On Saturday, The Next HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference was held inside the Hotel Pennsylvania in Midtown. The keynote speaker was scheduled to be Julian Assange, editor in chief of Wikileaks, a Web site that publishes anonymous leaks of sensitive documents from governments and other organizations. Assange canceled, though, because the U.S. government continues to hunt him for his role in releasing a classified gun-cam video of innocent civilians and journalists being mistakenly killed by an American helicopter gunship in Iraq on July 12, 2007. Instead, an American calling himself “Jacob Appelbaum” gave the keynote, in which he sought to rally support for Bradley Manning, the American serviceman being held in Kuwait for allegedly leaking the video, and to condemn Adrian Lamo, a hacker-turned-informer who reported Manning to the authorities.
