While each person brings their own perceptions to an issue, few have generated so much controversy sourced from so little context as my own on the day I electronically met Bradley Manning, in 2010. As with most things, there's more to it than the facts: I write this with the intent that you factor this into your narratives and truths on this issue as you best see fit.

In 2003, when I was 22 years old, I spent a period of time wanted by the FBI, for crimes I felt to be well-intentioned, even warranted. Spending a good deal of time on the Internet exercising what might be best-defined as weaponized curiosity, I'd decided that, as long as I was engaging in unauthorized network intrusion – some call it "hacking"; I personally never did – I might as well go about it in what I believed to be a socially responsible manner. I also thought perhaps to advance the dialogue on responsible disclosure on certain topics.

Internal networks of some of the largest and most infrastructure-critical companies in existence at the time fell victim in this course of conduct; I won't bore you with the list. It's safe to say, at the time, the security community was pretty well aware that this was happening, and my conduct was nothing if not criminally transparent.

What was less widely-known was that my access to a corporate intranet was a means, not an end. Once in – often by proxy (the computer kind) – I had no more access than the freshest intern. I would thereafter spend days mapping out the internal workings, finding further insecure critical systems, picturing the structure in my own mind, and extracting data.

I once spent over 24 hours at a San Francisco Kinkos copy shop doing so for a particular network. Given that I neither requested nor accepted any compensation from the companies involved, I can tell you in retrospect, it was a labor of love, albeit an illegal one.

The reason that this kind of exploration went less documented is that the public largely never saw it. Headlines tend to run to "Lamo hacks [X] corporation network", rather than a "Lamo gains access needed to fire Bernie Ebbers and turn off Bank of [redacted] network". I won't deny that I kept fairly vast amounts of data – I last saw it on a bridge somewhere – but I also kept it in close quarters.

It was kept this way for cause. As I read these documents, as I saw outlined arcana of critical infrastructure chokepoints, previous and existing wiretaps and pen registers, satellite control, offices and personnel of three-letter agencies, lists upon lists of passwords and access codes, how to access emergency communications in the event of a nuclear war, the occasional odd person who was supposed to be dead, etc – the thought that we would all be better-off if the public saw them never occurred to me.

The very reason I was reading these things is that they were beyond the ken of the public, and involved matters that I sometimes knew very little about. I tried to be socially conscious about what I was doing; throwing what I saw to the wind wholesale for public consumption was never an option – any more than going in for the sake of deleting it would have been.

The public would never know how to use it safely, or be informed about its context. As a raw data dump, they literally would not have been able to handle the truth – if in fact I had any truth to give.

It wasn't that I didn't want people to know the truth. It was that I couldn't tell them the truth. I could only tell them facts, and facts without meaning are the very enemy of truth. I said once that lies have no rights against truth. I was wrong. In daily life, it's the truth that's disenfranchised. What fits the popular narrative, what makes an observer happy with the consistency of events, is what is believed.

I could give people facts, but only in a disjointed, abrupt way that would be absorbed by their perception as they best validated their respective storyline – for I had no better one to give them. Against that kind of validation, the truth is only ever a fringe theory. More convenient beliefs are the incumbent.

There's a second tier here. I've said I tried to be socially responsible, even that to respect the privacy of others in my intrusions. But while I honestly had only good intentions, I was not fully informed myself as to the consequences of what I was doing might be for others. I've also said it was a crime for which I would take responsibility if it came to that – and I said that well before the FBI came looking – and that having good intentions about my conduct did not excuse it.

While I've made endless lighthearted fun of the FBI, I understood then and now that they had a mission to fulfill: it was their function to act their part. So when they finally did, I can't say I found the whole thing particularly surprising or in violation of any human right to extract non-public data. I can allow that it was Kafkaesque, but it would have seemed drab any other way. These things happen.

Since my guilty plea in that case, I have majored in journalism, written locally, and enjoyed light press photography as a non-criminal exercise of my curiosity. And I was, in 1998, ordained a ULC minister. I was also pretty regularly contacted by hackers wanting to talk about my story, or theirs, so I developed a disclaimer for conversations that might be entering dubious territory, involving elements of legal privilege available to the clergy and to the press.

On its face, it is understandable that such a disclaimer, if not adhered to, would be overtly duplicitous. But when it was offered, there was no reasonable expectation that merely sentences later, I would be faced with the choice between interdicting the freedom of the man in the IM window, or gambling that no part of literally hundreds of thousands of classified documents would intersect harmfully with the life of any person affected by their contents.

None of this happened in a vacuum; my duty was not to Manning alone. The avalanche had started, as Ambassador Kosh once observed. It was too late for the pebbles to vote. In the intersection between the one and the many, there was no clemency in numbers.

At the time of our conversations, Bradley Manning was 22 years of age – my own age when I made the choice to surrender to federal authorities. He was curious; I hope he still is. He was ideologically motivated from a position he saw as well-intentioned, and he represented his motive as social responsibility in the pursuit of a wider benefit regarding disclosure of certain information. I saw someone very familiar that day, and suddenly felt very old.

As much as ever, I feel that curiosity in itself is no crime. But curiosity is a force, of its own kind. As with any use of force, it must be proportionate, responsible, and ever-informed by the caution that just because we can do a thing, it does not follow that we must do that thing. And like any force, it is agnostic to the intent of its wielder.

When I say that my choice was a consistent one, that's exactly what I mean. I don't say that it was the right one – there were no right choices that day, only less wrong ones. It was cold, it was needful, and it was no one's to make except mine. It hinged on the very values that had led up to that point.

What I decided then I had truly decided long before, in deference to the hubris of believing that the masses only await our touch in order to to be enlightened. In that sense, I remain who I have always been.