[News] US Intelligence Analyst Arrested In Wikileaks Video Probe
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Tue Jun 8 12:37:04 EDT 2010
U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested In Wikileaks Video Probe
By Kevin Poulsen & Kim Zetter
07 June, 2010
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/leak/
Federal officials have arrested an Army
intelligence analyst who boasted of giving
classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of
thousands of classified State Department records
to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com has learned.
SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland,
was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer,
40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested
nearly two weeks ago by the Armys Criminal
Investigation Division. A family member says hes
being held in custody in Kuwait, and has not been formally charged.
Manning was turned in late last month by a former
computer hacker with whom he spoke online. In the
course of their chats, Manning took credit for
leaking a
<http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/04/whistleblower-report-leaked-video-shows-us-coverup/>headline-making
video of a helicopter attack that Wikileaks
posted online in April. The video showed a deadly
2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad that
claimed the lives of several innocent civilians.
He said he also leaked three other items to
Wikileaks: a separate video showing the notorious
2009 Garani air strike in Afghanistan that
Wikileaks has previously acknowledged is in its
possession; a classified Army
document<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/wikileaks-army/>
evaluating Wikileaks as a security threat, which
the site posted in March; and a previously
unreported breach consisting of 260,000
classified U.S. diplomatic cables that Manning
described as exposing "almost criminal political back dealings."
"Hillary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats
around the world are going to have a heart attack
when they wake up one morning, and find an entire
repository of classified foreign policy is
available, in searchable format, to the public," Manning wrote.
Wired.com could not confirm whether Wikileaks
received the supposed 260,000 classified embassy
dispatches. To date, a
<http://file.wikileaks.org/file/us-watson1-2010.txt%20>single
classified diplomatic cable has appeared on the
site: released last February, it describes a U.S.
embassy meeting with the government of Iceland.
E-mail and a voice mail message left for
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on Sunday were
not answered by the time this article was published.
The State Department said it was not aware of the
arrest or the allegedly leaked cables. The FBI
was not prepared to comment when asked about Manning.
Army spokesman Gary Tallman was unaware of the
investigation but said, "If you have a security
clearance and wittingly or unwittingly provide
classified info to anyone who doesnt have
security clearance or a need to know, you have
violated security regulations and potentially the law."
Mannings arrest comes as Wikileaks has ratcheted
up pressure against various governments over the
years with embarrassing documents acquired
through a global whistleblower network that is
seemingly impervious to threats from adversaries.
Its operations are hosted on servers in several
countries, and it uses high-level encryption for
its document submission process, providing secure
anonymity for its sources and a safe haven from
legal repercussions for itself. Since its launch
in 2006, it has never outed a source through its
own actions, either voluntarily or involuntarily.
Manning came to the attention of the FBI and Army
investigators after he contacted former hacker
Adrian Lamo late last month over instant
messenger and e-mail. Lamo had just been the
subject of a Wired.com article. Very quickly in
his exchange with the ex-hacker, Manning claimed
to be the Wikileaks video leaker.
"If you had unprecedented access to classified
networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+
months, what would you do?" Manning asked.
From the chat logs provided by Lamo, and
examined by Wired.com, it appears Manning sensed
a kindred spirit in the ex-hacker. He discussed
personal issues that got him into trouble with
his superiors and left him socially isolated, and
said he had been demoted and was headed for an early discharge from the Army.
When Manning told Lamo that he leaked a
quarter-million classified embassy cables, Lamo
contacted the Army, and then met with Army CID
investigators and the FBI at a Starbucks near his
house in Carmichael, California, where he passed
the agents a copy of the chat logs. At their
second meeting with Lamo on May 27, FBI agents
from the Oakland Field Office told the hacker
that Manning had been arrested the day before in
Iraq by Army CID investigators.
Lamo has contributed funds to Wikileaks in the
past, and says he agonized over the decision to
expose Manning he says hes frequently
contacted by hackers who want to talk about their
adventures, and hes never considered reporting
anyone before. The supposed diplomatic cable
leak, however, made him believe Mannings actions
were genuinely dangerous to U.S. national security.
"I wouldnt have done this if lives werent in
danger," says Lamo, who discussed the details
with Wired.com following Mannings arrest. "He
was in a war zone and basically trying to vacuum
up as much classified information as he could,
and just throwing it up into the air."
Manning told Lamo that he enlisted in the Army in
2007 and held a Top Secret/SCI clearance, details
confirmed by his friends and family members. He
claimed to have been rummaging through classified
military and government networks for more than a
year and said that the networks contained
"incredible things, awful things
that belonged
in the public domain, and not on some server
stored in a dark room in Washington DC."
He first contacted Wikileaks Julian Assange
sometime around late November last year, he
claimed, after Wikileaks posted 500,000 pager
messages covering a 24-hour period surrounding
the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. "I
immediately recognized that they were from an NSA
database, and I felt comfortable enough to come
forward," he wrote to Lamo. He said his role with
Wikileaks was "a source, not quite a volunteer."
