Snitching Hacker Adrian Lamo vs. Hostile Crowd at Hacker Convention | Hacker News Reader

Snitching Hacker Adrian Lamo vs. Hostile Crowd at Hacker Convention

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32 pointsfiaz37 comments

This is depressing, but I'll hope it's just a knee-jerk reaction, and that people will reconsider after they have a chance to think about it. Presumably the audience does not support informing because it believes that cracking and leaking are not a crime on the same level as , for example, child abuse or murder. Of course, people who participate in illegal activities often have no trouble rationalizing or excusing their actions. And for those who will wave the flag for "civil disobedience", I'll say right now that I have no problem supporting the idea of civil disobedience, as long as you realize the consequences of civil disobedience have typically been conviction and punishment. It's the conviction and punishment that drives public opinion to change the law, not whining.

Cracker culture has been traditionally marginalized by the state and law enforcement. It's unlikely that it will grow a sudden fondness for those who work with the state. Lamo, in addition to selling out Manning after telling him he was a journalist, is also involved with Project Vigilant, an organization that claims to use ISP EULA loopholes to spy on private citizens: http://bit.ly/dsS60a.

I was at HOPE and saw this talk. The irony of "Stop Snitching" shirts appearing on crowds of people who have almost undoubtedly spent zero minutes being interrogated by even local police was not lost on me.

It's a well-worn topic, but I was disheartened to see so many people launch into tangential rants that really skirted (avoided, even) the reality of the situation.

From what I know about this, Adrian Lamo initiated the contact. It has nothing to do with being interrogated by anyone. He himself decided to rat on the whistleblower.

Whistleblower? Leaking the single video was arguably whistleblowing. Dumping documents en masse without knowledge of their contents is not, by any stretch of the word, whistleblowing.

Regardless, whether you agree with the leaking, in whole or in part, Adrian Lamo was going to end up in an interrogation room sooner or later if he didn't come forward. Manning put him in that situation quite carelessly. This is not about politics/policy -- this is about someone instantly making another person a potential co-conspirator.

It's rather easy to comment from the sidelines and urge someone else to ignore the potential consequences they face.

Whistleblower? Which US law is the "whistleblower" accusing the government of breaking?

A whistleblower points out wrongdoing. This is different from pointing out lawbreaking. Please note for future reference: legality and morality are at best loosely related. Just because something is legal does not make it right, and vice versa.

I understand (and agree to some extent with) your larger point, but my concern was with the specific term "whistleblower", which is usually associated with someone who identifies a crime occurring within their own organization. Whistleblowers are often protected because of the recognition that publicizing a crime is usually in the public good.

In this case, I hesitate to use the term "whistleblower" because I think it implies circumstances and motivations that do not apply. At this point we are all speculating, but it appears that the alleged leaker made classified information available to another party, knowing that it would be made public, because they disagreed with US policy. In my mind, revealing privileged information because you do not agree with a policy is not the same thing as "whistleblowing". Would you classify Kim Philby, or Robert Hanssen as "whistleblowers"?

I would not classify Kim Philby or Robert Hanssen as whistleblowers. Of course both of them traded secrets to their sworn enemy for money. This is a much different situation than releasing secrets to the public out of a desire to uncover improper government lies. In fact other than the release of secrets, the situations are very different, your analogy is a strawman.

As for whistleblowing: Shawn Carpenter, Peter Buxtun, and Wendell Potter have all received that label, while not informing on their bosses about illegal activities, just reprehensible ones. There are plenty more.

Both Philby and Hanssen were agents of their respective governments, with a sworn duty to protect their country's secrets, as was the alleged leaker. People who work in these organizations, who hold top secret security clearances and handle sensitive information, are understandably expected to adhere to standard of personal behavior which does not include making personal judgments about government policy (in Philby's case, it is questionable whether he was motivated by money).

Surely we agree that government agents (in their many forms) cannot choose which directives to obey based on their personal beliefs about the rightness/wrongness of the policy, although they must disobey unlawful commands/orders. This is admittedly a fine line to draw, but most government organizations offer avenues to report concerns without releasing sensitive information to the public.

