Adrian Lamo has died

http://www.zdnet.com/article/adrian-lamo-hacker-dies/

by ad_hominem • 8 years ago

228 79 8 years ago

amyjess• 8 years ago

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 mostly for what happened between him and Chelsea Manning (and, quite frankly, I automatically like anyone who makes an enemy of Julian Assange), but I want to remember him for his early work more than anything.

andrewmcwatters• 8 years ago

That takes me back, I haven't heard anyone mention Rainman in over a decade...

loggedinmyphone2• 8 years ago

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

patorjk2• 8 years ago

That page isn't loading for me, but he was not the Magus behind the famous Fate X AOL prog. I actually talked to that Magus and several of his friends a few years ago [1]. I'd heard Lamo claimed to be Magus, and maybe he went by that handle in some cases, but he was not the author of Fate X.

[1] http://patorjk.com/blog/2012/05/03/cracking-magus-fate-zero-...

bob_theslob646• 8 years ago

For those who do not recognize his name as I did not:

Lamo first gained media attention for breaking into several high-profile computer networks, including those of The New York Times, Yahoo!, and Microsoft, culminating in his 2003 arrest.[7]
In 2010, Lamo indirectly reported U.S. soldier Chelsea Manning to the Army's Criminal Investigation Command,[8] claiming that Manning had leaked hundreds of thousands of sensitive U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Lamo]

incompatible• 8 years ago

I first heard of him from the initial version of his Wikipedia entry, and I wondered if he had written it himself (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Adrian_Lamo&oldid...)

Wikipedia was different in those days. A few hours after it was posted, Larry Sanger himself added a comment to the end saying "Um, can we clean up the above puff job, please?"

aliasnexus0• 8 years ago

Definitely check out the documentary Hackers Wanted [1], which follows Adrian. I found it interesting how he was able to break into some of the "high-profile computer networks".

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2292707/

VonGuard3• 8 years ago

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 himself some Lexis Nexis accounts. He then reported Chelsea Manning to the authorities when she reached out to him, connected because of their shared LGBTQ background.

Lamo screwed Manning big time, but when he did, none of us who knew him were surprised. He was never a happy person, and never friendly to anyone I knew. I think his folks threw him out of the house in his teens.

Kind of a tragic figure, but also not really someone you could ever trust or even invite to parties. When anyone dies, it's sad. But with Adrian, he had already basically removed himself from the groups who knew him long ago. He was just seemingly not comfortable being in society and making friends.

lainga• 8 years ago

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?

VonGuard3• 8 years ago

Honestly, I can't comment on that. I know Adrian was a SERIOUSLY good social engineer, and a fair to middling hacker. The chat logs show Adrian going very in depth with Chelsea, so if he thought the FBI was watching, he was purposefully giving them a good show.

CydeWeys3• 8 years ago

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.

chris_wot• 8 years ago

This is interesting, CydeWeys is a well known, respected and long time administrator of Wikipedia.

jsmthrowaway2• 8 years ago

Come on, man. His body's not even cold and it was well-known that he was experiencing mental health issues, potentially his entire life, including discovering he suffered from Asperger's after an involuntary hold (that he described himself). Your venting isn't actually far from that diagnosis making sense. Is this really the time and place for this?

VonGuard3• 8 years ago

Actually, I feel my comment is about as even handed as I could muster. Aspergers or not, he hurt a lot of people.

_wmd3• 8 years ago

I appreciate that you're being candid, but it's clear you also know that posting what you posted in this context is somehow wrong - otherwise why else justify it (childishly) on having a bad day?

Now my complaint: you could have posted this tomorrow and I wouldn't have so much trouble with it, but hijacking the announcement of someone's death to air privileged /and/ gossipy bits of their private life, their sexuality, their homelife, /and/ include allegations of sexual harassment all in one swoop strikes me as utterly distasteful, and the kind of personality I would not wish present at any party I ever attend.

CydeWeys3• 8 years ago

The comments here are honest, at least. Complicated people yield complicated discussions when they die.

rimunroe2• 8 years ago

Lamo screwed Manning big time, but when he did, none of us who knew him were surprised. He was never a happy person, and never friendly to anyone I knew. I think his folks threw him out of the house in his teens.
Kind of a tragic figure, but also not really someone you could ever trust or even invite to parties. When anyone dies, it's sad. But with Adrian, he had already basically removed himself from the groups who knew him long ago.

