Ex-Hacker Adrian Lamo Praises Manning Charges

July 10, 2010 - PRLog -- Bradley Manning, the accused would-be spy in the Wikileaks case, was charged this week in federal court. He had spent roughly a month in custody, and now faces a statutory maximum of 52 years.

Ex-hacker Adrian Lamo, who had exposed Manning's activities, praised the government for timely action, saying: "I am pleased that Manning is no longer being held without charges, and that the case against him is moving forward."

Lamo added: "The charging document is essentially consistent with what I know to be true, It is my hope that defense counsel will serve Manning by suggesting a plea agreement, resulting in a fair and proper guilty verdict."

In the interest of transparency, Lamo also took the opportunity to call on Wikileaks head Julian Assange to step aside, as a distraction from the project and due to questionable dealings on his watch, including the leaks of logs related to Lamo.

The call included senior Wikileaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum, who has concealed his Wikileaks ties when identifying himself as a Tor project developer to the presss. Tor is an anonymity service which Wikileaks is known to have misused in order to interdict sensitive documents.

Manning is innocent until proven guilty.

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Adrian Lamo is a threat analyst and journalist, known as a former grey hat hacker, principally for breaking into a series of high-security computer networks, and his subsequent arrest.

Best known among these were his intrusions into The New York Times. Yahoo! News and Microsoft, and most recently-reported Salon.com. He is also known for identifying security flaws in computer networks of Fortune 500 companies and then notifying them of any flaws he found.

He also informed the authorities of the identity of a US Army Intelligence Specialist who is alleged to be the source of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike video leak to Wikileaks, among many other classified documents.

Lamo founded Reality Planning LLC in 2007.