With respect to your examples of "whistleblowers", I'll accept that designation for Carpenter and Buxtun, but in both cases I think they were reporting something that was clearly illegal (Carpenter) or at odds with accepted standards (Buxtun). And both Carpenter and Buxtun did report their concerns through appropriate channels before "leaking".

US law may permit killing non-American civilians (as shown in the "Collateral Murder" video), but international law frowns upon it.

Which particular international law are you referring to? The Geneva Conventions?

International law does cover treatment of civilians during conflicts, but I'm afraid you are wrong - international law doesn't automatically class any and all civilian deaths as war crimes. This is pretty basic stuff.

During "Collateral Murder", an Apache gunship shot up, with no warning, a civilian van that exhibited no aggression. Would this be legal under international law?

I'm not sure what you mean by a "civilian van." As if there are or were at the time insurgent vehicles that were clearly marked as "non-civilian." And if you actually watched the video you'll see that the US personnel believed the occupants of the van were removing weapons from the site. After action footage redeemed this view, and showed the presence of RPG's.

Also, ask yourself, why was that van tooling around in the middle of a warzone with kids inside? If the driver was a "civilian" then he demonstrated very poor judgement at the least, and a willingness to use children as human shields at the worst. I'm inclined to believe it was the worst.

>if you actually watched the video you'll see that the US personnel believed the occupants of the van were removing weapons from the site.

They can believe that the occupants are also Martians, but that doesn't qualify as a belief based on reason.

>After action footage redeemed this view, and showed the presence of RPG's.

The van was a civilian vehicle. There were no RPGs found originating from the van.

>Also, ask yourself, why was that van tooling around in the middle of a warzone with kids inside?

My guess is the citizens in the van were Iraqi, hence their proximity to the country.

>If the driver was a "civilian" then he demonstrated very poor judgement at the least, and a willingness to use children as human shields at the worst.

I'm open to evidence that the van was 1) an insurgent van and 2) using the children as human shields, but a belief without evidence isn't reasonable.

I'm glad you're open and reasonable. Now ask yourself some questions:

1) Did you see any other "civilian" vehicles or civilians on the street in the footage? No. Where do you think the "civilians" and their vehicles were? The answer is, they were at home, hunkered down, because they knew there was fighting going on. There had been fighting going on in this neighborhood for weeks.

That's a "reasonable" reaction to living in a fucking war zone. That's what I'd do. That's probably what you'd do. And if I had kids, it sure as fuck is what I would do. The last thing I would do is put my kids in a car and drive around in it as some kind of a mobile aid station. Even if my best friend was sitting their in the street, bleeding out, I wouldn't risk my kids lives to pick him up in a war zone.

Furthermore, if you watched the entire video, and I suspect you didn't, you'd find that the same Apache crew was tracking another black and unmarked "civilian" vehicle just a few minutes before they fired on the Reuters journalists and guess what? That other vehicile (which may have been the same one) dropped off armed insurgents into a firefight.

So yes, Apache crew belief may have been incorrect -- though there is ample evidence to support that it was correct -- but it wasn't "unreasonable."

Listen, I think you're angry about war. War sucks. It's terrible. And I'm glad most of the fighting seems to be over in Iraq and that we'll get the hell out of there soon. But Assange edited that video to make US forces look like murders, which isn't the truth. They are just normal guys doing a very, very difficult job, and who sometimes make mistakes.

You want to be angry, get angry at Bush and Obama.

Wikileaks got it wrong, intentionally.

I don't recall any radio talk about suspecting the van of being insurgent, but I'll rewatch the unedited version of "Collateral Murder" for the reference.

Absolutely, I'm angry about the war. And, yes, Bush and Obama are to blame. But popular opposition to the war won't materialize unless people see the results of it, which is what Assange realizes. Media had much more freedom to operate during Viet Nam than in Iraq or Afghanistan (and, additionally, there have been cases where the US military appears to have deliberately killed journalists, such as Al jazeera's Tariq Ayoub). Assange's case would be much harder to make if real journalism in those theatres was possible (in which case information, such as the fact that the US military killed hundreds during demonstrations in Afghanistan [http://bit.ly/daeWlg], might otherwise see the light of day).

