Losing His Religion: Adrian Lamo Interview

digidave writes "Six months after the sit-down, TechFocus.org has published their interview with renowned hacker Adrian Lamo. Done before his arrest, TechFocus kept the interview secret so as not to influence the outcome of his trial. It remains his only interview since being arrested."

Comments

Fresh taste of burnt spin in the morning

[SuperBanana]

Done before his arrest, TechFocus kept the interview secret so as not to influence the outcome of his trial.

That's a nice bit of spin. They did it because they're a website, so in the eyes of the legal system, they're not decisively a "real" news organization, so they knew they'd get subpoenaed in a second by either prosecutors and have to turn over everything; it'd be a legal battle that would get drawn out for months given the stakes. The EFF would probably get involved, etc. A good deal of their notes etc would probably be very, very incriminating to Lamo, since hackers, like most stupid criminals, love to brag about their crimes.

So, in other words, they danced on the line of hiding criminal evidence. It would not be a stretch for them to get charged themselves. I'd be absolutely amazed if they didn't at least get subpoenaed within the next few days and the evidence used to file new charges against Lamo.

Re:It Figures the Times would do him in

[cableshaft]

You're right. From the Wired interview:

"Although the Times doesn't pay retail for the service, the FBI calculated Lamo's damages using the full Lexis-Nexis rate, which added up to a shocking $300,000. It was clearly a punitive figure. Had Lamo simply bought an unlimited three-month account with Lexis-Nexis rather than piggybacking off the Times, it would have cost him just $1,500."

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.04/hacker_pr .html

Re:Only interview?

[CHICK543]

The NPR interview has an interresting comment.

interviewer: You know it seems to me somebody with your curiosity, your interest and your skill could make for themselves a pretty profitable career as a security expert, obviously.
Adrian: There's things that I've really learned from the process of my crimes and one of them is that the security industry is a dishonest profession. It relies on people's fear; it relies on manufacturing fear by hyping up the vulnerabilities that have no real world applications and forcing people to pay more money to defend against them. It's really not something that I'm interrested in supporting or being a part of. It's not something that I could feel proud of. There's nobody in the security industry that I could point at and say "yea, they're good people. They've done good."

I don't know if I agree with that sentiment, I just think it's interresting that someone in his situation would say that.