In 2010, eight years before his mysterious death, notorious Wichita computer hacker Adrian Lamo made an online friend of Bradley Manning, then working in Army intelligence.
In time Manning revealed to Lamo that he had swiped thousands of intelligence documents and videos and forwarded them to Wiikileaks. “Hillary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public,” Manning wrote at the time.
Patriotic hacker that he was, Lamo told federal investigators what Manning was up to. This led to Manning’s arrest and eventual imprisonment but made Lamo something of a pariah in certain circles.
Manning’s star continued to rise on the left when he decided to become a she at taxpayer’s expense. So fashionable did Manning become that President Obama commuted his original 35-year sentence.
Beyond the expense, the switch has led to semantic botches like the one that follows in a tech article about Lamo’s death, “Manning disclosed to Lamo that she had gained access and leaked to Wikileaks hundreds of thousands of secret diplomatic cables.” No, he gained access. And although Caitlyn Jenner may like to play dress up, it was Bruce Jenner who won the decathlon.
In March of this year Lamo, 37, died in Wichita. At the time, the regional forensic science center in Sedgwick County confirmed his death but was unable immediately to determine the cause.
Three months later, the center issued a report on its work that failed to answer the most pressing question: how did Lamo die? “Despite a complete autopsy and supplemental testing, no definitive cause of death was identified,” Scott Kipper, the county’s deputy coroner-medical examiner said in his report. He continued: “As the cause of death cannot be definitely determined, the manner of death is best classified as undetermined.”
The report cited any number of conditions that might have contributed to Lamo’s death–kidney problems, a history of seizures, the presence in his system of “esoteric” drugs–but no hard answers.
“The concentrations of these drugs likely did not cause or contribute to death, however, the fatal ranges of some of these more esoteric drugs is not well established [or] described,” said Kipper. “It should also be noted that the esoteric nature of some of these drugs suggest the possibility that other rare drugs not tested for may have been used [or] abused.
Apparently, medical examiners found a sticker on Lamo’s thigh under this clothes that reads: “Adrian Lamo Project Vigilant Assistant Director Threat Analysis/Investigation 70 Bates Street Northwest, Washington DC 20001.”
Sounds like a plot line for “House of Cards.”
