Adrian Lamo dead at 37 – Hacker who shopped Wikileaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning to the FBI passes away

HACKER Adrian Lamo who turned Chelsea Manning into the FBI has died, according to a Facebook post by a family member.

In the post Adrian's father Mario Lamo wrote: "With great sadness and a broken heart I have to let know all of Adrian's friends and acquaintances that he is dead. A bright mind and compassionate soul is gone, he was my beloved son."

The Colombian-American hacker first rose to notoriety in the early-2000s by hacking into systems at The New York Times, Microsoft, and Yahoo, which he was subsequently convicted for.

Lamo was more recently widely known for his involvement in passing information on WikiLeaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning, a former US Army soldier who befriended Lamo told him she had downloaded and burned classified files to a disk.

Lamo, with help from two friends in military intelligence, informed the US military of the breach.