The Mysterious Death Of The Hacker Who Turned In Chelsea Manning
Debbie Scroggin and her husband live at the end of a series of gravel roads in a lonesome part of Kansas. It is the kind of place where, Debbie says, "you have to drive 15 minutes to get anywhere." Getting to the Scroggin house involves turning onto a desolate ribbon of gravel that cuts through fields as far as the eye can see. It was easy to think that someone might come here to either get lost or be forgotten. Scroggin remembers Adrian Lamo arriving on a night train with nothing but a broken suitcase and a hangdog expression.
"He was shorter than I thought he would be," she told me as we sat in her living room. "I saw pictures of him when he was young." He was slight, dimpled and smiling, back then. The Adrian Lamo who stepped off the train was thick, stooped and "had on gloves and a hat and this long black trench coat, full of things."
The sheer bulk of the coat demanded attention. Its contents rattled and clicked when Lamo walked, and the look of it was dramatic enough to compel the ushers at the Scroggins' church to pull the couple aside and ask, "Who is that guy, is he with you?" Bill Scroggin, Debbie's husband, remembers saying: "If I told you who that guy really was, you'd never believe me."
Lamo was, back in the early 2000s, one of the world's most famous hackers. As a young man, he broke into a who's who of corporate America and couldn't wait to tell anyone who would listen precisely how he did it.
"He was like the Tony Robbins of the hacking world," Lorraine Murphy, an old friend of his, said. "It is one thing to be gifted at hacking and another to be able to tell the world about it." Lamo did both. In happier times, he had legions of followers — long before Twitter made that a thing — and he loved the attention. "He wanted to be a household name," Murphy said. "Fame. Media. That's what motivated him."
It turns out, the thing that made Lamo anything close to a household name had less to do with hacking and more to do with a random Internet chat he had with a young soldier in Iraq in 2010 and the decision that followed it.
"Hi, how are you? ... Im an army intelligence analyst, deployed to eastern baghdad, pending discharge for 'adjustment disorder. ... Im sure you're pretty busy... if you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8-plus months, what would you do?
"Lets just say *someone* I know intimately well, has been penetrating US classified networks, mining data... and been transferring that data from the classified networks over the 'air gap' onto a commercial network computer ... Sorting the data, compressing it, encrypting it, and uploading it to a crazy white haired aussie who can't seem to stay in one country very long."
The "crazy white haired aussie" was Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks; and the young soldier was Chelsea Manning. What happened next is what people remember about Lamo: He turned Manning in and found himself on the receiving end of death threats. Manning was arrested days later, after she had passed hundreds of thousands of secret diplomatic cables and a video to Assange, which in one fell swoop had the effect of weaponizing the Internet and transforming the act of whistleblowing into a popular movement.
Those leaks, Manning's admission and Lamo are creeping back into public consciousness because they are now at the heart of the U.S. government's attempt to bring Assange to justice. As it seeks Assange's extradition, the U.S. government alleges Assange did more than just accept a trove of classified material from Manning. It claims he not only encouraged her to provide more secret information but also attempted to help her crack a Defense Department password so she could leak more.
If the U.S. government can prove that set of facts — and it is far from clear that it
