VILLAINS-Adrian Lamo

To say that Adrian Lamo is fucked up in the head is putting it mildly. Lamo is a computer hacker and has Asperger's Syndrome. His biggest claim to fame is being the guy who snitched on Bradley Manning to the authorities and then professed he did it for "moral" reasons. The problem is that Adrian Lamo is amoral slime.

For years, Lamo lived as a homeless person. When not homeless, the guy has either been in jail, a mental ward, or his parents' house. Lamo would hack into networks, expose the flaws, and report the holes to the companies who were grateful for the information. The New York Times was not so grateful which is how Lamo ended up with a criminal record.

Lamo befriended Bradley Manning. Manning spilled his guts to Lamo that he was the source of the Wikileaks material. Then, Lamo fucked him. To this day, no one knows why Lamo did it, and no one buys that he did it out of moral or patriotic reasons. Aspies are notorious for not having empathy for other people. They are unable to make the fine moral judgments that the rest of us are able to make. When Lamo speaks and explains what he did, his reasons sound like a statement that was prepared for him by someone else. If Manning made a mistake with Lamo, it was assuming the guy was anything more than a brilliant retard.

Lamo accuses Julian Assange of cultivating a relationship with Manning and then betraying him. This is absurd. Assange was the guy Manning was looking for and needed. Assange is a human being. But the nature of what Assange does prevents him from having the kind of contact that Lamo had with Manning. Lamo is very much like Assange but also very different. Both men are into computers and living as vagabonds. Both claim moral motivations for their actions. Yet, they end up doing opposite actions. One defies the government. The other embraces the government as its bitch. They are mirror images of one another. It is like the relationship between Superman and Bizarro.



The truth about Lamo is that he is a tool. That is it. He lacks the capability for real human compassion. He is not moral because he doesn't know what morality is. Do not think for a moment that he was concerned for the lives of people that might be exposed in Manning's leaks. No evidence exists that he knew the content of those leaks. Lamo is simply a blank slate that the Feds inscribed upon. He is a useful idiot for their purposes. You don't even have to pay the guy because he is really that fucked up in the head. He probably sleeps with a Rubik's Cube.

Lamo is not motivated by the same things the rest of us are. He is not driven by a need for money or love or fame or anything. This is the mistake people make in trying to understand the guy. Lamo is simply a human machine. He is interested purely in things. This is the product of his mental condition. Not all Aspies are like this. Lamo just has a very bad case of this syndrome. Deciding to snitch on Manning held as much importance to him as choosing orange soda as opposed to grape.

Lamo is now persona non grata among the hacker world. He is a villain and deserves the label. People accuse Julian Assange of being amoral slime, but you can't listen to that guy without coming to the conclusion that he is a deeply moral person. You can't listen to Lamo for more than a minute without concluding that this guy is incapable of being moral. That is because he doesn't care. He can't care. It is beyond him.

This now brings us to the actions that Lamo did. We can divorce motivations from what he did and determine whether or not Lamo's betrayal was the right thing to do. Manning succeeded. No one died from the revelations. Politicians were embarrassed. The world was awakened to atrocities. Tunisians discovered the truth about their own government and revolted. The world changed. Manning is nothing less than a hero, yet he faces severe penalties because of Adrian Lamo.

Why did Manning reach out to Lamo? Because he wanted some sort of empathy. He thought Lamo would have that empathy because of his hacker past and "sympathies" for LGBT causes. But Lamo is without empathy or remorse. Lamo is the Judas Iscariot of our day.



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NOTES

1. The Snitch Syndrome

2. Q&A: Adrian Lamo, the hacker philosopher

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