> On the other hand, he was a traitor, and he betrayed the trust of a true hero
I used to agree with this but honestly, the second Manning contacted him, he was complicit with the crime being committed and would have been sent to the same horrible hole Manning was sent to. It was irresponsible of Manning to put Lamo in this situation, as an ex-convict he would have gotten life in prison, probably solitary confinement if not worse. I don't think I can blame Lamo for doing what he did. It was a horrible situation for both of them. When you're about to commit a crime as severe as treason or murder, you don't call a friend or let alone a stranger and tell him "I'm about to commit the most severely punished crime in the country, could you advise me please?" and expect that person to be complicit.
> I used to agree with this but honestly, the second Manning contacted him, he was complicit with the crime being committed
Are you sure this is true? You don't have a duty to report anything just because you become knowledgeable of it. Mere knowledge doesn't make you complicit.
I don't know specifically in Manning's case, but yes, in general in the US, knowledge that a crime is about to be, is being, or has been committed can make you an accomplice and expose you to criminal liability.
In not all cases will knowledge alone necessarily be enough to convict you, but that doesn't mean a prosecutor might not try. An ex-con should probably not take the chance that a prosecutor will ignore prior knowledge of a criminal act.
Edit: I shouldn't say "knowledge alone." I should rather say that knowledge alone plus a zealous prosecutor. And then throw in prior conviction... Just a risky proposition. Knowledge alone with no other factors to tempt a prosecutor will probably not put you at any greater risk.
Lamo talked to Manning under the guise of being a journalist. Here's what Glenn Greenwald wrote in 2011, after WIRED published the full logs between Lamo and Manning (it must be pointed out that Greenwald was one of the loudest critics of WIRED and its editors, but I use this link since it quotes from the logs):
> MANNING: uhm, trying to keep a low profile for now though, just a warning
> LAMO: I'm a journalist and a minister. You can pick either, and treat this as a confession or an interview (never to be published) & enjoy a modicum of legal protection.
Lamo didn't stumble upon evidence of a crime. He got it by claiming to be a journalist. And as a journalist, he would've had plenty of leeway in not revealing a source, even a source that admits to a crime.
Yes, this is it exactly. Keeping sources confidential is the norm for reporters in the US. Some have spent time in prison for refusing to reveal sources. Judith Miller, for example.
> I don't know specifically in Manning's case, but yes, in general in the US, knowledge that a crime is about to be, is being, or has been committed can make you an accomplice and expose you to criminal liability.
This is incorrect. Being an accomplice generally requires active counsel or assistance to a crime before it happens (the usual “accomplice before the fact”, or “aiding and abetting”) or active concealment (which goes by a number of terms, including “accomplice after the fact”.).
There are a few special cases where particular people have special duties to report specific crimes, but that is not the norm in general.
What's incorrect? Having knowledge of an actual crime can make you an accomplice.
I said generally. You said generally. I made edits before you quoted that to clarify that knowledge alone isn't likely going to make you a target of prosecution in the majority of cases. Maybe not even in 1 in a million cases.
I've had clients be targeted for prosecution on weak facts plenty of times.
If I were a lawyer for the ex-con, and he came to ask me whether to contact the FBI given the facts that seem to be stipulated, I certainly would not recommend not contacting the FBI.
Who does and does not have a duty to report is not really relevant in a whole lot of real world cases, unless you think that no ex-con has ever been railroaded on flimsy or fabricated charges.
I've had clients plead guilty when they probably could have fought it just because they can't risk doing long-term jail time, and I'm not even a dedicated criminal defense lawyer.
I've heard about, and read about, much worse. Surely, you have as well.
Edit: Just for example, say Lamo doesn't contact the FBI, and after Manning is prosecuted, they come after Lamo claiming that he advised Manning on how not to get caught, given Lamo's previous experience. Does Lamo beat the charges or go to prison? The system is not rigged in favor of ex-cons. Given the risk, I'd contact the FBI, too.
> Private Manning said he first called The Washington Post and spoke to an unidentified reporter for about five minutes. He decided that the reporter did not seem particularly interested because she said The Post would have to review the material before making any commitment.
