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.
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.
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.
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.
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.