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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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. :(
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.
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?"
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.
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.
> 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).
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...
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.
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".
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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).
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. :(
> 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]
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?"
Dead Comment
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).
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2292707/