> He said he then tried to reach out to The New York Times by calling a phone number for the newspaper’s public editor — an ombudsman who is not part of the newsroom — and leaving a voice mail message that was not returned.
"Traitor" is a pretty powerful word. A more realistic way to look at it is that someone—using a persistent method of communication—told him that they had committed a very serious crime¹, and he then had to choose between covering it up or going to the police. Covering it up or ignoring it could have meant he was an accessory.
¹ Whether it should be a serious crime or not is irrelevant here.
Under US law, most people in most situations are not obligated to report crimes they become aware of.
Accomplice liability only comes into play when a person intentionally, actively aids a person to commit, conceal or profit from a crime, or to escape prosecution. Inaction doesn't count.
And to be honest I'd rather he snitch than contribute to a culture of cronyism that's all too prevalent in the world.
Like, discovering that a friend of yours committed a serious crime and then keeping it a secret is the very definition of corruption. If we, as a society, are going to move past corruption and cronyism, then we have to accept this kind of snitching, because it's the only way to defeat corruption.
For that matter, do you want to end a culture of people being sexually assaulted at frat parties in full view of dozens of people because none of the witnesses will go to the authorities? Then normalize snitching.
Yeah, best way to end corruption certainly is to help those in power keep their secrets by snitching on those who tell the world, that makes sense! After all, those in power have said it's a crime to challenge their power!
On a personal note, a year or two before that happened Adrian helped my family recover our AOL/AIM accounts after they were compromised. Someone got control of the master account for all my family's AOL accounts, which we created back in ~1995. Because we hadn't been paying customers for over a decade, AOL was unresponsive to support requests. One of my acquaintances knew Adrian though, and got him in touch with me and my mom. Adrian still knew a bunch of people at AOL, and got them to restore access to our accounts and flagged them for an extra layer of security. I remember thanking him on the phone and him replying, "I strive to provide better service than the people I hack."
It was a fun story to tell until the news came out, at which point I stopped.
While I'm not certain what I felt about the man himself (conflicted, much like yourself), he was still in his thirties. No matter what mistakes he made, that is not an age at which anyone should die.
She's a hero if someone says she is, and that's all there is to it. I think she was a brave, selfless person in doing what she did, and I'm glad that the US got its ass handed to it in this way. American military crimes are heinous, and the entire nation is doing nothing effective about it. There are millions of people suffering because the American public are too cowardly to confront their own military.
So by sticking her neck out and releasing the Collateral Murder videos, she is most definitely my hero.
She also released hundreds of thousands of pages of other documents. I can sympathize with carefully targeted disclosures -- like the Collateral Damage videos -- but there's no way she reviewed all the documents she dumped. Wildly irresponsible.
Ned Kelly is considered by equal numbers as either a heroic Bush Ranger sticking it to the man in Australia, or a callous murderer who attempted mass murder when he ripped up the train tracks near Glenrowan.
You can be a hero to some and a villain to others.
I do agree with her that some of that stuff did need to see the light of day. But it was foolish to blindly turn everything over to Assange. It would have been better if she'd only released the few worst items.
Is that the correct usage of 'at best'? Isnt that just minimizing the range of discussion? Shouldnt the objective range be: At best, she's a hero. At worst, she's a villain.
> On the other hand, he was a traitor, and he betrayed the trust of a true hero
I don't know. I have a hard time with calling Chelsea Manning a true hero. While some of the information that she leaked was useful in exposing war crimes, there was a lot more that wasn't particularly relevant exposing military abuses, but was used by enemies to track down and kill those who were collaborating with the US.
> in order to put more unaccountable government power in the hands of people like Donald Trump
I'm not sure how what Adrian Lamo did would have given more power to Donald Trump. In fact, it's Wikileaks that ultimately wound up being critical in the election of Donald Trump; by dumping a lot of not particularly noteworthy private campaign emails, but which could be picked through and made to extend some controversies and conspiracy theories around Hillary Clinton, it was one of the key factors in getting Donald Trump elected.
While there has been some good, newsworthy information released on Wikileaks, it seems to have been corrupted by Russian influence, has a lot of alt-right tendencies including antisemitism (https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks... ); I think that overall, it has become a net negative on the world.
