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

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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  • (Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Saturday September 21 2019, @08:08AM (2 children)

    by jmichaelhudsondotnet (8122) on Saturday September 21 2019, @08:08AM (#896756) Journal

    Classic, he knows too much and pissed off the wrong people.

    Israel would do it just because he's an intelligent programmer who might unravel their backdoors ten years from now.

    Get it through your head, all intelligence that cannot be co-opted to build the prison intercom system is a threat to the prison intercom system.

    I draw it out for you on a whiteboard even:

    https://jmichaelhudson.net/4-important-drawings/ [jmichaelhudson.net]

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  • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Saturday September 21 2019, @02:36PM (1 child)

    by JNCF (4317) on Saturday September 21 2019, @02:36PM (#896809) Journal

    Okay, let's continue this conversation with the following assumptions (which I think you'll agree with): people with intelligence and focus above certain levels who are working towards certain ends that the government disagrees with will probably be targeted by the government. Let's further assume that Lamo met the intelligence and focus requirements.

    Why did the government target Lamo now? I get that he has a history of attacking society's infrastructure, but so do some other not-dead hackers. His recentish betrayal of Chelsea Manning, however, would seem to be in line with the government's interests. If I were them, I would see him as more of an asset to have mulling around hacker forums than a liability. Is this hit supposed to have been a delayed response to his earlier work? If Amir Taaki died under similar circumstances I would be leaning toward your interpretation of reality, but Lamo was a snitch who fed the feds useful information. Why him and not Taaki? Do you have a specific reason you think he was targeted, the way we have quotes from Hastings before his death about the new project he was working on attracting FBI attention? We can't just assume every intelligent hacker who ODs got murdered by the government, that's not a high enough barrier of evidence; intelligent people OD all the time.

    • (Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Sunday September 22 2019, @08:30AM

      by jmichaelhudsondotnet (8122) on Sunday September 22 2019, @08:30AM (#897049) Journal

      At the end of the day it's going to boil down how much you trust your government.

      After las vegas, seth rich, hastings, and a bunch of other mysterious deaths for instance the ferguson protestors, why not throw in Paul Wellstone, yeah at this point the United States has just as much of a problem of disappearances and deaths as russia. Boston and San Bernadino are also highly suspect after investigation.

      I see it as more 'tying up loose ends.' For people on the inside of the system of surveillance and state control, you are either controllable directly like a robot, or you are not. They don't want you writing a book later and exposing their operational tactics and capacities, or worse.

      Think about how bad it is though, I don't trust local kansas news to report it one bit. I also think the government, whatever it is, has the ability to probably also disappear him completly.

      The autopsy found a sticker with his name on it under his clothes, what if they cloned a dead body to leave and now lamo is in a secure facility somewhere where he will never be seen again. I can't explain that sticker with any normal thing that might happen. It's f&cking odd. I'm surprised anyone even reported it.

      Did you watch the imitation game? Turing allegedly saved the world but 10 years later all of the spooks who were kissing his ass during the war weren't there when he was being driven to suicide over dumb puritanical laws. Did they really want or need an academic researcher operating independently outside of their control? Nope. They take the work of your intelligence and leave you to die, hand your work to people who could never in a million years have done it, and they use it to tyrannize everyone, consolidate their power.

      That's what they did to the inventor of the computer, I would not think you should expect much more. This is why most of what I write is of the sort of thing the mucky mucks will have to work hard to erase, I can no longer feed a system that is just a murder machine. It represents a complete forgetting of american history.

      Like I have been saying, the magna carta and bill of rights is not in effect on our planet so anyone can be killed, disappeared at any time and the historical record after the fact can be altered or erased, this is the power the government now has due to basically the republican party selling out the american people.

      The us miiltary, who is reading this without any doubt, I think needs to reexamine why they got into soldiering in the first place and decide if they want to be an american, or if they want to be vassals of some cabals in haifa. To me it looks like an army of wolves being led by sheep and traitors, which allows essentially foreign mafias to operate freely in the country wiping their ass with the american flag.

      When the rule of law is gone, you can't trust anything. When the official story is an obvious lie, all we are left with is our imagination. But if that doesn't inform our level of trust to change to adjust to new conditions, that is what it means to be a cow, livestock.

      And I am not a cow. I don't have to have the exact answer to what happens behind the curtain, but I am not getting on the conveyor belt because I at least know it's dumb to trust the guy with his hand on the lever. Other people arguing til the end of time over what specifically is behind the curtain, continue their argument on the conveyor belt and are distracted from the fundamental issue, giving someone else complete power over themselves as they approach the rotating knives.

      Sadly, the operator has his eye out for the stock who refuse to drink the koolaid and then moves them to the front of the line.