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* SP Weekly | stweekly.com | NewS : Feature A Luty tu raun,rusiais Lai, WY Ger gree Wore well." The family spent a few years in Lamo's father's native | Colombia, then returned to the United States when Lamo's younger brother was born prematurely and needed medical attention here. His parents settled in the Bay Area in time for Adrian to start high school; he never finished. Following three unsuccessful stints at San Francisco schools (where, to no one's great surprise, he had some problems with authority), Lamo opted to get a GED instead. By this time he was 17, his parents had moved to Sacramento, and he'd decided to remain behind on the streets of San Francisco. Adrian's parents, Mary Atwood and Mario Lama, have never been quoted in media reports about their son, but they agree to respond in writing to some of my questions. ("As long as they don't show you any baby pictures," Adrian grumbles.) I ask them several: What was he like as a kid? Are you proud of what he does? Do you ever just wish he'd get a “normal” job? What's the source of his unique outlook on life? Mario and Mary, whom Adrian refers to as former "young radical types," avoid answering most of the questions directly, but they do respond with a few warm paragraphs about their son. "Since he was a baby, he had an outstanding intelligence and verbal ability," they write. "By the time he was three, he was already completely bilingual (English/Spanish). He easily jearned to read at home and always loved books. As a child, he wasn't the type that tinkered with gadgets, although he did begin playing with Lego's at a very young age. ... When he was 6 years old, he received his first computer, a Commodore 64, from his grandmother, and soon mastered its use." Indeed, it was this Commodore -- the first personal computer for so many American families in the 1980s -- that sparked Lamo's interest in virtual trespassing. L He was playing a text-based adventure game, in the ancient era before full-color graphics, and became “intensely frustrated” because he couldn't get past a certain point. "I neglected to pick up the pebbie-of-something, so consequently I couldn't get through the so- and-so," Lamo recalis with a grimace. “After days of trying to get through, I said, ‘Fuck this,’ and I picked up the Commodore's manual and read about the list command, which shows the program code. I rewrote that particular part to let me through, and that was that." He shrugs. "Really, everything since then has been larger versions of that, being unwilling to accept reality as It's presented to me, the idea that this is denied to me, and there's no way around it.” He pauses. “There's always a way around it.” After his parents moved to Sacramento, Lamo began drifting around the city, working at a few nonprofits, doing some security work for Levi Strauss. He lived in a furnished apartment for a while, although when he moved back out, plastic sheets still covered most of the furniture. "I never made a conscious decision to start bouncing around,” he says. "I just wasn't interested in finding an apartment in the Bay Area during the dot-comness." FBI(19-cv-1495)-135 http://www.sfweekly.convissues/2003-04-16/ feature.html/1/index.html 6/20/2003