Wikileaks Source Outed To Stroke Hacker's Own Ego 347
Binary Boy writes "Bradley Manning, the US Army private arrested recently by the Pentagon for providing classified documents — including the widely seen Apache helicopter video — may have been duped by wannabe hacker Adrian Lamo, according to Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com. Lamo told Manning he could provide protection under both journalist shield laws, and the clergy-lay confidentiality tradition, and instead immediately turned him in to authorities in an act of apparent shameless self-promotion."
The article also goes into Wired's role in the whole situation, the strange, sometimes sensationalist media coverage, and the odd similarity between this case and proposed scenarios in a US Intelligence report from earlier this year aimed at undermining Wikileaks.
So.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Suppose something happened to Lamo in revenge, out there in the offline world - maybe such operations would be discouraged in future.
Re:So.... (Score:3, Interesting)
What I don't get, is how Adrian Lamo found out Manning was the guy who did it?
I mean, how do you dupe someone into giving you that kind of information if you don't know they have it?
So, it sounds like Manning was "boasting" about it - which one of the articles even uses that words, which is entirely his own stupidity and not some "operation" preformed by anyone, at all.
Re:"Salon" impresses me (Score:5, Interesting)
Manning described the incident which first made him seriously question the U.S. war in Iraq: when he was instructed to work on the case of Iraqi "insurgents" who had been detained for distributing "insurgent" literature which, when he had it translated, turned out to be nothing more than "a scholarly critique against PM Maliki":
Maliki: i had an interpreter read it for me... and when i found out that it was a benign political critique titled "Where did the money go?" and following the corruption trail within the PM's cabinet... i immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on... he didn't want to hear any of it... he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees... i had always questioned the things worked, and investigated to find the truth... but that was a point where i was a *part* of something... i was actively involved in something that i was completely against...
And he was leaking it to WikiLeaks because he believed that was where it would do the most public good:
Manning: i mean what if i were someone more malicious- i could've sold to russia or china, and made bank?
In regards to his belief that Lamo was doing it for the attention:
On May 20 -- a month ago -- Poulsen, out of nowhere, despite Lamo's not having been in the news for years, wrote a long, detailed Wired article describing serious mental health problems Lamo was experiencing... Lamo called the police, who concluded that he was experiencing such acute psychiatric distress that they had him involuntarily committed to a mental hospital for three days. That 72-hour "involuntary psychiatric hold" was then extended by a court for six more days, after which he was released to his parents' home. Lamo claimed he was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a somewhat fashionable autism diagnosis which many stars in the computer world have also claimed. In that article, Poulsen also summarized Lamo's extensive hacking history. Lamo told me that, while he was in the mental hospital, he called Poulsen to tell him what happened, and then told Poulsen he could write about it for a Wired article. So starved was Lamo for some media attention that he was willing to encourage Poulsen to write about his claimed psychiatric problems if it meant an article in Wired that mentioned his name.
It was just over two weeks after writing about Lamo's Asperger's, depression and hacking history that Poulsen, along with Kim Zetter, reported that PFC Manning had been detained, after, they said, he had "contacted former hacker Adrian Lamo late last month over instant messenger and e-mail." Lamo told me that Manning first emailed him on May 20 and, according to highly edited chat logs released by Wired, had his first online chat with Manning on May 21; in other words, Manning first contacted Lamo the very day that Poulsen's Wired article on Lamo's involuntary commitment appeared (the Wired article is time-stamped 5:46 p.m. on May 20).
Many of the bizarre aspects of this case, at least as conveyed by Lamo and Wired, are self-evident. Why would a 22-year-old Private in Iraq have unfettered access to 250,000 pages of diplomatic cables so sensitive that they "could do serious damage to national security?" Why would he contact a total stranger, whom he randomly found from a Twitter search, in order to "quickly" confess to acts that he knew could send him to prison for a very long time, perhaps his whole
That's the point (Score:5, Interesting)
Thank you for your service (Score:4, Interesting)
If this guy goes to prison, I will be the 1st one in line to thank him for his service to the country. As a Vet and citizen I want people who sacrifice for their country in ANY fashion to know they are appreciated.
Re:First rule of breaking the law (Score:3, Interesting)
The First Part is the Manning has a self-destructive personality. He might have to constantly set himself up for failure.
So the whole thing could be explained that way.
---
Second.
This whole thing smacks me of the South Park, 'having your cake and eating it too'
Obama is a 'very smart guy'.
He is conscious of the fact that things like Wiki leaks, are and openness are to be Lauded.
I think he also realizes that if he mentions this sort of thing in public that he will not make into his 2nd term.
He would be branded a traitor by the right claiming that was willing to give up national security, as well as 'Amercian Troops' right on 'American Soil' as it were.
Whether Mr Obama is doing this on his own is having help, who knows.
But the Ploy is Brilliant.
I think Obama is trying to 'discredit it'. Officially while helping it at the same time.
Thus allowing him to have his cake and eat it too.
By going after the 'founders' he keeps the site at the top of every ones radar.
By putting someone in jail. If he is a plant, then he might not actually be in jail. He is keeping the central/right side happy.