From what I can tell, Chelsea Manning meant well, did some good, but also did a lot of damage, including substantially raising Wikiseaks' profile. I think that whether to report the conversation with Manning to the authorities was likely a difficult one, but the concern about leaking significant amounts of non-newsworthy but potentially quite dangerous information was well founded.
He's a human being. A complex and maybe a little bit messed up human being who has made mistakes. And regardless of those mistakes, we should mourn the loss of a pretty interesting person.
I know what you mean but i am not sure how much he knew about the things manning leaked. Considering what he did before i want to believe that he had a good reason why he did it. Maybe he really thought people were in danger
People really were put in danger. The Taliban targeted Afgan nationals revealed in the documents to be associating with the US. From a Taliban spokesperson: "We will investigate through our own secret service whether the people mentioned are really spies working for the U.S. If they are U.S. spies, then we know how to punish them." [1]
I like freedom of information, but what Manning did was simply irresponsible. There was no filter on the documents released. Release all the reports of us torturing and murdering, sure. But don't go around telling the Taliban exactly which families risked their lives to help the counterinsurgency.
Fucking hell, will you stop linking that 8-year-old article? The only information contained in it is one goat enthusiast no one ever heard of, quoted as saying "yes if we learn of a betrayal against goat enthusiasm we will be upset about it." That proves absolutely nothing. If any brave Afghan national USA collaborator had died as a result, we would have heard about him enough to be sick of it. Unlike, for instance, the thousands of Afghan nationals murdered directly by USA military, whom the war media never mentions.
This comment crosses into ideological flamewar and personal attacks, which are destructive on HN regardless of how correct your underlying views may be. Please don't do those things here.
It isn't a question of criticism but of grandiose rhetoric—e.g. equating people who disagree with you with child-haters, and whatnot.
One can argue that atrocities demand intense responses and I agree with that. But I also know that on internet forums this has long degraded into garden-variety flamebait, that the discussions it produces are tedious, predictable, and worthless, and that the end state they lead to is heat death. It's for those reasons we moderate discussion this way, not because we're secret atrocity sympathizers.
Edit: I think it can be helpful to understand how this is really a question of the medium you're posting to. Heated rhetoric that might make sense in a different medium doesn't work the same way in an online forum. No awareness is raised. All it does is provoke opposite flames, and then people try to destroy each other verbally and wreck the container in the process.
If your concern is to make points about reality in the hope that someone else will shift their view a bit, the only way to do that here is neutrally, because if you can't be neutral, the state machine simply advances to state Flamewar. If your concern is to vent rage about evil, that may well be justified, but it doesn't make sense here because the destruction it causes outweighs the limited relief it brings and the zero other good it does. This isn't personal or specific to your views. It's a way of tending to the container for everybody.
Troll somewhere else. If you read even the first line of my comment you’d know I’m talking about protecting Afghan nationals. If you continued reading, you’d see that I agree with leaks exposing the evils committed.
According to him he did it as a matter of conscience given the broad and indiscriminate nature of what Manning was releasing, potentially putting the lives of US servicemen and those that work with them at risk.
His stated reason was that Manning was putting lives in danger due to not filtering the documents released whatsoever. This included revealing the identities of Afghan nationals which had been friendly with the counterinsurgency. These nationals were then targeted by Taliban. See my sibling comment for more.
He had been involuntarily held more than once, and described his diagnosis of Asperger's to more than one publication. There were questions about the story he told, though, based on records not matching up with his narrative; this, to me, indicated a man not well, who needed help more than anything. I hope he was getting it.
That said, I think it's inappropriate to speculate, particularly when the circumstances likely involve mental health. We should really just celebrate Adrian and send our best to those who survive him, as well as take the opportunity to mention that mental health is extremely important in our line of work (and not!) and you should never feel bad for seeking help or fall victim to the stigma. Code can wait; you and your brain can't.
> He told the audience that he, like Manning and WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange, had acted out of conscience. Lamo believed the cables were dangerous. "Holy fracken crap, there's 260,000 documents," he said, "Do you think you could look through those and make sure they wouldn't cause anybody's life to be lost?"
He had claimed CYA, because he assumed he was being watched. If I recall there were a few conspiracy theories at the time because He had recently been arrested, and then put on psychiatric medication as a result.
