Hacker Adrian Lamo[1] died at the age of 37, according a Facebook post from his father. “With great sadness and a broken heart I have to let know all of Adrian’s friends and acquaintances that he is dead. A bright mind and compassionate soul is gone, he was my beloved son,” Mario Lamo wrote in a post[2] to the 2600: The Hacker Quarterly Facebook Group. The cause of death is not yet known, but a coroner in Sedgwick County, Kansas confirmed the news to ZDNet[3].
Lamo was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1981. In the mid 1990s, he volunteered for PlanetOut, a public media company that catered to the LGBTQ community. In 1998, he was appointed to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Questioning Youth Task Force by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
Lamo first gained notoriety online in the early 2000s for hacking companies like Yahoo! and AOL, as well as The New York Times. In 2004, after accepting a plea bargain, Lamo was sentenced for hacking the newspaper, where he had added his name to an internal list[4] of op-ed writers and racked up $300,000 in charges using the organization's subscription to Lexis-Nexis, a pay-per-use search tool.
He was also known for tipping[5] US government authorities about the actions of whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who was later sentenced to 35 years in prison for providing Wikileaks with 750,000 classified military cables. (President Barack Obama commuted Manning’s sentence[6] in 2017.) In a 2013 interview[7] with the Guardian, Lamo explained his decision to report Manning.
"There was no option to interdict just the documents and put him merely in touch with counseling. There was no way