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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.
If you don't want to get caught keep your damn mouth shut.
Yes, I think this hacker is aiming for all the lulz he can get. Adrian Lamo? Adrian Lmao? indeed....
Suppose something happened to Lamo in revenge, out there in the offline world - maybe such operations would be discouraged in future.
That is a game any number can play. But the pros are likely to win.
He actually believed that Lamo was an ordained minister, and that his chat with him constituted a confession?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
All I care about is why that footage hasn't really been all that well explained by the military.
I want to see and hear both sides on this obviously, but pointing out the motivation as hubris at this point is sort of the smaller part of a bigger picture.
crazy dynamite monkey
Honestly, if you're going to leak government docs to Wikileaks, you should't go around tooting your horn about it to random "hackers" you find on-line. This guy may have been caught in the end anyway, but he didn't do himself any favors by not KEEPING HIS MOUTH SHUT about it.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
that he would betray the confidence of someone who trusted him.
Suppose something happened to Lamo in revenge, out there in the offline world - maybe such operations would be discouraged in future.
That is a game any number can play. But the pros are likely to win.
That's odd you feel that way, considering the amateurs outnumber the pros 1000 to 1.
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.
There's a real difference in personality type and action between people with different motivations for breaking a trust and revealing confidential data.
In the case of conscience, it is because you really believe this is important to the public good. You believe that the world needs this information to be public. That was the case with The Pentagon Papers. The reason Ellsberg leaked the documents was he felt that he had to. He had tried to contact Senators and have them deal with it, but they wouldn't. He was out of options more or less, and felt the only way to deal with it was public disclosure, that the public's need to know outweighed the oath he'd taken to keep classified information secret.
However this was not a case like that, it was a case of ego. Manning was pissed off (in part because apparently he'd been broken up with) and decided to act out on it, in this case by leaking documents. He may have felt they should be public, but his motivation was ego. Well guess what? When ego is involved, people like to brag. They can't help but run their mouth to show how awesome they are.
Personally I don't feel a lot of sympathy for him for that reason. Were this a case of a deep personal belief, I can respect that, however he was just being spiteful more or less. Also, if he is telling the truth about leaking a quarter million diplomatic cables it is clear he doesn't care. There is no way he read all of those and decided they all needed to be public, he's just leaking information indiscriminately.
Whatever the case, it isn't likely to go well for him. Given that this was done in the course of his duties as military personnel, he will most likely be tried by court marshal as per the UCMJ. Means he's not likely to find a sympathetic civilian jury.
That, of course, ignores the fact that others are playing games that put our freedom and safety at risk at every turn.
There are people who seek to justify war and killing at every opportunity. Some seek to enrich themselves through the military industrial complex. Others by taking the resources of foreign lands. Meanwhile these actions make every citizen and resident of the U.S. less safe because the rest of the planet is gradually loosing appreciation for the U.S. and are taking it out on the people of the U.S.
The winning move is definitely not "not to play." In fact, it is the most assured way to lose... we are all losing while the players are winning.
I mean, really: Protip:
1. Go to some Internet café and upload everything to a "free homepage", "online hard drive" or similar service.
2. Go to another Internet café and post the link to a couple of forums that Wikileaks people frequent, saying that you just found it on that homepage trough a random google search.
3. Watch how after you leave the computer at the Internet cafés, they get wiped and overwritten with a disk image.
4. Watch dozens of customers use the same PC in the next hours/days, making it impossible to know by the fingerprints or by asking the people there, who actually did the upload or posts.
5. WIN!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The Americans are so self centred and introverted, they will commit patricide for purely save face.
Unlike the pure, upstanding people from every other country on earth, who would never dream of doing such things? It's not just Americans who suck, it's people in general.
... and then they built the supercollider.
If you read about Lamo's reaction to story (Wired had an excellent article about it), you'd find it has nothing to do with "ego." And it has nothing to do with being a "snitch." He said himself that he agonized over the decision for a long time because normally he wouldn't turn someone in. And he supports Wikileaks. But in this case, Manning was completely reckless, vacuuming up any and every piece of classified information he could find, and "throwing it up in the air." This is a legitimate threat to national security. Manning wasn't identifying abuses anymore, he wanted to create anarchy. He said it himself in one of his chats.
Releasing embassy cables could reveal names of operatives, and details of secret operations that really should be kept secret. Just because it's secret doesn't mean it's unethical or some abuse of power. There's plenty of people out there collecting information for our government about real threats in the world, and those people put their lives at risk for a good cause (most of them). They haven't done anything wrong. Yet they might find themselves in a Chinese prison never to be seen again once their name is released, and for no reason than some out-of-control monkey who wanted to create "anarchy." I would've done the same.
I will admit, I do not know what his motivations are, but then we'll never know. He could say one thing and simply be lying. However the way he has acted leads me to believe ego was the driving force. As I said, the biggest would be running his mouth like he did. He wanted credit for what he'd done, but of course that would get him in trouble. So he was bragging to those he believed he was safe in telling.
Then there's the events preceding the leak. By his own statements his girlfriend had broken up with him, he'd be demoted for assaulting another solider, and he felt like his family wasn't supporting him. That is not a mindset that to me sounds like ground work for a rational decision. Sounds to me like he was angry, and the military was the target that bore the brunt of his anger. He may claim it was a moral decision, but people are able to rationalize all kinds of things. To me it sounds like ego.
Finally there's the 260,000 diplomatic cables he claims to have released, but that have not yet been seen. Now there's one of two ways this goes:
1) He really did leak a quarter million pieces of classified correspondence. In this case, it is a purse ego move as there's no way he could have looked at them all and decided they were relevant. He was just shotgun releasing everything he could, since his ego told him that he was the good guy and whatever he does was right since it gets back at those that hurt him.
2) He made it all up, in an attempt to appear more competent, more powerful, etc than he really was. That is pure ego, making things up for the purpose of appearance.
So all in all, to me it looks like the guy was driven by his ego, not his conscience, to do what he did.
Shooting Reuters reporters and a van of civilians is a secret that should be kept now?
Hell Yea. Sometimes the best service that you can do for your country is calling into question those who are using the military industrial complex to service their own needs rather then the needs of their country. National security should not be used as a pretense to cover up politically unpopular 'mistakes'
-Not all the enemies of freedom are overseas. Some of them are right here close to home, tightly nestled in a warm blanket political influence and corporate nepotism.
Maybe he's a run-of-the-mill stupid, naive, thinks-he-knows-everything 22-year-old how royally fucked up in the traditional way, being at that age where you have too much power and too little wisdom?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Shooting Reuters reporters and a van of civilians is a secret that should be kept now?
Damn straight! We should be able to keep anything secret that makes us look bad. We are, after all, totally awesome and in the right about everything. And it's all just lies and spin anyway. Why do you hate america? What's wrong with you?
(just trying to see things from the others' perspective.)
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
If we have to have a standing army at least let the soldiers have a conscience and be guided by it. Blind obedience is for nationalists.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.