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From: Greegor on 31 Jul 2010 02:37
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/05/lamo/

Ex-Hacker Adrian Lamo Institutionalized for Asperger's
By Kevin Poulsen May 20, 2010 5:46 pm

Last month Adrian Lamo, a man once hunted by the FBI, did something
contrary to his nature. He picked up a payphone outside a Northern
California supermarket and called the cops.

Someone had grabbed Lamo's backpack containing the prescription anti-
depressants he'd been on since 2004, the year he pleaded guilty to
hacking The New York Times. He wanted his medication back. But when
the police arrived at the Safeway parking lot it was Lamo, not the
missing backpack, that interested them. Something about his halting,
monotone speech, perhaps slowed by his medication, got the officers'
attention.

An ambulance arrived. "After a few moments of conversation, they just
kind of exchanged a look and told me to get on the stretcher," says
Lamo.

Thus began Lamo's journey through California's mental health system —
and self discovery. He was transported to a local emergency room and
put under guard, and then transferred to the Woodland Memorial
Hospital near Sacramento, where he was placed on a 72-hour involuntary
psychiatric hold under a state law allowing the temporary forced
hospitalization of those judged dangerous or unable to care for
themselves. As the staff evaluated him and adjusted his medication, a
judicial officer extended his stay, and three days became nine.

When Lamo was finally discharged to his parents' house on May 7, he
left the hospital with a new diagnosis. At 29 years old Lamo learned
he has Asperger's Disorder.

"It's kind of a surprise that it took me until almost 30 to find I had
a particular disorder and get proper treatment for it," Lamo says.

Sometimes called the "geek syndrome," Asperger's is a mild form of
autism that makes social interactions difficult, and can lead to
obsessive, highly focused behavior.

There are no reliable figures on how many people have Asperger's, but
anecdotally a lot of them are drawn into the computer field,
particularly the logic-heavy world of coding. BitTorrent creator Bram
Cohen has diagnosed himself with the disorder, and Microsoft founder
Bill Gates is frequently speculated to have it.

Also anecdotally, people with Asperger's are frequently diagnosed in
adulthood, even into their 50s, according to the U.S. Autism and
Asperger's Association. As in Lamo's case, the diagnosis often follows
a run-in with the police, says Dennis Debbaudt, an independent
consultant who trains law enforcement agencies on interacting with
people on the autistic spectrum.

"They may be living a life where people think they're odd, they're
unusual, they're eccentric, whatever you want to call it," says
Debbaudt. "But nobody's thinking, 'Oh, by the way, I think they have
Asperger's Syndrome.' It's not something that would pop into the mind
of the general person or law enforcement. It's just, 'There's
something different here. This person communicates different. His body
language is different.'"

The Asperger's diagnosis, though, didn't come as a complete surprise
to Lamo or his family — the therapist Lamo had been seeing for
depression had already suggested he visit a specialist to be evaluated
for Asperger's. Now, the new medication prescribed in Woodland has
made a positive change in his interactions with other people.

"Talking to strangers was really hard for me," Lamo says. "I had to
script it all in my head and act out normal behaviors in a very
conscious way. Essentially, I had to learn how human beings act."

Photo caption: Adrian Lamo at the home of his parents in Carmichael,
California, five days after his release from an involuntary
psychiatric hold.

"Now I no longer feel there's a surface tension that I have to break
through when I talk to somebody, like I'm a fish going after a
particularly tasty bug and I have to break through the water to get
it," he continues. "I just talk to somebody, like it's a natural
function."

To a reporter who's been covering Lamo for a decade, the diagnosis
makes a layman's instant, intuitive sense.

Lamo made his mark in the early 2000s with a string of brazen but
mostly harmless hacks against large companies, conducted out in the
open and with a striking naiveté as to the inevitable consequences for
himself. In 2001, when he was 20, Lamo snuck into an unprotected
content-management tool at Yahoo's news site to tinker with a Reuters
story, adding a made-up quote by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Lamo's other targets included WorldCom, Excite(a)Home and Microsoft; he
alerted the press to each intrusion, and sometimes worked with the
hacked company to close the security holes he'd exploited. Unemployed
at the time, and prone to wander the country by Greyhound, he was
given the appellation "the Homeless Hacker" by the media.

His hacking career ended around 2002, after Lamo penetrated the
internal network of The New York Times and added himself to the
paper's database of op-ed contributors, putting himself in the virtual
company of William F. Buckley Jr. and Jimmy Carter. The Times didn't
think it was funny, and the FBI and federal prosecutors in New York
charged Lamo under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He pleaded guilty
in 2004, and was sentenced to six months of house arrest at his
parents' home in Carmichael, California, followed by two years of
probation.

