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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.
no pun intended.
Well, at least he won't be homeless for 5 years.
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.
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.
Why didn't he do something useful, like get rid of that obnoxious registration system?
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.
The Custom Mary
According to TechTV's "The Screen Savers" (computer help and trends show, for those not familiar), who have interviewed Lamo several times, he has struck a deal with the Feds to server six months in Federal prison. He was asking for six months of home detention, but he still ended up a heck of a lot better than five years!
"I'm not, like, that smart. I, like, forget stuff all the time." -- Paris Hilton
Not trying to compare him in any sort of way to a murderer ... but did you ever notice the neighbors often say the same thing you are saying about a neighbor convicted of murder?
... if somebody does something wrong, just because they did 10 "nice" things before that doesn't excuse their action, and doesn't mean you should ignore the "bad" thing when defining their character. I'm sure there are worse hackers out there, but then again ... with the exception of one ... there always are.
"He was such a good guy. Seemed perfectly normal to me. Always waved 'hi' in the morning."
Not trying to bust on your acquaintance, but since you brought it up
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.