FBI Paid Informant Inside WikiLeaks

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Wired: "On an August workday in 2011, a cherubic 18-year-old Icelandic man named Sigurdur 'Siggi' Thordarson walked through the stately doors of the U.S. embassy in Reykjavik, his jacket pocket concealing his calling card: a crumpled photocopy of an Australian passport. The passport photo showed a man with a unruly shock of platinum blonde hair and the name Julian Paul Assange. Thordarson was long time volunteer for WikiLeaks with direct access to Assange and a key position as an organizer in the group. With his cold war-style embassy walk-in, he became something else: the first known FBI informant inside WikiLeaks. For the next three months, Thordarson served two masters, working for the secret-spilling website and simultaneously spilling its secrets to the U.S. government in exchange, he says, for a total of about $5,000. The FBI flew him internationally four times for debriefings, including one trip to Washington D.C., and on the last meeting obtained from Thordarson eight hard drives packed with chat logs, video and other data from WikiLeaks."

Comments

Re:Cheap

[sentientbeing]

Off to the NSA with him then

what he did say for 5k?

[nimbius]

FBI: what did you learn from infiltrating wikileaks?
Sigurdur: Its headed by Julian Assange
FBI: okay...and....
Sigurdur: and he is on a mission to expose a ton of sensitive information about governments...especially american governments.
FBI:OKAY. AND...
Sigurdur: he intends to release any leaks he receives to the public.
FBI: How much have we paid this asshole already?

Another way to look at this

[skegg]

The FBI had an internal data corruption, and paid this guy $5,000 to help them restore from "off-site back-up"

Re:"Ego trip"

[jcr]

I've noticed that as well, and I was wondering whether NSA has bots or minions to do that for them. Or maybe, they sub out the work to the Scientologists, who always did a lot of that, too.

-jcr

America

[future assassin]

Fuck Yeah!!!!