The Mysterious Death Of The Hacker Who Turned In Chelsea Manning

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/19/760317486/the-mysterious-death-of-the-hacker-who-turned-in-chelsea-manning

By Dina Temple-Raston
I'll Be Seeing You
NPR.org
September 19, 2019

Debbie Scroggin and her husband live at the end of a series of gravel roads in a
lonesome part of Kansas. It is the kind of place where, Debbie says, "you have
to drive 15 minutes to get anywhere." Getting to the Scroggin house involves
turning onto a desolate ribbon of gravel that cuts through fields as far as the
eye can see. It was easy to think that someone might come here to either get
lost or be forgotten. Scroggin remembers Adrian Lamo arriving on a night train
with nothing but a broken suitcase and a hangdog expression.

"He was shorter than I thought he would be," she told me as we sat in her living
room. "I saw pictures of him when he was young." He was slight, dimpled and
smiling, back then. The Adrian Lamo who stepped off the train was thick, stooped
and "had on gloves and a hat and this long black trench coat, full of things."

The sheer bulk of the coat demanded attention. Its contents rattled and clicked
when Lamo walked, and the look of it was dramatic enough to compel the ushers at
the Scroggins' church to pull the couple aside and ask, "Who is that guy, is he
with you?" Bill Scroggin, Debbie's husband, remembers saying: "If I told you who
that guy really was, you'd never believe me."

Lamo was, back in the early 2000s, one of the world's most famous hackers. As a
young man, he broke into a who's who of corporate America and couldn't wait to
tell anyone who would listen precisely how he did it.

[...]



--
Subscribe to InfoSec News
https://www.infosecnews.org/subscribe-to-infosec-news/
https://twitter.com/infosecnews_