Adrian Lamo said: 'The decision was not one I decided to make. It was
thrust upon me.' Photograph: Jennifer S Altman/Washington Post/Getty
Images
Adrian Lamo, the hacker who betrayed the alleged
WikiLeaks source
Bradley Manning to the US authorities, has said it would be to his "lasting regret" were the soldier to be given a lengthy custodial sentence.
Lamo,
30, dubbed the "world's most hated hacker" for his role in passing
information on Manning to military intelligence after the soldier
befriended him on internet chat, said that he understood that Manning
was an idealistic young man who believed he could change the world for
the better and "who didn't necessarily know what he was doing.
"I think about him every day. The decision was not one I decided to make, but was thrust upon me."
Lamo's
comments come on the eve of the opening of a pre-trial hearing in the
prosecution of Manning, who is charged with multiple counts of
transferring state secrets to WikiLeaks including hundreds of thousands
of US embassy cables. The hearing starts in Fort Meade, Maryland, on
Friday amid exceptionally tight security.
Bradley Manning
supporters hoping for an expression of remorse from Lamo ahead of the
soldier's prosecution will be disappointed, however. Despite the note of
regret at a possible harsh sentence for Manning – the soldier faces a
maximum punishment of life in custody with no chance of parole – Lamo
said he continued to be convinced that he had done the necessary thing.
"Had
I done nothing, I would always have been left wondering whether the
hundreds of thousands of documents that had been leaked to unknown third
parties would end up costing lives, either directly or indirectly," he
said.
A soldier alleged to be Bradley Manning contacted Lamo on
AOL instant messaging on 21 May 2010, using the internet handle
Bradass87. Lamo was known to the soldier because of his celebrity status
in the hacking world having been prosecuted in 2003 for breaking into
the computer network of the New York Times, for which Lamo was put on
six months' house arrest.
In the course of their internet chat,
later published by Wired,
the soldier asked Lamo: "if you had free reign [sic] over classified
networks for long periods of time, things that belonged in the public
domain, what would you do?" The soldier confessed to Lamo that he had
been downloading US state secrets on to a CD labelled "Lady Gaga".
Lamo
took advice from two friends who had experience working with military
intelligence, and, with their assistance, he passed the details of the
internet conversation to the
US military.
On 26 May, Manning was arrested on duty at the Forward Operating Base
Hammer outside Baghdad, where he was working as an intelligence officer.
For his action, Lamo was denounced by fellow hackers as a "snitch" and a traitor to the community, and was
booed at the Hackers On Planet Earth conference in Manhattan in July 2010. Lamo said he also had to move home to avoid any opprobrium affecting those close to him.
But
he said he was unflustered by the adverse reaction. "I'm not a
politician running for re-election. I don't need to be popular among the
hacker community, and I most likely will never be liked in the hacker
community."
Lamo said he was taken aback by the enormous fallout
from his approach to the military authorities. "At the time I was not
even certain that this was newsworthy. I suppose that demonstrates a
certain degree of naivety on my part."
He had thought hard, he
said, about Manning's position. "I remembered what it was like to be
Manning's age – 22 – that was the age that I was arrested for what I
regarded as crimes of conscience. I deliberated on whether I wanted to
subject someone of that age to the same process that I went through."
In
the end though, he concluded that "Mr Manning's wellbeing was not as
important as the security of our armed forces. I had never considered
myself particularly patriotic, but when push came to shove the wellbeing
of the nation was of paramount importance to me."
He said he
suffered "a great deal of internal conflict" about Manning's situation
when he was being held at the Quantico marine base in Virginia. The
soldier was held in solitary confinement and stripped naked every night
in conditions
that some likened to torture.
Manning, 23, is now being held under a much more liberal regime at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.
Lamo
declined to speculate about what an appropriate sentence would be for
Manning were he found guilty of the WikiLeaks charges. However, a
hypothetical individual who had engaged in passing state secrets to a
third party would merit a sentence of "25 to 50 years", he said.
"This
is different to a James Bond film. WikiLeaks was involved in an overall
weakening of strategic operations and diplomacy that will take decades
to recover from," he said.
But Lamo added that he was aware of the
lasting harm that he has caused. "There are times in life when you are
faced with a variety of choices, none of which you consider right. All
of them harm someone and you have to choose the one that harms the
fewest number of people. That still leaves you harming someone, and, because of that, I think of Manning on a daily basis."
Ed Pilkington @
'The Guardian'
