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.

Comments

First rule of breaking the law

[Wonko the Sane]

If you don't want to get caught keep your damn mouth shut.

Re:First rule of breaking the law

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Kind of difficult to follow that advice when the lawbreaking in question consists solely of not keeping your mouth shut.

Re:First rule of breaking the law

[DrugCheese]

But he's not breaking the law. He swore an oath to protect the constitution from ALL enemies, foreign and domestic.

blah blah blah nazi blah blah blah blindly following orders

The fact that his employer is the enemy of the constitution should bear no moral weight.

Re:First rule of breaking the law

[Shakrai]

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?

Re:First rule of breaking the law

[DrugCheese]

Yes, thank you for spelling out my point for laymen.

The informants, Manning, information up to this point has been correct. So why assume the rest isn't? If said 'classified' information is truly unconstitutional, you know it, and you go along with the flow then I say yes you are responsible. To what degree? Probably very little, group think is a powerful phenomenon.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. This man did something.

Re:First rule of breaking the law

[chimpo13]

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.

Re:First rule of breaking the law

[Hognoxious]

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

Just to clarify - if you find that he really is what he claims, does that mean you should trust him more - or less?

Re:First rule of breaking the law

[sumdumass]

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.

Re:First rule of breaking the law

[WNight]

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.

Re:First rule of breaking the law

[WNight]

I didn't say it was smart, I was telling you that he didn't jeopardize his sources for this - he'd already lost them. And it's unlikely he did this for personal gain as he tried to arrange to remain unnamed.

He had stated a goal of making sure more people saw the documents and debated them. It's pretty likely he was just trying to stir up more attention for the abuses he was blowing the whistle on.

Apparently he found Lamo via a twitter search but Lamo was semi-famous, anti-establishment, and had spoken of donating to wikileaks and his interest in the organization. On the surface he would seem like a good person to contact.

And yes, his mistakes are very clear. I'm pretty sure that between that and how the article showed that "real" journalists are in the pocket of the government anyways that nobody here would bother asking for confidentiality and simply arrange to remain anonymous.

But Bradley Manning's success is also clear. He turned his superiors in for crimes against humanity despite great personal cost to himself. If there were more of him there wouldn't have been Nazis.

So....

[CdBee]

So we can suppose this is an operation to make people doubt the safety of going to Wikileaks?

Suppose something happened to Lamo in revenge, out there in the offline world - maybe such operations would be discouraged in future.

Re:So....

[erroneus]

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 don't care

[decipher_saint]

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.

Re:I don't care

[MrEricSir]

That's what's bugging me here as well. Who cares how the footage was released? The important thing is WHY we have soldiers killing unarmed civilians.

The military guys seem to have a very elitist attitude about the whole thing, like us little people don't need to know how this could have happened. As though it's none of our business somehow.

Re:I don't care

[decipher_saint]

They say there are important bits of the video missing, great! I'm willing to believe that, show it to me!

But so far? Nada.

Re:I don't care

[DigiShaman]

The military guys seem to have a very elitist attitude about the whole thing

No, they are genuinely scared about it. Not from the enemy, but buy their own citizens.

It's one thing to be hated by a country you're fighting in. It's quite another to be hated/disowned by the country your FROM. Review the Vietnam protests for example.

Re:I don't care

[guruevi]

It is the freakin' Middle East, everybody has guns. I see this comment and other versions of it posted around here and other forums by guys with a pretty recent UID. Could there be some spreading of misinformation going on from the powers-that-be that don't want this video out?

This whole thing stinks badly. There have been mistakes before and the footage has usually been released, people accepted it, people apologized, people got punished and moved on. There seems to be a media blackout around this event and a lot of nationalistic propaganda being spread around the subject.

Re:I don't care

[grcumb]

That's what's bugging me here as well. Who cares how the footage was released?

I do. I care a lot. Why does someone have to face a lifetime in prison just to allow us to discuss 'WHY we have soldiers killing unarmed civilians'?

The fact that it took someone breaking the law to show a commonplace incident in the so-called War on Terror can be viewed as a sad commentary on the state of censorship in our time, or (if you're an optimist) an affirmation that, despite a culture of secrecy, information really does want to be free.

In either case, Greenwald's conjecture is that Manning really was genuinely motivated by his conscience and that his 'confessor' Lamo rewarded his honesty with lies, venality and betrayal. I find his case as presented compelling but not conclusive.

Greenwald's larger point about wikileaks, however, is irrefutable:

The reason this story matters so much -- aside from the fact that it may be the case that a truly heroic, 22-year-old whistle-blower is facing an extremely lengthy prison term -- is the unique and incomparably valuable function WikiLeaks is fulfilling. Even before the Apache helicopter leak, I wrote at length about why they are so vital, and won't repeat all of that here. Suffice to say, there are very few entities, if there are any, which pose as much of a threat to the ability of governmental and corporate elites to shroud their corrupt conduct behind an extreme wall of secrecy.