This is awfully similar to the impression of Aaron Swartz I've heard from those who knew him. All of them seem uncomfortable with the praise that was heaped on him after he died, though that's not to say that what happened to him wasn't awful. People are just very flawed, and it's hard to look at or acknowledge those flaws sometimes.

r00fus• 8 years ago

I seriously wonder how anyone can equate Adrian with Aaron. Aaron contributed to RSS, Creative Commons, and Markdown.

Aaron's story is by far the more tragic to me.

ryan-c• 8 years ago

Adrian identified as bisexual, not gay.

https://www.quora.com/If-youre-bisexual-and-coming-out-could...

tptacek2• 8 years ago

You met Adrian Lamo at 2600 meetings and wouldn't invite him to parties. Other people in the community were close friends with him and allowed him to stay in their homes for weeks or months. I don't know him really at all, but I think this is a poor way to sum anyone up.

ytoi• 8 years ago

I don't know the person in question. He might have been a great person overall, to the people around him or maybe he wasn't very pleasant, but that was it. I don't know. Certainly people tend to have widely different impressions other people.

What I do know, and what the world should have thought us in the last couple of years, is that when this isn't the case it is often hiding in plain sight under layers of denial. And that the only way to uncover those things is to be able to speak about people and their actions. So while I do believe in being respectful I am not sure that we have earned the luxury to be uncomfortable when someone has a negative opinion about someone else.

patorjk2• 8 years ago

If you don't mind, I have a question about Adrian that I've wondered about for a while. I first came across his name when I was researching the author of an old AOL hacking program known as Fate X. It was pretty popular on AOL at the time and was written by "Magus". In interviews around 2010, Adrian claimed he went by the handle Magus on AOL, and many people I talked to pointed to him when I was trying to track down the author. However, I later discovered the app was written by someone else. Did Adrian claim to have written Fate X? And did he ever go into detail about his AOL days? It may just be a coincidence that he used the same handle, but I always found this to be a little strange.

VectorLock6• 8 years ago

I can't find any reference to him saying he created Fate X. The Magus handle is most likely purely coincidental.

throwaway2312• 8 years ago

Is 2600Meetings still active ? I wanted to attend one of the meetings.

ooajim• 8 years ago

Yup. You can check the website.

https://www.2600.com/meetings/

azinman22• 8 years ago

I also know Adrian from 2600 meetings, starting in about 1992. I have invited him into my home and had him stay a while on various occasions.

He’d always been comfortable in our friendship.

I find your summary distasteful and not accurate. You should have enough respect for life to not take the opportunity to trash someone on their death announcement.

alafazam• 8 years ago

I have read almost all his answers on quora. And from all that, one thing is there which i know for sure, that he was a good man. Rip.

phusion• 8 years ago

here's a documentary featuring Adrian prominently. This is the best you'll see Adrian, because some time after this film he went on (or off?) his meds, betrayed Chelsea Manning and various other things shitty humans do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYN6JuQGGX0

Hackers Wanted.

fjsolwmv• 8 years ago

Taking medicine and not taking medicine are both things shitty humans do, as is refusing to join a criminal conspiracy?

eganist3• 8 years ago

There's merit to discussing whether his actions were beneficial or not. But for the love of god, if you've got a problem with him as a person, pocket it unless you know discussion of the specific problem you had with him will with certainty serve the public good. You've got every right to say what you want, but think it through.

I didn't know him, but I've known plenty of others with questionable reputations who've died as a result of mental duress. Before you comment, I'll ask as a bystander for you to think about whether everyone benefits from knowing what you wish to share. Otherwise, you'll just out yourself as an asshole.

Rest in peace, Adrian. Regardless of what you did, beneficial or otherwise, no one deserves the mind-shackles you had to live with.

VectorLock6• 8 years ago

Inexplicably this post just disappeared off the very top of HN... Edit: appearing now as flagged.

dang5• 8 years ago

Users explicably flagged it.

VectorLock6• 8 years ago

Wasn't showing up as flagged when it disappeared.

It is now, though.

tptacek2• 8 years ago

Reminder: Lamo is a public figure but also a real person with real relationships with people who will read this thread. You are all commenting on a Facebook thread written by Lamo's dad about the death of his son.

