Adrian Lamo: From the New York Times Hack to Manning's Chats

In February 2002, a 20-year-old with a battered Toshiba laptop missing six keys and no fixed address found his way into the internal network of The New York Times and added himself to the paper's database of op-ed contributors. Under expertise, he typed "computer hacking, national security, communications intelligence."

Adrian Lamo, the Homeless Hacker, crossed the country by Greyhound, slept in abandoned buildings and did his exploring from Kinko's copy shops. He broke into WorldCom, Microsoft, Yahoo and Excite@Home, then called a reporter and offered the victims free advice on fixing the holes.

Eight years later, an Army private in Iraq read a story about him and started typing. What Lamo did with that conversation made him the most reviled man in hacking, and he never got out from under it.

Adrian Lamo at a Glance

• Born in Malden, Massachusetts, on February 20, 1981, to a Colombian father, Lamo learned computers on a hand-me-down Commodore 64 and was expelled from his San Francisco high school after run-ins with his computer teacher.
• With nothing more than a web browser, he hunted for badly secured proxy servers and walked into WorldCom, Yahoo, Microsoft and Excite@Home, publicizing each hack and often helping close the hole.
• In February 2002 he got into The New York Times, added himself to the op-ed contributor list and ran more than 3,000 searches on the paper's LexisNexis account.
• After five days as a fugitive he surrendered in Sacramento in September 2003, pleaded guilty in January 2004 and in July got six months of home detention, two years' probation and $65,000 in restitution.
• An April 2010 psychiatric hold ended with a diagnosis of Asperger's at 29. Weeks later, Private Bradley Manning, now Chelsea, read about it and contacted him.
• Manning confessed to leaking classified video and 260,000 diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. Lamo reported her, and Wired broke the story of her arrest on June 6, 2010.
• Hackers called him a snitch, Julian Assange called him a "serial F.B.I. snitch," and he testified against Manning at a military hearing in December 2011.
• Lamo was found dead in a Wichita, Kansas, apartment on March 14, 2018, aged 37. The autopsy couldn't determine a cause.

The Life of Adrian Lamo

Lamo's Early Years

Adrián Alfonso Lamo Atwood was born in Malden, Massachusetts, on February 20, 1981. His father, Mario, was Colombian, and the family eventually settled in Northern California.

A hand-me-down Commodore 64 got him started, and he learned about software by digging into the code of the games he played. He attended high school in San Francisco until altercations with his computer teacher got him expelled; he earned a high school equivalency instead, and later became friends with the teacher.

He got his first laptop in high school, and with it a method that never changed: no C++, no Java, just a browser and a great deal of patience.

The Homeless Hacker

By his early twenties Lamo was relentlessly nomadic. He crossed the country by bus half a dozen times, slept on friends' couches or in empty buildings, and carried a blanket, a change of clothes and a stun gun he used to pick electronic locks. He once spent two weeks at a Pennsylvania Bible school on a whim.

His technique, as Wired described it in 2004, was to trawl a company's site for outsourced functions like payroll, then test the proxy servers connecting those contractors to the corporate network. Many still had default passwords.

In 2001, at 20, he slipped into an unprotected content tool at Yahoo's news site and inserted a made-up quote from Attorney General John Ashcroft into a Reuters story. Later that year he found WorldCom's intranet, including Social Security numbers and bank details for some 86,000 employees. WorldCom thanked him and spent a weekend being briefed.

He called it being a gray hat. Hack in, take nothing, tell the press, offer to help. One fellow hacker called his gift "the ability to condense fact from the vapor of nuance."

The Gray Lady

The New York Times was different. Rebuffed by the news servers, Lamo worked the corporate network until he hit the database of op-ed writers, a who's who with home phone numbers, addresses and notes on temperament, and added himself with his real name and cell number.

He also created passwords for the paper's LexisNexis account and spent months digging through it, mostly for information about other hackers and journalists who'd criticized him, plus one attempt to list every license plate on an undercover FBI vehicle. At the full retail rate, his 3,000-plus searches came to $300,000.

He gave the scoop to Kevin Poulsen at SecurityFocus, as usual. The Times called the US Attorney, and a 15-month investigation followed.

Six Months at Home

In September 2003, with a federal warrant out for him, Lamo spent five days as a fugitive before surrendering in Sacramento, a documentary crew in tow. "I'm sure it would be educational," he said of prison. "The beautiful thing about the universe is that nothing goes to waste."

James Comey, then the US Attorney in Manhattan, compared him to a burglar who kicks in your door, runs up a $300,000 phone bill and then tells you your deadbolt was weak. Lamo pleaded guilty to one felony count in January 2004, telling the judge, "I know that I crossed a line that should not be crossed and I'm genuinely remorseful."

On July 15, 2004, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald sentenced him to six months of home detention at his parents' house, two years of probation and $65,000 in restitution. Even probation produced a fight: he refused to give the government a blood sample for its DNA database, citing the Book of Genesis, and in 2007 the Justice Department settled for a cheek swab.

The Private in Iraq

In April 2010, police in a Safeway parking lot near Sacramento put Lamo on a 72-hour psychiatric hold that stretched to nine days. He left the hospital on May 7 with a diagnosis of Asperger's disorder, and Poulsen, by then at Wired, wrote it up on May 20.

Within days, an Army intelligence analyst at a base east of Baghdad reached out over instant messenger and email. Over about a week of chats, Private Bradley Manning, 22, told Lamo she'd leaked the "Collateral Murder" helicopter video, 260,000 diplomatic cables and more to WikiLeaks.

Lamo took the logs to the Army and the FBI. Manning was arrested in late May, and on June 6, 2010, Poulsen and Kim Zetter broke the story in Wired. "I thought to myself, 'What if somebody dies because this information is leaked?'" Lamo said that year.

Snitch

The reaction was savage: WikiLeaks denounced him, Assange called him a "serial F.B.I. snitch," and the hacking community that'd once treated him as a folk hero turned on him. Glenn Greenwald accused Wired of hiding the full chat logs, and the magazine published them in July 2011.

Lamo testified at Manning's military hearing in Fort Meade in December 2011. Manning was sentenced to 35 years in 2013, the longest punishment ever imposed for a leak, and President Obama commuted the sentence in January 2017.

Meanwhile, Hackers Wanted, the Kevin Spacey-narrated documentary about Lamo's 2003 exploits that'd been locked in a studio vault, leaked onto the Pirate Bay in May 2010. "The truth tends to itself," Lamo said.

Wichita

Lamo spent his last years in Kansas, still working, his father said, as a security consultant. On Wednesday, March 14, 2018, he was found dead in a Wichita apartment, aged 37. His father announced the news on Facebook two days later, and The New York Times, the paper he'd famously hacked, ran his obituary.

The Sedgwick County coroner's report in June listed the cause and manner of death as undetermined: "Despite a complete autopsy and supplemental testing, no definitive cause of death was identified." It noted a history of anxiety, depression, Asperger's, drug and alcohol abuse, and a seizure disorder that couldn't be ruled out.

"He was never a malicious hacker," Mario Lamo said. "Everything that he did was out of curiosity."

Adrian Lamo: No Fixed Address

Lamo belonged to a brief, odd era when a kid with a browser could wander into a Fortune 500 network, tell the world, and expect a thank-you note. The Times reminded everyone that the thank-you was optional, and the felony wasn't.

Then he made the hardest call of his life, and whatever you think of it, he made it knowing exactly what it'd cost him. He spent his last eight years paying.

He never had a home. He has a place in the story of the internet, and it isn't a comfortable one.