Please do watch the unedited video. Respectfully, there is much popular opposition to the war, it has materialized, and there is plenty of photographic and video evidence of exactly how much war sucks.

If you have evidence that the military deliberately killed a journalist, please share it with me.

And respectfully, the military has done a good job of helping journalists do their job. Mike Yon, who was openly critical of General McChrystal (and frankly kind of unprofessional in how he did it) has spent a long time in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and is apparently now on his way back for yet another embed.

Also, I think it might be worth pointing out that while the US military often does get it wrong -- causing collateral damage that is sometimes disproportionate to the tactical objective, and does kill innocent civilians, I have yet to see a case where killing innocent civilians was their actual goal. This is in stark contrast to the people the US military is fighting against -- Al Quaeda remnants and some elements of the Taliban -- who target civilians intentionally.

Personally I don't think the amount of effort we're expending in Afghanistan is justified based on the expected future benefit, and after a long time supporting our mission there I'm ready to pull our forces out. But Julian Assange is doing his best to make sure a) America looks worse than it is, b) that American soldiers have a harder job to do and c) anyone Afghans who have reached out to us in the past are more likely to pay a price for it in the future.

If Assange had taken the time to sanitize the documents he released of any information regarding names and villages of sources, I'd have more sympathy for him. Instead he stupidly and needlessly put their lives in danger, and now wants to blame the US military for their deaths. He's a piece of shit.

Article 5 of the 4th Geneva Convention states (in part): Where in the territory of a Party to the conflict, the latter is satisfied that an individual protected person is definitely suspected of or engaged in activities hostile to the security of the State, such individual person shall not be entitled to claim such rights and privileges under the present Convention as would, if exercised in the favour of such individual person, be prejudicial to the security of such State.

So your question comes down to whether the crew of that gunship suspected the van of containing persons who threatened the security of the Afghan state. I don't know the answer to that. Do you?

Watching that video, there doesn't seem to be a reason to suspect the van of being engaged in hostile activities. Your interpretation of that law would allow the military to kill any civilians they please, merely stating that they suspected them. I suspect this interpretation is incorrect.

I'm sorry, in the interest of brevity I may have been unclear. I don't think that I'm "interpreting" the Geneva Conventions. I reported what the convention said, and explained that to know whether the US had violated the conventions, we would have to know whether there was "suspicion". It would be up to a court to determine this. While the video is one piece of evidence, we have no way of knowing what other information was available (e.g., did the daily intel briefing warn crews that Taliban forces were using white vans to transport fighters). My point was that the GC does not make all civilian deaths illegal.

My guess is a court would find "suspicion" unwarranted without reason for it. As the military hasn't cited any reason for the killing of the civilians in the van (no daily intel briefing warning of white vans was revealed in defense of the military), it would seem that there isn't one. Obviously civilians can be killed if there is a rational reason for it (i.e. aggression), but it's fairly certain that killing civilians without reason is not legal under international law otherwise death squads would be considerably more popular.

What interpretation? Your disagreement seems to be with the Geneva Convention itself.

When a law allows certain activity based on "suspicion" it means reality-based suspicion, not suspicion based on an individuals hunches or psychic prowess.

Given the wider context of the video it seems the suspicion could have been legitimate in good faith

Anyway; the point of this aside was that legally the deaths could have been, well, legal. But they were certainly morally/ethically problematic.

Which is the point about whistleblowers; they don;t necessarily just air illegal acts but morally wrong ones as well.

This is probably not the thread to get back into the whole debate of "were those deaths illegal" :)

Apparently, for many of the hackers present, it was an issue of snitching. That's pretty stupid. I don't think there's any "no snitching" ethic that would obligate a gun enthusiast to keep his mouth shut when he sees somebody killed with a gun. I don't see why hacking should be any different. I question Lamo's motives, and I disagree with what he did (because I think the U.S. government dishonestly sweeps its mistakes under the rug of "classified for reasons of national security,") but he could have done what he did from a pure motive to protect civilians, soldiers, and U.S. interests.

