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Adrian Lamo Pleads Guilty
darth dickinson writes "InfoWorld reports that Adrian Lamo, the so-called 'homeless hacker,' pleaded guilty on Thursday to charges that he broke into the internal computer network of The New York Times. The 22-year-old could face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine at a sentencing hearing in April." From the sound of things, he just wants to pay his debt to society and put this behind him. It'll be interesting to see if the judge sticks to the suggested sentence or not.
rootless life? - doh!
In real life if you go exploring where you shouldn't, you'll likely be charged with tresspassing. There's a variety of other crimes you could be charged with, depending on how you entered. One of these is breaking and entering. Just the same, in the online world, if you circumvent security measures, you should expect to be charged with a crime for it, should you get caught. In the real world, if I get caught having broken into someone's house, whether or not I actually stole or destroyed anything doesn't matter. I still illegally entered. It lessens the crime, but there still was a crime committed.
That's the law, like it or not. Lamo broke the law and needs to pay his debt to society just like anyone else who breaks the law. Whether or not you agree with his sentence of the law itself doesn't matter.
Lexis-Nexis costs money. NYT has to pay for that access. Administrator time costs money.
I wouldn't be in his shoes; I would be smart enough not to cross the line between checking out their security and racking up bills with other online services in their name. I also wouldn't be adding stuff to the corporate databases.
So if you catch some kids in your house, just snooping around, but not stealing anything (they ate a few of your cookies though, and watched one or two Pay-per-view movies), and they came in through a window while you were on vacation.. it's okay because they are "Just kids, just exploring?"
The neighbor who checks your front door, finds it unlocked, knows you are on vactaion, so he locks it for you and slides a note under the door, he's being nice. That's a totally different story than a stranger wandering around your shit.
"Apparantly it seems Times doesn't share the same affinity"
Would you be like WorldCom or like the Times if a stranger broke into your house "just to test how easy it was"?
No you are way wrong.
He is a vandal, and bragged about his vandalisim.
In fact he is not even a hacker/cracker but pretty much a poser with a little bit of "skillz".
While I will be the first to defend a hack/crack that was in the truest sense, or someone that was trying to do good, I will not help defend a vandal-punk nor condone such actions.
This was not some curious person trying to better themselves or found something that was wrong and brought it to the attention of it's owners... this was a person that intentionally set out to deface and damage other people's property.
Just like the kid that spray painted my car, I was there in court to help hang him for damaging my property... but he was merely curious if spraypaint would stick to cars.
If he hacked in, looked around, maybe mssed around a bit and used some of the resources there to learn more, then I agree.... he did not, he intentionally went in to damage.
Please help him today (imagine if you were in HIS shoes!).
I wouldn't be, I'm not so stupid as to brag about what I have done. The true sign of a lamer.... they brag.
so I wont help, this isn't like the last 2-3 (and no, Mitnick was not innocent, he was guilty as hell and merely a common thief but treated very unfairly)
so call me when he is not allowed a speedy trial, or other rights are getting violated. until then this is a simple punk that broke the law for the fun of destruction and got caught because he was really stupid.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
OK, mind if we make a hero out of burglar who breaks into your house?
After all, there is nothing wrong if he "EXPLORES" your medicine cabinet and sock drawer, right?
As long as he doesn't do anything of "REAL financial damage" ?
From the sound of things, Adrian didn't want to take the chance of having to spend five years in Danbury or Allenwood.
He didn't create the vulnerabilities in the Times' network, he merely exposed them in the same way he's been doing for years. Adrian hurt no one and owes nothing to society.
The irony of going to jail for using a legal service begars description. In the future, when we have real networking and everyone takes access to case law for granted as a public right, the punishment our hacker faces today will look barbaric. "Were not public trails public property, recorded at the public expense?" they will ask, "How was it that you had to pay a private firm for reasonable access to the law?" What information, I wonder, did the New York Times have about their op-ed contributors that is not available from public phone books and the paper itself down at the local library. This case casts great shame on the New York Times and society in general.
Yet you, gantrep, say, "I feel that what he did is the analogue of theft and trespassing on a massive (albeit electronic) scale." Think about it some more. To me, what he got at was information that should be publically accessible without tresspass.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
We HAVE to help this guy out. Jail is not right -- what he did was mere curiosity mixed with the desire to HELP these companies fix their network.
He did nothing of REAL financial damage. Please help him today (imagine if you were in HIS shoes!).
Thank you for reading this, friends. We, as a large tech community, have to get behind this guy and show others that mere EXPLORING is not to be looked down upon. What if we didn't explore Mars/Moon?
