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The Mysterious Death Of The Hacker Who Turned In Chelsea Manning

posted by Fnord666 on Friday September 20 2019, @12:31PM   
from the RIP dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/19/760317486/the-mysterious-death-of-the-hacker-who-turned-in-chelsea-manning

Morrow witnessed the exact moment when the hacker community turned on Lamo. It happened, in a stark way, at a Hackers On Planet Earth conference in New York. Hacker meetups were usually a great opportunity to party, meet new people and start new projects, but from the outset it was clear that post-Manning, this HOPE meeting would be different.

"The first day at the conference there were a lot of people yelling out 'snitch' and at least one occasion that I recall somebody spitting in his direction," Morrow recalls. "It was a rather divisive time back then. Something like this had never happened to the community. Up until that point, Adrian had been an inspiration, but that all turned. In their minds, or in the culture, the worst thing you could be was a snitch and I think that probably confused a lot of people. There was a bit of a mob mentality, people were just so taken aback that this happened."

[...] After the conference, there was no ambiguity about how the hacker community felt about Lamo.

"People hated him," said another of his friends, Andrew Blake. "He couldn't log on to any sort of interest platform under his actual name without instantly getting some sort of hate directed toward him. Even when Adrian would do something with the absolute best of intentions, as soon as anyone realized that it was Adrian Lamo who did it, they didn't want anything to do with it."

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Original Submission

• Re:How did he die? (Score: 3, Informative) by tangomargarine on Friday September 20 2019, @03:07PM

  by tangomargarine (667) on Friday September 20 2019, @03:07PM (#896521)

  Fucking long-ass article, near the bottom:

  On March 14, 2018, the manager of Shadybrook Senior Apartments found Lamo's body. He was lying on a pile of clothes in the bedroom and when she saw the blood pooling under his fingernails, she pulled a medical alert cord in the apartment. The first responders found an apartment in complete disarray — huge piles of trash, dirty dishes, pills and powders everywhere. The medical examiner took photographs and then loaded Lamo's body into a van.

  Debbie Scroggin called Lamo's father and then went out to the apartment to tidy it up a bit before he arrived. "One of the things I did that I probably shouldn't have done is I threw away all his empty prescription bottles," she said.

  ...

  Dr. Timothy Rohrig is Sedgwick County's chief medical examiner, and when he began to read through the chemicals found in Lamo's bloodstream, he saw it was a long list of prescription and over-the-counter drugs: clonazepam, etizolam, flubromazepam, Benadryl, chlorpheniramine, citalopram, gabapentin, some decongestants and anti-diarrheals. It wasn't enough to kill Lamo, Rohrig said, but he was likely in a fairly sedated state.

  ...

  And while Madras couldn't say exactly what killed Lamo, she did allow that people who mixed "natural" substances like kratom with prescription drugs were essentially conducting their own human experiments. "They have no clue what they're putting into their body and what the consequences could be."

  --
  "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"

  Parent

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