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.

Comments

Re:This is NOT right - Please DONATE to his fund

[91degrees]

Why?

It seems he crosed the line into illegal hacking. The website gives no reason not to believe the prosecution's account of the case, and to accept that the penalty agreed to is proportionate.

More details of what he did.

[gantrep]

His "exploring" involved the access of "home telephone numbers and Social Security numbers for more than 3,000 contributors to the Times' Op-Ed page." And use of the LexisNexis service without paying for it. He also "set up five fictitious user identification names and passwords inside the Times' system to use to access LexisNexis and then used them to make more than 3,000 searches in February 2002."

While you can quibble about the definition of damage, I feel that what he did is the analogue of theft and trespassing on a massive (albeit electronic) scale. He is remorseful for his actions, and I agree that he certainly should be held accountable for his actions.

This from the CNN article.

I'm sorry man, but the moon wasn't anybody's private property and equipment.

Crackdown

[Nadsat]

He is a charasmatic hacker. He explains to companies their weaknesses. When he hacked WorldCom in 2001, WorldCom praised him for his efforts.

Apparantly it seems Times doesn't share the same affinity. Now FBI has him as a public menace and threat. I wonder what the talk would be if he was Islamic?

I'm beginning to think that all the FBI does these days is find martyrs, symbolic arrests to illustrate points of model citizen behavior. This is opposed to actually arresting people who do do a lot of damage. Another example, Sherman Austin from Raise the Fist.com, was subject to police raid, extended arrest, and jail sentencing because he posted information in a protest guide (that he didn't author) which contained a small link about explosives.

Too many martyrs. We need a calendar, the martyr-a-day celendar, to list the date when all the different people were arrested. Otherwise we'll lose track and just start accepting this.