Pardon my frankness, but you are full of shit. If you came home and found this asshole sitting in your livingroom watching pay-per-view TV after having gone through all of your cabinets and drawers, would you say:
"Oh, no problem. What you did wasn't wrong. You were just being *curious* about what was in my house. You were just *exploring* when you went through my desk drawers and read all of my personal documents. You were just trying to *help* me by pointing out security vulnerabilities in my patio door and alarm system. Thanks so much!"
NO! You wouldn't. You'd call the cops after chasing the guy out of your house.
This isn't about exporing Mars. This is breaking and entering, pure and simple. It's time that people like this stop thinking the whole goddam world is here just to satisfy their personal "curiosity". To be perfectly blunt, you can take your Adrian Lamo Defense Fund and cram it up your ass. I want to see this guy do the maximum stretch as a lesson to other "curious" fellows.
Well I have been waiting for this news for a while now. I know Adrian much more as a person then a hacker. It saddens me to see him plead guilty and possibly go to jail but I knew he wouldnt fight if they charged him with actions that he did do.
One thing though that is hard to convay exspecially in text is his increadible sence of moral ethics. When we look at a name attached to the word hacker we have a certain mindset an image of all the hacker refrences we have at our disposal and apply that to Adrian. In this case that image is way off base. While I could list why I think he is an activly good person instead of the passive good/passive neutral people that make up the bulk of our society it still would not do him justice.
If you ever have the chance to talk to him for a good 20 minutes take the oppertunity, sit down and buy him a drink. By the end of the conversation you will walk away feeling that in his case he really shouldnt get the maximum sentance.
Never could figure out why my girl liked my bitch tits, then I found out she was a lesbian.
There is a right way and a wrong way to do things. When you do them the wrong way you need to expect to be punished by society. If he would've done it the right way and either started a consulting company or joined one of the numerous computer security companies he wouldn't be in this situation. I don't care how kind hearted you think you are when you're breaking into someone's system, it's still illegal and you're still a criminal. The only legitimate people that can break into systems are the administrators themselves or people who have been given permission (no doubt along with a lengthy rules of engagement that you must adhere to).
He did nothing of REAL financial damage.
He didn't run more than $300K worth of searches on LexisNexis on somebody else's dime? Please consider the actual facts before starting a campaign.
If someone walked into my home or jimmied the door to gain access, and stood in my living room to say "by the way, your door sucks", he's guilty of trespassing at the very least. This guy is no different. There is nothing that gives him or any other hacker a special "permit" to go where they do not belong just because they claim to do it "for the greater good". He deserves some kind of punishment.
*Fortitudo, aequitas, fidelitas.*
Did the guy who spray painted your car get five years in jail?
War is necrophilia.
As was pointed out in posts about Kevin Metnik - the glory days of cracking systems past quite a few years ago.
Back then people sent passwords in plain text, there were no firewalls, nfs was as vulnerable as eggs laid on a freeway. Practically nobody paid any attention to security issues.
And this illustrates exactly why the crackers have done all of us a service.
There are enemies in this world... but they are not people like Adrian Lamo.
Without the crackers our systems would still be as vulnerable as they were 15 and 20 years ago. People would still take risks that any normal person would consider insane. In fact, a lot of people, perhaps the majority, still have a lot to learn.
So again I say - thank Gawd for the crakers and guys - keep up the good work. Keep pounding home the point that people must pay attention to proper security. Without consequences for lax security it is clear they won't do a damn thing.
Oh god I thought I was the only one who thought this was a bunch of BS.
I was watching Tech TV when I saw his arrest, I was wondering how the hell do they think this guy a savior? He didn't do anything good, in fact he just exploited an unsecure proxy! He did it maliciously and then he tried to make it sound like he was just "doing his part" for the hacker community! what the hell is wrong with this guy! he's done something illegal and he's trying to make it sound like he's done nothing wrong.
I dont think that 5 years is warranted though, if I broke into someones house and stole everything I wouldn't even get more than a year (if that) and I wouldn't pay any fines. The act of it being on a computer seems to make people afraid and want to make it a worse crime. Also I dont think a judge can order no use of computers. A computer can be a television, console, camera, phone, or even a cd/mp3 player... If a judge ordered no use of computers then he would be disconnected from the world and I dont think that should be allowed doing that is like taking basic rights, like the right we have to be free.
Do you keep potentially sensitive information in your shed? For instance, payroll information, information regarding contacts, unpublished articles, or other confidential information?
A better analogy to the situation at hand would be if your shed was locked, chained, and bolted shut, the bum was actually a person who forced open locks, chains, and bolts in their spare time and your shed contained your personal and tax information, any information about your business' transactions and contacts, and your entire archive of e-mail correspondence. Stuff you would not seen by others, and stuff you would *definitely* not want potentially distributed freely on the internet.