The fact that Iceland has moved forward with Shield laws for W.Leaks, keeps the left happy since the founders can move there away from any attempts of 'arrest' from the U.S
Re:That's the point (Score:3, Interesting)
What I find even more odd, is that this Private is supposed to have spilled his guts to Lamo over unencrypted AIM... AFTER contacting Lamo via PGP-encrypted e-mails?!
Re:First rule of breaking the law (Score:2, Interesting)
Who would have even looked for the leaked cables without stumbling upon them first?
Is bringing attention to the cables a good thing or "a security risk that can get people killed?" You are simultaneously praising Lamo for informing on a whistle blower and bringing attention to leaked documents in question. As for the question of who would have looked for the leaked cables, I have a solid confidence the the U.S. government's ability to comprehensively monitor Wikileaks for potentially embarrassing material.
In essence he not only helped himself, but with the media attention also helped Manning's cause.
The positive impact of the media exposure given to Manning's cause by Lamo is easily outweighed by the evidence he turned over to the government.
If Manning's documents actually prove anything then none of this will have been in vain. If they unearth nothing then Manning leaked a bunch of garbage for nothing and is not only reckless but very, very stupid.
If Manning's documents prove anything, the many years he is about to spend in prison will have been in vain.
Greenwald's suspicion is probably true (Score:5, Interesting)
The author thinks it may be a setup by the Pentagon to discredit Wikileaks.
I think that the govt has establish a relationship with Lamo in the past. Similarly, just after the Apache helicopter video became news, the govt came down hard on Manning, scared the wits out of him and made him an offer he couldn't refuse.
Now all of a sudden we are hearing about vast amounts of state secrets that nasty ol' Wikileaks took from Manning's tender but misguided hands.
(sniff) 'How could those rats do this to my Homeland?!!!' (sob...)
Only thing is Assange says he has never seen or heard about this supposed cache of stolen communications, and I tend to think that the govt is telling Manning to make this (damaging to Wikileaks) claim as part of a deal.
Re:First rule of breaking the law (Score:3, Interesting)
Crime is what legislators, prosecutors, lawyers, juries, and judges decide it is.* My guess is that Manning will be convicted of something and sent to jail**, regardless of how much of a public service he may have done.
[*: This is a description, not a judgement. There are rare instances in which we are lucky enough to have that process align well with Right and Wrong, but I am by no means claiming such luck is commonplace.]
[**: And if he does not end up in jail, the notion that this is all an anti-wikileaks disinformation operation will look a lot more likely to be correct.]
Stupid? Naive? Not The First Time We've Seen It (Score:1, Interesting)
Alex, I'll pick Occam's Razor for $100. It has occurred to me that PFC Manning was just that stupid.
I've seen an example of this sort of thing on Slashdot, where someone representing himself as an Army NCO mouthed off regarding a technical capability of his systems. It took a couple of tries reminding him of his OPSEC responsibilities before he purchased a clue, deleting his personal information from his /. profile. Too late, though, as I pulled his POC from Google cache, and within about 5 minutes strung together his specialty, his unit, its facility in the FRG, its most recent deployment to the ME, his photo from a unit newsletter, his friends and family on MySpace, and likely stateside address from Zabasearch.
Inconsistency in the story (Score:2, Interesting)
>>Lamo says that Manning thereafter sent him additional emails encrypted to his current PGP key, but that Lamo never bothered to decrypt them. Instead, Lamo claims he turned over all those Manning emails to the FBI without ever reading a single one of them. Thus, the actual initial communications between Manning and Lamo -- what preceded and led to their chat -- are completely unknown.
The only way that the FBI could've read the emails without having Lamo himself first decrypt them, is to allow the FBI access to his secret key and password. You be the judge on the plausibility of that happening.
Re:First rule of breaking the law (Score:4, Interesting)
He was ordered to use known irrelevant data to frame innocent Iraqis as dissidents. Presumably from stories of Abu Ghraib, to have them rounded up into camps and prisons where many were tortured and died.
We hung Nazis for that sort of thing, yeah... He did what we'd want a "good" Nazi to do. Hopefully we expect as much of good Americans.
This leak is apparently just the tip of the war crimes he's witnessed. With documentation from him they might be able to finally prove the situation in detainee camps (we won't even treat them like POWs) is knowingly inhumane and inflicted on innocents.
lol no (Score:3, Interesting)
Governments are *very* good at force escalation. Gandhi and MLK won by denying them legitimacy once they employed force. By comparison, the Palestinians have never gained their own state precisely because they've refused to forswear violence.
You need not be completely non-violent of course, but you must convincingly reject violence. Indeed, Gandhi and MLK both faced competition from violent groups with the same goals, but they and their lieutenants rejected violence so absolutely that government could not blame them for any violence. Arafat never seriously even sought that status.
I doubt online rights would suffer if Lameo got shot by one lone crazy with guns and NRA membership, but your public encouraging of said hypothetical gun nut makes rights activists look bad, and any concerted effort towards would be even worse.
If you feel like doing some good, how about helping convince slashdot, boing boing, etc. to impose a 1 year moratorium on wired.com links. Lameo is just a moron who tricked Manning. Wired has seriously violated journalistic integrity.