_wmd3• 8 years ago

Thoroughly agreed. Would love to see the mods taking a much more active role in this thread

dang5• 8 years ago

Users have flagged the submission and some of the less humane comments in the thread. That's probably the right outcome, given that there's no way to stop the discussion from being about the events of 8 years ago, but probably no good discussion about them to be had in this context.

Myrmornis• 8 years ago

You are all commenting on a Facebook thread written by Lamo's dad about the death of his son.

I think I understand why you wrote that, but I don't agree. Posts here should be thoughtful and respectful, certainly. But it is not Facebook. I am not an expert about this person who has died, but it appears his story has a public interest dimension. HN is an appropriate place for such discussion. Furthermore, I think you need to remember that this is a global community, containing many people far away from events in the USA. In the event of any death, the vast majority of HN readers are not members of the in-crowd who had some personal connection to that person. This site has a large global readership; it isn't and cannot be a "community" in the local sense that you and dang seem to be portraying it as. (Also, friendly reminder, dang is the moderator but AFAIK you aren't).

point78• 8 years ago

And? It's not about anything you wrote, just have a shred of decency on a comment to a father who lost his son. That's above anything you know obviously.

chipotle_coyote• 8 years ago

I think the context for dang's comment is that the HN link originally went to a Facebook thread. I hope nobody from HN showed up on that thread to trash Lamo in comments that were effectively directed right to his grieving father, but...

whichwalrus2• 8 years ago

Sorry, this story isn't very interesting, but it really stuck with me nonetheless, and I wanted to share.

Adrian had a passing romance with a friend of mine, and thus ended up traveling through the city I grew up in. This was long before Chelsea Manning, etc.

I was a super shy, rather awkward teenage girl. I suppose the teenage part has changed.. but I digress. I loved the idea of mischief, but at the same time, I was a habitual rule-follower. I get nervous walking through the retail store detectors placed at entrances.. even though I've never stolen anything in my life. I remember listening to social engineering phone pranks -- the sort where people would talk their way into being put on the store-wide intercom at Walmart. At the time, I think I really wanted to be so confident that I could do such a thing, versus the reality, which was mild anxiety over something so simple as placing a legit pizza order over the phone.

I knew who Adrian was in a peripheral sense. I was a community leader and eventual employee on AOL in years prior, and I had an interest in how to break things as an inverse of being curious how they're built.

I had a car, while my friend did not, and Adrian had traveled via transit, so I spent the day with them hopping around town. At one point, we were downtown grabbing food in one of the larger complexes -- Adrian breaks off for a second and asks a retail store employee a bunch of questions about working there, saying he was just hired at the cafe. We then ended up going into what was clearly an employee-only area -- GUYS WE AREN'T SUPPOSED TO BE HERE WHAT IF WE GET IN TROUBLE OH GOD -- we duck into a fire escape, hike up to the upper level where he picks the lock to the door with roof access, and there we are, highest point in the city. After a few minutes of me suggesting that MAYBE we go back down since this was cool BUT REALLY WE SHOULD GO, Adrian told me I'd miss the sunset if I kept worrying.

It was dumb. I'm sure I could've been arrested. But watching the sunset with the two of them from the top of that building remains one of my favorite memories. It was the first time I'd taken a step out of my shell, I suppose. Adrian was a troubled guy, and I don't forgive what he did to Manning, but I appreciated him for that moment in time.

VectorLock6• 8 years ago

This is a good description of the kind of hacker Adrian was. He wasn't a write finely crafted shell code to exploit a buffer overflow in an application or deep knowledge of the esoterica of how CPUs function Spectre Meltdown kind of hacker. He'd just try the knob on a door he wasn't supposed to go through and surprise it was open.

ZephyrP• 8 years ago

well, to be fair, he didn't plenty of that too.

rjbwork• 8 years ago

This is a fantastic story. Thank you for sharing.

squarefoot• 8 years ago

Good hackers can expose the inconvenient difference between what is illegal from what is wrong without doing harm to anyone or anything. So thanks for sharing such a beautiful story, it perfectly explains the hacker mindset where mainstream media articles would fail miserably.

jancsika• 8 years ago

In honor of hackerdom I'll be a bit of a pest and say that stoners already have that lesson covered. :)

I think hackers reveal the unexamined difference between how people use something and what it does. E.g., people used copyright to give exclusivity to a particular publisher. But copyright itself doesn't "do" exclusivity. It instead gives the author the power to license the work as they see fit. So even if the license is a legal restatement of the golden rule, it is still backed by the full force of U.S. copyright law.