As others will no doubt suggest, whistle blowers should understand the consequences of their actions, accepting the sometimes inevitable retribution that follows in order to serve the public good. That does not, however, excuse what Greenwald characterises as 'despicable' behaviour by Lamo. If this account proves true, then Lamo really is a sick, sorry individual.

I find this whole story compelling precisely because it demonstrates the stakes involved in something as simple as telling the truth. Secrecy and Transparency are equally costly and dangerous as we wander too far towards either end of the continuum. Stories like Manning's allow us the opportunity to gauge where we are in that continuum.

Re:I don't care

[Idiomatick]

And individuals have a moral obligation to stop things they feel are wrong. Even if they are grunts. I think in these situations there should be a court which determines whether he was being ethical in his actions. Not simply whether or not he was breaking military rules.

Otherwise it simply discourages leaks and whistle blowers. Which may be good from a military POV. But we should be working towards what is good from a countries POV.

Re:I don't care

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

Re:I don't care

[Idiomatick]

IT ISNT A FUCKING WAR ZONE and you show why. This should be a police operation. With people on the ground building things up and keeping CRIME low. I'm not even questioning the motivations of being in Iraq atm. But you CANNOT wage war on NO ONE. There is no enemy military, no bases, no lines of battle, nothing. Treat it like a country with a lot of well armed murders. Would you declare war on murderers and have heli's shooting people that may have guns w/ out provocation? Of course not, that would be retarded nd only make the problem worse!

BTW you are blaming people that were albeit foolishly trying to rescue a dieing man for getting shot by a helicopter that came there from a different country to help them. Foolish maybe but talk about blaming the victim.

Good Grief.

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

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.

"Salon" impresses me

[spydabyte]

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.

Re:"Salon" impresses me

[DeadCatX2]

Did you read the same article I read? It is not unbiased (most of Glenn Greenwald's work is slightly biased, quite often with a pinch of venomous rhetoric, usually towards those who deserve it)

Greenwald believes Manning is probably a heroic whistle blower, not a criminal.

The reason this story matters so much -- aside from the fact that it may be the case that a truly heroic, 22-year-old whistle-blower is facing an extremely lengthy prison term

He also believes Lamo was doing it for the attention.

Making Lamo's conduct even worse is that it appears he reported Manning for no reason other than a desire for some trivial media attention. Jacob Appelbaum, a well-known hacker of the Tor Project who has known Lamo for years, said that Lamo's "only concern" has always been "getting publicity for Adrian." Indeed, Lamo's modus operandi as a hacker was primitive hacking aimed at high-profile companies that he'd then use Poulsen to publicize. As Appelbaum put it: "if this situation really fell into Adrian's lap, his first and only thought would have been: how can I turn this to my advantage? He basically destroyed a 22-year-old's life in order to get his name mentioned on the Wired.com blog."

Re:"Salon" impresses me

[twoallbeefpatties]

He also qualifies both of those beliefs with quotes from Manning. From the quotes of Lamo's chat with Manning, it seems he believed that he actually was acting in the role of a whistleblower. He mentions his moral issues with what's going on:

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? ...it belongs in the public domain -information should be free - it belongs in the public domain - because another state would just take advantage of the information... try and get some edge - if its out in the open... it should be a public good.

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

[twoallbeefpatties]

Read the article - that's part of what Glennwald is asking. He's asking, why would a 22-year-old Private with access to high-security information get onto AIM and spill his guts about an issue that could get him thrown into jail for a long time with some guy that he's never met before? Something is funny about the whole notation.

Re:That's the point

[lawpoop]

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?

Citation?

[twoallbeefpatties]

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?

Why did he need "Limo" in the first place?

[Hurricane78]

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!

Re:Oh dear

[dangitman]

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.

Thank you for your service

[Sprouticus]

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:Persona non grata

[Idiomatick]

Shooting Reuters reporters and a van of civilians is a secret that should be kept now?

Re:It was the right thing to do...

[SunSpot505]

But Manning might not have done anything wrong either, and Lamo himself admitted that he had not seen any proof of wrong doing, other than the fact that Manning claimed to have released these documents.

Further, claiming it's the "right thing to do" is all the easier when you're guaranteed a front page story in a premier tech magazine. Manning claimed he was doing the right thing too, by exposing hypocrisy and unnecessary violence in a volatile situation, but he didn't give his information to wired, he gave it to a third party to release as they saw fit, not promote himself.

So basically, it's ok to be an informant if it soothes your ego to "keep spies from getting killed" (or gets you into a Wired article), but it's not ok if you attempt to keep civilians from getting killed (or it gets you into a Wikileaks article). Now I understand.

Greenwald's suspicion is probably true

[Burz]

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.