Adrian Lamo - Activities - WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning

WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning

In February 2009, a partial list of the anonymous donors to the WikiLeaks not-for-profit website was leaked and published on the WikiLeaks website. Some media sources indicated at the time that hacker Adrian Lamo was among the donors on the list. Wired reported that Adrian Lamo commented on his Twitter page, "Thanks WikiLeaks, for leaking your donor list... That's dedication."

In May 2010, Adrian Lamo reported to U.S. Army authorities that Specialist Bradley Manning had claimed to have leaked a large body of classified documents, including 260,000 classified United States diplomatic cables. Lamo stated that Manning also "took credit for leaking" the controversial, classified video footage of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike, which has since come to be known as the "Collateral Murder" video.

Lamo has stated that he would not have turned Manning in "if lives weren’t in danger... was in a war zone and basically trying to vacuum up as much classified information as he could, and just throwing it up into the air." WikiLeaks responded by denouncing Lamo and Wired Magazine reporter Kevin Poulsen as "notorious felons, informers & manipulators" and said that "journalists should take care."

According to Andy Greenberg of Forbes, Adrian Lamo may have worked as a "security specialist" with Project Vigilant, a private security institution that works with the FBI and the NSA. Chet Uber, the head of Project Vigilant, has claimed, "I’m the one who called the U.S. government... All the people who say that Adrian is a narc, he did a patriotic thing. He sees all kinds of hacks, and he was seriously worried about people dying."

Lamo has been criticized by fellow hackers such as at those at the Hackers on Planet Earth conference in 2010, who called him a "snitch". Another commented to Lamo following his speech during a panel discussion saying: "From my perspective, I see what you have done as treason."

Julian Assange calls Adrian Lamo "a very disreputable character", and says that Lamo's monetary support for WikiLeaks amounted to only 20 U.S. dollars on one occasion. Assange says that it is "not right to call a contributor to WikiLeaks", and questions the electronic record associated with the Manning-Lamo chats, because, according to Assange, Lamo has "strange motivations" and "had been in a mental hospital three weeks beforehand".