It was around that time that Lamo fell into a deep depression that has
dogged him until last month. "I'd associated his depression with what
had happened with the FBI," says his father, Mario Lamo, who describes
his son as having had a normal childhood. "As a child he would give
speeches to people and entertain visitors and talk about a thousand
things, and we didn't notice anything irregular," he says.

But as a teenager, Lamo began struggling in social situations. Since
his discharge from Woodland, "I've noticed an incredible difference,"
says the senior Lamo.

Lamo joins a growing list of computer intruders who've been diagnosed
with Asperger's, though usually the diagnosis comes when the hacker
faces the criminal justice system for the first time, rather than six
years later.

In December, a defense psychiatrist concluded that credit card thief
Albert Gonzalez exhibited behavior consistent with Asperger's. A
government-appointed psychiatrist rejected the claim, and Gonzalez got
20 years. Earlier, in August, a Los Angeles computer intruder involved
in a lucrative fraud scheme received a slightly reduced sentence
because of his Asperger's, which his lawyer argued made him vulnerable
to manipulation by the ringleader in the scheme.

In the most high-profile case, the British hacker Gary McKinnon was
diagnosed with Asperger's at the age of 42, shortly after losing a
legal challenge to an extradition order that would have sent him to
America to face charges of sabotaging unclassified Pentagon computers.
The diagnosis opened new legal avenues for McKinnon, who now appears
likely to avoid extradition.

For his part, Lamo thinks Asperger's might explain his knack for
slipping into corporate networks — he usually operated with little
more than a web browser and a lot of hunch work. "I have always
maintained that what I did isn't necessarily technical, it's about
seeing things differently," he says. "So if my brain is wired
differently, that makes sense."

But he scoffs at the notion that Asperger's should mitigate the
consequences of illegal behavior. Asperger's might help explain his
success in hacking, but not his willingness to do it, he says. "If, in
fact, the diagnosis is accurate, it had zip to do with my actions at
that time."

While Lamo thinks he shouldn't have been confined against his will, he
says most of the hospital staff were well-intentioned and
professional, and he's been happier since the incident. "Many of them
were beautiful people who had a great deal of genuine concern for
their patients, and I feel that I benefited from their attention," he
says.

He tried to help them, as well. After the staff discovered his hacking
past, they began seeking him out for computer advice. "The questions
changed from, 'Do you know where you are? What's today's date?,' to,
'Hey, I have a Mac."

"They also untaped the login and password from the state mental health-
database terminal at a nurse's station," he adds.

Today, he says, "I feel less sedated, more social, and I feel better
able to carry out the day-to-day functions of the average member of
society.

"I still can't say if the situation were to be repeated back at the
Safeway, that they wouldn't look at me and say, 'Yeah, yeah, better
get him in.'"

(Photos: Ariel Zambelich/Wired.com)
From: Nunya on 31 Jul 2010 03:35
On Jul 30, 11:37 pm, Greegor <greego...(a)gmail.com> wrote:

You can guess the tune to read this one to...

Go away, little girl.

Go AWAY, little girl.

You're not mature enough to be posting here...

Abuse complaint forwarded.
From: Greegor on 31 Jul 2010 04:26
On Jul 31, 2:35 am, Nunya <jack_sheph...(a)cox.net> wrote:
> On Jul 30, 11:37 pm, Greegor <greego...(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
>   You can guess the tune to read this one to...
>
> Go away, little girl.
>
>   Go AWAY, little girl.
>
>   You're not mature enough to be posting here...
>
>   Abuse complaint forwarded.

Did you use all 75 of your sock identities?
Or Archie or Jack Shephard?
Post a copy of your complaint e-mail.
This will go on your assessment.
From: John Larkin on 31 Jul 2010 11:30
On Fri, 30 Jul 2010 23:37:38 -0700 (PDT), Greegor
<greegor47(a)gmail.com> wrote:

>http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/05/lamo/
>
>Ex-Hacker Adrian Lamo Institutionalized for Asperger's
>By Kevin Poulsen May 20, 2010 5:46 pm
>
>Last month Adrian Lamo, a man once hunted by the FBI, did something
>contrary to his nature. He picked up a payphone outside a Northern
>California supermarket and called the cops.


There's a really good bit in Lewis' book "The Big Short" about a
brilliant stock trader who, after his kid is diagnosed with Aspergers,
discovers that he has it himself. He proceeds to address that
situation, well, very methodically.

John

From: Dirk Bruere at NeoPax on 2 Aug 2010 18:20
On 31/07/2010 07:37, Greegor wrote:
> "Talking to strangers was really hard for me," Lamo says. "I had to
> script it all in my head and act out normal behaviors in a very
> conscious way. Essentially, I had to learn how human beings act."

Exactly.
Which is what I did.
I even reduced smalltalk to an easy formula:
a) Feed back - who, how, what, when, where, why
b) The thing people most like talking about is themselves

Body language can be emulated quite easily (as long as I am not tired).

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onetribe - Occult Talk Show
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