Let's assume for a moment that his choice was neither right or wrong: A crowd of people attacking an informant without being placed in his shoes. This group mentality leads to ignorance leads to violence.

Suppose for a moment, some korean spy was bragging about all the US documents they were funneling back to their government. These documents consisted of building names, employee's names, and a few other misc trails. Do we worry that the spy might obtain even more sensitive information and release it or ignore the spy completely and continue on with our daily lives?

What if there was a man working at your mom's bakery leaking all of your mom's baking secrets/employee information and boasting about it on his facebook page. Would you let your mom know that this employee is letting everyone in the world know her address and she makes an excellent strawberry muffin?

Hacker, civilian, crackhead, secretary, garbage man; whatever title, if you believe a person might be endangering your government, people, or rights(or baking secrets)... is it so wrong to alert an authority of the situation before it gets out of hand? Could he have stumbled upon some new nuclear weapon schematics that wiped out an entire continent and went "OH LOOK WHAT THE US IS DOING, MUST SHARE THIS?!"

(BTW: I don't really understand why we push democracy on other countries. The best way to spread democracy is by example and let other countries adapt on their own, in their own way... rebellion, civil war, or civil disobedience or whatever new method springs up. Democracies don't just spring up over night, the US just got extremely lucky in forming its republic. Many lives were lost, rights were nonexistent, and somehow we still ended up at this point.)

(Also, that soldier knew the risk of leaking documents in a time of 'war,' so, I feel no pity for his capture.)

(I should also note that I know nothing of Lamo or bradass other than what I saw on the daily show. This video is just group stupidity.)

Wow your strawman is made of many little strawmen. My mom's baking recipe being leaked or not will not result in someone's death, nor will snitching on the leaker.

Nuclear secrets likewise are a completely different story than outdated opsec.

On the other side, not all instances of Authority are the same. Some should never be notified, others more often.

Of course, you are basing all of this on the assumption that someone leaking X must necessarily possess NO ability to reason and choose wisely about what to leak next (if anything) -- an assumption that is in no circumstances warranted.

Outdated opsec? No. The documents Assange published via Wikileaks exposed innocent Afghan sources by name and by village. These people are now in danger and I've seen a report that at least one of them has now been killed. Personally I con't see any real sunshine value in leaking these particular documents but I'm amazed that Assange didn't take the time to sanitize them using plain old common sense. And I'm surprised that people don't see him for the thoughtless prick that he is. And for that, I'm afraid, he becomes the collateral murderer.

You are correct, names of sources is different than both nuclear secrets and outdated opsec. Congrats, you understand one of my points. Amusingly, at the same time you commit the exact same error I was pointing out: The strawman attack. I was not stating a position on the nature of the original leak, but instead pointing out how there are situations with different ramifications and consequences.

The most you can infer from my statements, without making assumptions, is that I am not fond of strawman arguments.

Thank you for the lecture on straw man. If you did not mean to imply that Assange's recent document dump was composed of nothing more than "outdated opsec" then please disregard my last comment. However on re-reading your comment I still think my assumption a reasonable one.

A 14 year old boy once found a botnet on an ircd. Instead of going to the ircops on the network, the boy infected himself and found the inner workings of the botnet and posted it on the internet. The internet was quite pleased with the boy's findings, but the boy did not assume that a certain group would obtain the server of the botnet and get access to it. The boy watched as the zombies spewed out all types of information to this certain group who had got admin access in the same way he had put forth in his discussion on the botnet. The boy learned that full disclosure is not always in the best of interests of everyone and still agrees with that in his 25 year old manhood. :(

Using the word "snitch" makes you sound like a 12 year-old.

Plus I thought snitching was ratting out your partners in crime to save your own skin, not simply informing on a criminal.

In older senses, yes you are correct. This is not really the case in the last 30 or so years -- a snitch is anyone within a group (hacker community, black community, drug underworld for common examples) who informs to the police about someone within that group. It has less to do with the informants involvement in a specific action(s) than his/her group membership.

Federal offense. I'd have turned his ass in too. Hackers know they are breaking the law, and shouldn't be squawking too loudly when they get prosecuted for it.

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