coldtea• 8 years ago

Nice story, the kind that makes HN worth it

dmix2• 8 years ago

I sadly can't believe anything I read on the internet and I view this with suspicion for some reason...

free2beme66• 8 years ago

I know that there has been controversy dealing with Adrian Lamo for a long, long time, however; my sister was married to him for a short time and I know he had many mental health issues and demons that he's been dealing with his entire life. I know she loved him very much at one point and time and she is sad today because she knows how hard his life was dealing with his issues. I feel terrible for his parents, family, and friends. This is not the time to talk badly about him.

havetocharge• 8 years ago

Well said. Many don't have any class or manners. De mortuis nil nisi bonum.

watersb• 8 years ago

Thanks for this insight, and blessings to your sister.

dang5• 8 years ago

At a user's suggestion, we changed the URL from https://www.facebook.com/groups/majordomo/permalink/10156204... to avoid the painful contrast between an internet forum controversy and a father's grief over the death of his son.

I've turned off flags on this story because if we don't, the story will be reposted until we do. In return, here's a request: if you comment here, try to bring your heart with you a bit more than you usually would.

If we don't do that, a sort of tragedy of the commons kicks in where we each add a piece that's defensible in itself, but the picture of us that the pieces add up to is ugly.

Kip9000• 8 years ago

lama of winamp?

engi_nerd• 8 years ago

I hope that he found peace, somehow.

jasmemphis• 8 years ago

Rest In Peace: you lived your life the way you believed it mattered ~ and you had to wade through difficulties with an illnesses. I admire your ability and your talent . Rest easy .

azinman22• 8 years ago

This is somewhat a shock to me, and I’m curious to know what happened.

Adrian and I became friends when we were both about 12. We met at 2600 meetings in the embarcadero in SF. We soon were buddies, going “trashing” downtown finding all kinds of crazy things corporate SF left out for trash: working DAT backup drives, 17” view sonics (prized at the time), blueprints for a bank (!), entire trash bags full of credit card receipts with nothing redacted, etc.

He was always a mysterious one, and beat to his own drum. I admired his spirit, and our paths crossed many times including when we both volunteered at the same queer youth center in SF.

Years later he stayed with me in grad school in Cambridge looking not the healthiest. I tried to provide food and shelter, not able to figure out why a guy so talented refused to do anything conventional that would make him good money. But he didn’t care about such things.

He had his own sense of right and wrong, and was principaled within his own philosophy — but I never fully understood what philosophy that was. When I recently was chatting with him, I asked why did was doing something currently to which he said “why do I ever do anything?”

I’ll deeply miss Adrian.. he was a kind and unique spirit. Some may disagree with me on that only because they only know him through Manning, but that was a small sliver of his life (and one I happen to agree with him on, with additional perspectives I can’t share publicly).

kevinelliott• 8 years ago

I too use to go to the 2600 meets at the Embarcadero in SF and go trashing.

VectorLock6• 8 years ago

Thanks for sharing your connection with Adrian. It was nice hearing some positive memories about him. I know he did what he did with Manning with much consternation but out of a moral necessity. It really did weigh on him.

I met Adrian in about 98 in SF and shared many of the same kinds of adventures with him. He shared a lot of his physical and electronic intrusions with me and he never did any harm or anything malicious. It was all simple exploration in the best hacker ethos. He'd usually inform the 'victim' taking nothing for his services except a Coke while he told them his story.

I'm also curious what happened, morbidly. I haven't heard from him at all in a few years. An unfortunate addition to the list of young, talented but troubled hackers I've known who've left us too soon. :(

Grue3• 8 years ago

Sad. He did the right thing reporting Manning and I'd do the same thing if I was him.

vagif• 8 years ago

You would tell nazi patrol which cellar jews are hiding in? You are a good patriotic boy!

dfsegoat• 8 years ago

Adrian and I met back in '97. He always struck me as ahead of his time, and was someone who opened my eyes to what "information security" actually was: The man's natural ability to find his way into places he shouldn't be - physical or electronic, was simply uncanny and I have never before spoken with or known of anyone like him.

dmix2• 8 years ago

The directors cut of his documentary voiced by Kevin Spacey, and featuring Woz and Kevin Rose is available on public Bittorrent sites:

https://thepiratebay.org/search/Hackers%20Wanted

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hackers_Wanted

Adrian Lamo has died

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