Slashdot Mirror
Wikileaks Source Outed To Stroke Hacker's Own Ego
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.
You may not like the guy, but it seems like he has done some legitimate hacking and cracking in his day.
If you don't want to get caught keep your damn mouth shut.
Indeed. This guy "outed" himself by bragging online to other people.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
href=http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/wikileaks-part-ii-adrian-lamo-responds-580-0?page=0,1
and
href=http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/spies-wikileaks-and-hackers-oh-my-443
Highlight of the reply from Lamo:
You have a number of questions that could be answered by contacting me. I politely request that you consider doing so via my publicly-available contact details in the future - and if you did & I was somehow unreachable, I retract this & apologize.
I would suggest that Manning is neither a whistleblower nor a spy (although he may be guilty of espionage, which is a different animal in some circles.) I was aware that KLP had little interest in keeping my identity secret.
Whether I was right is not for me to globally judge (though I believe I did the right thing, which is also a different animal. Yes, I'm splitting that hair mighty thin.)
Poulsen knows I've been around the block a couple dozen times, and I've been a bona-fide confidential source, albeit never for Poulsen. I don't feel taken advantage of. If I was pressured, it was up to me to exercise my right & ability to resist.
I object to your characterization of Asperger's as a "disability" - it's more-often described as a "syndrome" or "condition" in psychiatric circles, and in a less pejorative fashion to boot.
I know Poulsen isn't my friend. We don't socialize. We don't go clubbing. He's the most highly ethical journalist I know. If I were unaware that he considers me a source, not a friend, I'd be taken advantage of. I am however quite aware of this.
The government - and this is important - never asked me to be a source for them in the Manning case, in terms of eliciting information in furtherance of prosecution. This request would be improper, and I would decline in the interests of justice.
I have no reason to lead me to believe that Assange is on the run from anything larger than his own PR machine. It's perverse that this story has increasingly drifted from focusing on Manning to focusing on Assange.
I hope this clarifies things for you from my end. I've been entirely candid with you, and hope you'll update with a clarification from my end.
Unlike the summary posted above, the article is very unbiased. I'm surprised how sensational slashdot has become on issues like this. This isn't about some hacker wanting street cred, it's about an agent of the government getting a criminal to talk. Salon even stops slander found in other articles that is just journalism upon journalism leads to US Government vs. WikiLeaks, which at this point looks completely ridiculous.
I for one congratulate Salon for this very well balanced article.
You know, Manning could have just dropped off the package (containing video media) anonymously to the local media or some such in the middle of the night. I would have advised wearing latex gloves in the process. Either way, if you want to be a whistleblower, do so without it being traced back to you.
It seems as though this guy didn't leak the data for the public good, but rather because he was angry. He was getting back at people etc, etc. Well that sort of thinking doesn't lead to good decision making.
TFA has excerpts from the chat in which Manning had told Lamo that he wanted this material out in the public domain to spur debate, that he was having some moral issues with how the military was doing business. What's your source that he was doing this for revenge?
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
ggreenwald: Good Gawker post on Wired's concealment of the Lamo-Manning chat logs: [is.gd]
kpoulsen: @ggreenwald I'm supposed to take journalistic ethics lessons from Gawker? Pass
ggreenwald: @kpoulsen No - you should explain whether the claims Adrian made about his chat that don't appear in your published logs are in them
ggreenwald: @kpoulsen And you should release the parts you're concealing that don't reveal harmful national security secrets or very personal issues
You didn't follow the story. Wikileaks has no relation to Lamo at all. They didn't give him any access to anything. Wikileaks had no idea who submitted the videos. Manning told Lamo he submitted the videos. Wikileaks wasn't involved. Assange didn't go public with anything. The "scandal" is that Lamo may have lied to Manning and told him that their conversation was confidential and then gone and used it anyway.
Please, I was disconnecting modems for the lulz while this guy was learning 2 times 2 is 4.
Maybe when a stranger at the other end of a keyboard tells you that he is a journalist and priest you should check up on his credentials before you admit to him that you committed a felony?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
It is the freakin' Middle East, everybody has guns
I *SERIOUSLY* doubt that.
According to Spiegel the gun ownership rate in Iraq is 39 guns for every 100 people. When you factor in kids as presumably unarmed, I think saying that "Everybody has guns" is probably close to the truth.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The airmen did kill unarmed civilians but you have to realize that these civilians were journalists hanging out with armed men. The journalists were carrying cameras but there were men holding RPGs and AK-47s in that crowd they were hanging out with.
I don't think that's the case. It is my understanding that those civilians weren't killed because they were hanging out with armed men, they were killed because their camera were mistaken for weapons.
From http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6344FW20100406:
The gunsight tracks two of the men, identified by WikiLeaks as the Reuters news staff, as the fliers identify their cameras as weapons. Military spokesman Turner said that during the engagement, the helicopter mistook a camera for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
If you read the story, Greenwald writes about several accounts of newspapers sitting on stories to help President Bush. The NY Times sitting on the illegal wiretapping of the US for a year until after the election at the request of Bush was one. Then there's the stuff the Washington Post held onto: the CIA black sites. And the mention of creepy David Finkel for the Post holding onto the same "Collateral Murder" video.
Plus we now have Obama cracking down on leaks with prison terms. Not going after the illegal stuff that caused the leak, but the leakers themselves.
Basically, wikileaks is the best option. I wish Manning had been quiet but he's 22 and wasn't thinking the whole thing through.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
It is still a crime when it exposes another crime just the same as a crime doesn't negate another crime.
In other words, if you break and enter a building in order to obtain evidence that someone murdered someone, neither crime disappears unless you are the cops hiding certain facts that your supervisor doesn't want known. there might be some instances where the crime becomes un-prosecutable because of the way evidence was gathered making it unusable, but it doesn't disappear or get negated.
Come on, that's hardly a fully truthful representation of events. Firstly, yes, they thought they saw an RPG, which they would have been *well* outside the effective range of (and that's effective range for hitting large armoured targets, not attack helicopers). So it was, strictly speaking, a potential danger. Legally that probably justifies immediate lethal force. But in reality, it would have been perfectly safe for them to continue evaluating the situation.
Secondly, it's not like they opened fire while the camera was being aimed round the corner at them. They saw the camera being aimed, decided it was an RPG, then continued their orbit for nearly another 180 degrees before getting permission and opening fire. At which point they should have seen a group of not certainly armed people strolling along in a big dense group looking like they hadn't a care in the world. This is when a levelheaded person should think "these guys don't look like militants who've just spotted an Apache and decided to take it down with an RPG".
It's difficult to be levelheaded in combat. But the decisions they made were really bad ones, even considering it from their perspective.