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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."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Friday September 20 2019, @03:38PM (1 child)
There's a difference between infiltrating and being a member.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 20 2019, @05:00PM
Oh, yeah, definitely.... where I used to live, the biggest local biker gang was mostly cops - still is today, mostly because they liked being bikers and cracking skulls every so often, but... when you saw them at a big public event like a concert or whatever, you could be reasonably assured that they wouldn't start any biker gang like BS - they might jump in and finish biker gang BS in progress, or just get drunk and beat up each other, but for the most part it was a good thing when they were around.
As for the Klan, in the 1920s the Mayor and Police Chief were at the head of it, and they declined to investigate when a mouthy catholic priest - talking about how the darkies deserved equal treatment - got himself beat within an inch of his life and castrated... just not in the "public interest" to investigate that particular event.
However, I _think_ that today's Klan meetings in that area, yes - they still happen, are also joined by FBI and other agencies posing as serious members. For the most part their activities are lightweight in recent years, for instance: they painted red hate graffitti on Asians' houses one night. I suspect the agencies let stuff like that ride just gain trust and watch to see if they've got any actual murderers in the group.
Or, you know, the Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn't bother with keeping tabs on domestic terror groups anymore - that might also have become the case starting a few years back - money better spent on other projects like a wall and such.
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