Friday 29 July 2011

How low did Lamo go?


Sometime around 21 May 2010 self-identified hacker Adrian Lamo and Bradley Manning began a series of private online conversations. These chats Lamo reported to the FBI , then allegedly sent a full log of these conversations to WIRED and subsequently gave numerous media interviews embellishing his storyline.

Two entries in a three-day transcript from the alleged full log titled Manning’s alleged chat logs diff at CablegateSearch:

(10:23:34 AM) info@adrianlamo.com: I’m a journalist and a minister. You can pick either, and treat this as a confession or an interview (never to be published) & enjoy a modicum of legal protection.
(1:55:10 PM) info@adrianlamo.com: i told you, none of this is for print.


In a much earlier interview on 1 December 2001 Lamo answered the question What is your real name?:

Adrian Lamo. . if you want to be technical, its the Doctor Reverend Adrian A. Lamo, Ph.D . . Doctor of Divinity and minister through the Universal Life Church, the grandma of all diploma mills everywhere. . .i don’t take those seriously, and don’t expect anyone else to, but i put them on my resume and my business cards to make a point of my disdain for the certification and educational process.

Earlier yet in 2003 he allegedly admits to drug abuse.

To date I can find no evidence that he was a bona fide journalist.

This is Salon commentator Glenn Greenwald’s opinion on 14 July 2011:

In sum, the full chat logs -- in particular the parts Wired concealed for over a year -- prove that Adrian Lamo is a serial liar whose claims are inherently unreliable. But Wired's selective editing prevented this from being proven -- served to shield from critical scrutiny the person the BBC accurately described as Poulsen's "long-time associate" -- and thus enabled Lamo to run around for a full year masquerading as a reliable source, making claims that were fabrications and driving much of the reporting about the Manning and WikiLeaks investigations. Enabling false claims to be disseminated to the public on a vital news story -- by withholding plainly relevant information that proves those claims false -- is the opposite of the purpose of journalism, as is needlessly withholding key context to the events one is purporting to describe; yet that's exactly what Wired did here, and continued to do despite growing calls for the release of this information.

No comments: