Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Shown above is one Adrian Lamo -- yes, that's his real name, apparently. Lamo is the police informer who says that he turned in Bradley Manning, alleged source of the Wikileaks Afghanistan material.

Lamo appears in the clip below, taking some very slow pitches from the aggressively, pugnaciously reactionary BBC, and swinging groggily at each one about five seconds after it passes over the plate. (There's a few seconds of setup; wait for it.)

Droll, eh?

There is much rich material here, as well as a few puzzling questions.

Lamo works with a maildrop "organization" called Project Vigilant, headed by one Chet Uber. (Yes, that's really his name too. Dickens couldn't do better.) Project Vigilant's seal tickles me:

(I particularly like the garbled motto.)

Project Vigilant claims to be a mighty network of hundreds of mad-skill'd volunteer super-"hackers", collecting mountains of information from your friendly local ISPs, discovering threats to "national security", and generally acting as a sort of pasty-faced auxiliary police force.

In fact it appears to consist of a handful of cop buffs and self-promoters like Lamo, who has a thorougly bad reputation in the esoteric world of infosec and its penumbra of script kiddies.

(One mailing-list correspondent of mine, a familiar of this milieu, writes: "Lamo can eat a bag of dicks. I hate that douche.")

The big question, of course, is why Manning would have taken an obvious creep like Lamo into his confidence -- which is the story Lamo tells. The evidence offered to back up this claim are a few short decontextualized snippets extracted from emails and AOL chats between the two. (Apparently Wired magazine has the full texts but won't make them public.)

I suppose it all could have happened just as the public story so far suggests: all this material was readily available to a relatively low-level staff guy like Manning(*); he idealistically gave it to Wikileaks; and then was naif enough to confide in Lamo. But it will be interesting to see how the story develops.

The other interesting thing, to me, is the existence of people like Uber and Lamo in the first place. Apparently there's so much runoff into the social waters from the activities of the cops, the spies, the snoopers and surveillers, that it's nourished a malodorous algal bloom of hangers-on, informers, unofficial volunteer secret-police trolls, parasitic entrepreneurs hoping for spilled swill from the national-security trough, and a richly repellent inventory of other loathesome creepy-crawlies.

Welcome to Obama's America, a land where everyone not a screw is either an inmate or a stoolie.

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(*) This isn't as improbable as it may sound. Lots of large bureaucratic organizations -- I have worked for a few -- tend to think of information security in terms of an Iron Wall between inside and outside. On the supposedly secure "inside", access and trust are far too widely distributed. I've never been in the military, but it would surprise me if this mind-set didn't exist there, perhaps even more strongly than in the corporate world.