Ex-Hacker Consummates Deal With Salon.com; Refutes Conspiracy Theories

July 4, 2010 - PRLog -- Former hacker Adrian Lamo finalized his acceptance of Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald's offer to publish a rebuttal to a recent Salon.com item by Greenwald.

The item, which accused Lamo and Wired.com's Kevin Poulsen of being a part of a vast government conspiracy to destroy Internet data trafficking site Wikileaks.org, was widely and incorrectly distributed as fact on the Internet.

In his reply, Lamo outed Greenwald's primary source, Jacob Appelbaum, as being a Wikileaks collaborator, as confirmed by multiple sources. Appelbaum has been a frequent critic of Lamo since Lamo cooperated with military authorities in the arrest of PFC. Bradley Manning, who has been accused of passing classified information to Wikileaks.

Lamo also detailed the assistance he rendered to Salon after gaining access to all Salon premium subscriber data in 2003. The web site had promised to cover its own intrusion in its own pages, but backed out of the deal out of fear that it could impact potential investors.

"Salon's accusations that two of the best-known ex-hackers in the world collaborated with the government to bring down some Internet site could barely grace the pages of a bad spy novel," Lamo retorted.

In an e-mail exchange late Saturday, Greenwald said of Appelbaum: "His relationship with WikiLeaks and Assange is and was both unknown to me and totally irrelevant," to which Lamo replied "I find it both hilarious and incredibly appropriate that you think having your source be a confidante of the primary antagonist here is irrelevant."

Greenwald refused to discuss the matter on the telephone, and refused to answer further questions on the topic, leaving what Lamo described as "the unmistakable impression of journalistic collusion for the express purpose of discrediting a critic," Lamo concluded.

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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. 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.