Voting Station

Adrian Lamo

Please vote to return to collections.

Computer Tech

The Resume

    (February 20, 1981-March 14, 2018)
    Born in Boston, Massachusetts
    Broke into the computer networks of the New York Times, Microsoft, WorldCom, Yahoo! and Lexis/Nexis
    Sentenced to six months of home detention and two years of probation (2004)
    Reported Chelsea Manning to Army investigators as a source of confidential documents published on WikiLeaks (2010)
    Appeared in the documentary ‘We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks’ (2013)

Why he might be annoying:

    ‘Wired’ called him ‘a serial self-promoter.’
    He was dubbed ‘the homeless hacker’ for crossing the country on Greyhound busses, couch surfing with friends and squatting in abandoned buildings.
    His ex-girlfriend described him as ‘very controlling,’ and claimed he used a stun gun on her, and that after she dumped him, he hacked into phone company databases to get her unlisted number.
    He was placed on a 72-hour involuntary psychiatric hold after his father reported that he was overmedicating himself with prescription anti-depressants (2010).
    He promised Manning confidentiality, then reported her to the authorities.

Why he might not be annoying:

    He would often offer to fix the security holes he exploited for free.
    In one of his more memorable stunts, he hacked the customer service database of Excite@Home, found a customer whose emails had gone unanswered for a year, and forwarded him all the company’s internal correspondence about his original complaint.
    He said about his decision to inform on Manning, ‘There were no right choices that day, only less wrong ones.’
    He received death threats for turning in Manning.

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 1 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 3 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 9 Votes: 77.78% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 4 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 4 Votes: 75.00% Annoying
    In 2018, Out of 10 Votes: 50.0% Annoying