Adrian Lamo, the hacker who exposed Chelsea Manning as the person leaking US Army documents to WikiLeaks, has died aged 37.
It is not yet known how he died but his death has been confirmed by a coroner in Sedgwick County, Kansas.
Writing in a Facebook post in a group called 2600: The Hacker Quarterly Facebook group, his father Mario Lamo said: "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,"
Lamo was born in 1981 in Boston, Massachusetts and, as well as his role in exposing Chelsea Manning (then known as Bradley Manning), he was responsible for hacking huge companies like Yahoo!, AOL, and The New York Times.
He was dubbed 'the world's most hated hacker' for passing on information that led to Manning's arrest after he had befriended her.
Lamo had defended his actions in handing Manning over to the authorities but had been branded a 'snitch' and regarded as a traitor to the hacking community.
When speaking at the Hackers On Planet Earth conference in 2010 he was booed off stage by his peers.
Despite this, he always said that he had done the right thing. He told The Guardian in 2011: "I think about [Manning] every day. The decision was not one I decided to make, but was thrust upon me.
"Had I done nothing, I would always have been left wondering whether the hundreds of thousands of documents that had been leaked to unknown third parties would end up costing lives, either directly or indirectly.
"I'm not a politician running for re-election. I don't need to be popular among the hacker community, and I most likely will never be liked in the hacker community."
In a separate interview with US News, he said: "Literally dozens, if not hundreds, of hackers have told me about their exploits,
"My standing rule had always been if the harm to the individual from prospective punishment outweighs the harm to the public from what they did, I don't say anything, and Manning was the only case that came across my desk that tripped that rule."
Manning was initially sentenced to 35 years in prison, but President Barack Obama commuted the sentence in 2017 and she was released.
She is now planning to run for government in her home state of Maryland.
In the hacking community, Lamo was known as 'The Homeless Hacker' as a result of his tendency to move around a lot. He would often do his hacking from public libraries and shared computers.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange - perhaps unsurprisingly - didn't mourn Lamo's passing, tweeting: "Coroner says serial FBI snitch Adrian Lamo is dead. Lamo, a fake journalist, petty conman & betrayer of basic human decency, promised alleged source @xychelsea journalistic protection, friendship and support, then sold him to the FBI."
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