The network was protected for a reason, and Adrian Lamo must have known the nature of the information he was accessing. He deserves to be punished.
What do you mean, "pay his debt to society"? He has a debt only to those specific people and organizations that he harmed, and only to the extent of the harm itself. One thing that bothers me about stories like this is that the punishment seems to bear no relation to harm actually caused.
In the United States the punishment for a crime is always inversely proportional to the damage that the crime did to society.
For example, a Chief Financial Officer of a major Forbes-500 corporation who does a pump-and-dump on the stock, collects $100 million dollars and wipes out the pension funds of thousands of employees MAY get six months if caught.
A cracker who breaks into a 'secure' corporate network and has the opportunity to view home phone numbers of op-ed page contibutors will LIKELY get three years.
A black or working-class white teenager found with 25 cents worth of marijuana in his pocket will get a mandatory minimum of five years in prison.
In the USA the punishment for your 'crime' (and everybody is guilty of something) is determined by the amount of money that you spend on your lawyer. The lawyer acts as the intermediary between you and the 'justice' system. He/she ensures that the court takes your social class into consideration when the prosecutor is determining what 'crime' that you will be charged with, and that any applicable pay-offs are delivered to the right parties with all deniable discression.
In the USA many prisons are run by private corporations that receive a set fee for each convict delivered to them. Often these prison corporations (such as CCA and Wackenhut) are publicly traded on the stock exchanges and their stock price depends on how many people they have in their camps. These corporations set up Political Action Committees to lobby for prision sentences that are much longer than the same activities would bring in other countries where the activity is considered a felony offence.
The most common cause for long prison sentences in the USA is getting high differently than drinking whiskey like the ruling class does. Major drug dealers are routinely set free in exchange for supplying the prison industry with hundreds of individual users who supply more bodies for the prison and ensure high profits and stock prices for the prison corporation. Since these people are often poor, they don't have the money to buy 'legal services' like bribes that would keep them out of the camps. Once in prison these people are sold by the prison corporation to drug companies as test subjects for corporate drugs that will then be sold to middle-class people through television ads at enormous profit for imaginary diseases like shyness.
As a result the USA has more people in prison for longer periods than any other country.
" Weed equipment is illegal. What is so hard to fucking understand about that? "
There is a lot that is hard to understand about that. Why is it illegal? Why is it legal to sell guns but not bongs? Why is it legal to sell bayonets but not bongs? What exactly is a bong anyway? Why not arrest people for selling tobacco pipes on the internet? You want to jail people for selling small pipes but not big ones? the whole thing is nonsensical. It's very hard to understand. Why do you blindly accept that some dork someplace decided that you should not have the right to have small pipe in your posession. Don't you care at all about your freedom? Would you roll over and let them deny you the right to carry cigarettes or tissues too? How about pocket knives?
It boggles my mind that it does not bother you that having a small pipe in your pocket is illegal or that selling a pipe over the internet is illegal.
"Or is it an unfree country because you can't do whatever the hell you damn well please?"
It's a good question. How do you measure freedom of a country. How do you compare if one country is more free then another one.
A logical thing would be to compare the number of laws. The less laws there are the more freedom you have right?
Another one might be about how trivial and nonsensical the laws are. For example in some countries it's illegal to worship some religions in other countries it's illegal to cross the street in the middle or to be in the posession of indigenous flora. In some countries you can be jailed simply for posessing a device which might be used to burn and smoke plant material.
Another criterea might be how what percentage of the population is in jail at any one time.
Maybe you could take into account whether the country executes it's criminals or uses prison labor.
You could also look at whether some prisoners are denied habeas corpus and are locked up without access to lawyers or charges.
You could take a look to see if the country has set up concentration camps outside it's own borders so that it could freely house prisoners any bypass it's own laws or constitution.
Finally you might want to consider if all humans are treated equally in that country. For example if certain humans are not allowed to vote, or get married just because they are different then the majority. You might also want to make a list of countries where it's legal to discriminate on housing or jobs based on your differentness.
I don't know how you define freedom but those are the factors I would look at.
What is your definition of a free country? How does the US rate using your definition compred to western europe, australia, new zealand or canada?
War is necrophilia.
" I would ask you to keep in mind that freedom is not just a lack of laws and regulations but the ability of the common people to go about their business on a daily basis without being accosted and or negatively affected by various social ills."
Really? That's your actual definition of freedom? Nothing about equality or habeas corpus? Nothing about fair trials or sane laws? You think prison labor OK? You think I am advocating chaos and no laws? You actually think that being addicted to cigarettes (or alcohol for that matter) has no adverse social effects but that smoking a joint does?
I now understand where you are coming from. There is no need to discuss this any further.
War is necrophilia.