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wk WS UaLy [Saray ru pare tre meee 7 *don't know* what you'd do in someone else's shoes until you actually have to face their decisions. Moralization is easy. Making decisions that may save or cost lives is hard.” There are many in the computer security industry who, while freeiy admitting they find some form of nobility in Lamo's peculiar brand of hacking, worry that those who follow his lead may do so not because they admire his spirit, but because they want to grab some headlines themselves. “Benevolent hackers have been a piece of the computer underground for years," says Skoudis of Predictive Systems. “Adrian doesn't leave me ill at ease ... he's too smart. My fear is that it's not reproducible. Adrian does his thing, but Adrian is pretty decent about what he does; someone who doesn't have his skills, or his personality, could be like a bull in a china shop." FBI officials, meanwhile, won't say whether the bureau has ever investigated any of Lamo's intrusions. “There's no way I'd be able to tell you that," a spokeswoman in the FBI's Washington, D.C., office says. . At one hotel in Washington, D.C., there's a vending machine that dispenses 20 cents in nickels every time it's hit with a Taser, an electric stun-gun meant for personal defense that is one of the more useful things Adrian Lamo has ever owned. “You never know what something's going to do when you Tase it," Lamo enthuses. "It's like the Swiss Army Knife of electronic devices. " it's a mild Sunday evening in late March, and Lamo has cashed ina gift card at Banana Republic for a new black jacket, which he wears over his usual dun-colored pants and boots. He's also sporting a new black shoulder bag -- complete with a sleeve on the strap for his cell phone -- that he bought, with another gift card, at the Gap. Protests against Operation Iraqi Freedom have roiled these streets in downtown San Francisco for much of the past two weeks, but Lamo has been away from the city, recuperating, again, from too many steepless nights. Since turning 22, Lamo has noticed that his sleep schedule (or lack thereof) has been harder on him, and as we walk down the mostly empty streets, he stops to gaze in the window of a health food store. He's heard that some herbs and vitamins have anti-convulsive properties, which might help him stave off the spasms he suffers when he doesn't get enough rest. The convulsions are the result of a neurological disorder, which Lamo says stems from an amphetamine overdose he endured last year. As with most of the steady influences on Lamo's life, drug use is something he regards as a necessary element of his lifestyle -- which also includes mainlining caffeine-laced energy drinks like Red Bull, Jolt Cola, and Mountain Dew Code Red. “T'ye resisted including this in news reports because I think it would make me intolerable to the government if 1 was advocating both FBI(19-cv-1495)-140 http -//wrww.sfweekly.com/issues/2003-04-16/feature.html/2/index.html 6/20/2003