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.

"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

[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.

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?

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.

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: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.