Adrian Lamo: hacker who betrayed Wikileaks mole

The interest in today's story about a US Army intelligence analyst held for leaking files to Wikileaks has quickly moved on from the alleged whistleblower Brad Manning – held safe from media glare under protective custody in Kuwait – to Adrian Lamo, the man who shopped him.

Manning is the American being investigated for leaking the so-called 'Collateral Murder' video to Wikileaks. The video showed the crew of a US Apache helicopter killing Iraqi civilians and Reuters journalists in Baghdad after apparently mistaking a camera for a rocket propelled grenade launcher. Shot in 2007, the chilling video caused an uproar when it was posted by Wikileaks in April this year.

Manning worked at Forward Operating Base Hammer in Iraq, near Baghdad. Wired magazine, quoting Lamo, alleges that Manning copied incriminating files held on an Army database onto CDs and smuggled them out of his workplace.

Lamo (pictured above left in 2001 with two fellow hackers, Kevin Mitnick and Kevin Poulsen) is a former computer hacker with whom Manning chatted online. In the course of their conversations, Manning apparently confessed to being responsible for the leaking of 'Collateral Murder'.

So, why would Lamo, himself once the subject of an FBI investigation, betray the confidence of a man who was guilty of nothing more than exposing the worst excesses of the US Army?

Lamo, 29, has quite a history. He was arrested in 2003 for computer fraud against Microsoft, the New York Times and Lexis-Nexis. After pleading guilty, he was sentenced to six months' detention at his parents' house and two years' probation.

More recently he has worked as a journalist – although today it became clear he has also been working as a casual informer for the US government.

Lamo admitted to the BBC that "a lot of people have labelled me a snitch". But he added in his defence, "I guess I deserve that on this one - but not as a generality".

As a celebrity in the world of hacking, Lamo appears to have become something of a confidante for the likes of Brad Manning, who at 22 is the same age as he was when the FBI caught up with him.

"I'm contacted on a daily basis by all kinds of people who confess to all kinds of federal crimes," he says. "I have never once turned them in, even when the FBI offered me a deal."

Lamo has offered two different explanations for shopping Manning. The Wired article, written by Kevin Poulsen, a fellow former hacker who served a jail term for computer fraud and money laundering, says Lamo did it because he feared Manning had risked national security by leaking 260,000 classified diplomatic dispatches. "I wouldn't have done this if lives weren't in danger," Lamo told Poulsen.

Lamo's explanation to the BBC, however, sounds less like a noble attempt at protecting lives and more like a bid to save his own skin.

"At the moment he gave me the information, it was basically a suicide pact," he says. "I was worried for my family - that if I were obstructing justice that they could be caught up in any investigation."

The latter explanation might be the honest truth, but it has won Lamo no friends among those who believe that Manning should be treated as a national hero for exposing what the US Apache crew did that day in 2007. The words of the pilot on seeing the men on the ground drop like flies still send a shiver down many spines. "Oh yeah look at those dead bastards," he said. To which his colleague responded, "Good shootin'". ·