just noted as a footnote at the time. Everyone was focused on the Afghanistan and Iraq leaks. Little did they know what a huge leak the cables would be towards the end of 2010. Apparently he saw Lamo as a fellow hacker and confessed the entire thing to him.

Lamo then went to the FBI with this info. Whether you think this is a good thing depends on how much of a libertarian hacker you are. Also, because of the late 80s and early 90s and the hacker scare, there’s a lot of animosity between the FBI/law enforcement and the older hacker community. Pretty much everyone at HOPE 2010 mentioned him in a derogatory way in their presentations. Some of them got immature about it, calling him gay and other stupid stuff. Others were more mature in their criticism. I attended a different talk when he was defending his actions, so I don’t know how that went.