Manning had already been sifting through the
classified networks for months when he discovered
the Iraq video in late 2009, he said. The video,
later released by Wikileaks under the title
"Collateral Murder," shows a 2007 Army helicopter
attack on a group of men, some of whom were
armed, that the soldiers believed were
insurgents. The attack killed two Reuters
employees and an unarmed Baghdad man who stumbled
on the scene afterward and tried to rescue one of
the wounded by pulling him into his van. The
mans two children were in the van and suffered
serious injuries in the hail of gunfire.
"At first glance it was just a bunch of guys
getting shot up by a helicopter," Manning wrote
of the video. "No big deal
about two dozen more
where that came from, right? But something struck
me as odd with the van thing, and also the fact
it was being stored in a JAG officers directory. So I looked into it."
In January, while on leave in the U.S., Manning
visited a close friend in Boston and confessed
hed gotten his hands on unspecified sensitive
information, and was weighing leaking it,
according to the friend. "He wanted to do the
right thing," says 20-year-old Tyler Watkins.
"That was something I think he was struggling with."
Manning passed the video to Wikileaks in
February, he told Lamo. After April 5 when the
video was released and made headlines Manning
contacted Watkins from Iraq asking him about the reaction in the U.S.
"He would message me, Are people talking about
it?
Are the media saying anything?," Watkins
said. "That was one of his major concerns, that
once he had done this, was it really going to
make a difference?
He didnt want to do this
just to cause a stir.
He wanted people held
accountable and wanted to see this didnt happen again."
Watkins doesnt know what else Manning might have
sent to Wikileaks. But in his chats with Lamo,
Manning took credit for a number of other disclosures.
The second video he claimed to have leaked shows
a May 2009 air strike near Garani village in
Afghanistan that the local government says killed
nearly 100 civilians, most of them children. The
Pentagon released a report about the incident
last year, but backed down from a plan to show
video of the attack to reporters.
As described by Manning in his chats with Lamo,
his purported leaking was made possible by lax security online and off.
Manning had access to two classified networks
from two separate secured laptops: SIPRNET, the
Secret-level network used by the Department of
Defense and the State Department, and the Joint
Worldwide Intelligence Communications System
which serves both agencies at the Top Secret/SCI level.
The networks, he said, were both "air gapped"
from unclassified networks, but the environment
at the base made it easy to smuggle data out.
"I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled
with something like 'Lady Gaga, erase the music
then write a compressed split file," he wrote.
"No one suspected a thing and, odds are, they never will."
"[I] listened and lip-synced to Lady Gagas
'Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the
largest data spillage in American history," he
added later. "Weak servers, weak logging, weak
physical security, weak counter-intelligence,
inattentive signal analysis
a perfect storm."
Manning told Lamo that the Garani video was left
accessible in a directory on a U.S. Central
Command server, centcom.smil.mil, by officers who
investigated the incident. The video, he said,
was an encrypted AES-256 ZIP file.
Mannings aunt, with whom he lived in the U.S.,
had heard nothing about his arrest when first
contacted by Wired.com last week; Debra Van
Alstyne said she last saw Manning during his
leave in January and they had discussed his plans
to enroll in college when his four-year stint in
the Army was set to end in October 2011. She
described him as smart and seemingly untroubled,
with a natural talent for computers and a keen interest in global politics.
She said she became worried about her nephew
recently after he disappeared from contact. Then
Manning finally called Van Alstyne collect on
Saturday. He told her that he was okay, but that
he couldnt discuss what was going on, Van
Alstyne said. He then gave her his Facebook
password and asked her to post a message on his behalf.
The message reads: "Some of you may have heard
that I have been arrested for disclosure of
classified information to unauthorized persons. See CollateralMurder.com."
An Army defense attorney then phoned Van Alstyne
on Sunday and said Manning is being held in
protective custody in Kuwait. "He hasnt seen the
case file, but he does understand that it does
have to do with that Collateral Murder video," Van Alstyne said.
Mannings father said Sunday that hes shocked by his sons arrest.
"I was in the military for 5 years," said Brian
Manning, of Oklahoma. "I had a Secret clearance,
and I never divulged any information in 30 years
since I got out about what I did. And Brad has
always been very, very tight at adhering to the
rules. Even talking to him after boot camp and
stuff, he kept everything so close that he didnt open up to anything."
His son, he added, is "a good kid. Never been in trouble. Never been on
drugs, alcohol, nothing."
Lamo says he felt he had no choice but to turn in
Manning, but that hes now concerned about the
soldiers status and well-being. The FBI hasnt
told Lamo what charges Manning may face, if any.
The agents did tell Lamo that he may be asked to
testify against Manning. The Bureau was
particularly interested in information that
Manning gave Lamo about an apparently-classified
military cybersecurity matter, Lamo said.
That seemed to be the least interesting
information to Manning, however. What seemed to
excite him most in his chats, was his supposed
leaking of the embassy cables. He anticipated
returning to the states after his early
discharge, and watching from the sidelines as his
action bared the secret history of U.S. diplomacy around the world.
"Everywhere theres a U.S. post, theres a
diplomatic scandal that will be revealed,"
Manning wrote. "Its open diplomacy. World-wide
anarchy in CSV format. Its Climategate with a
global scope, and breathtaking depth. Its beautiful, and horrifying."
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
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415 863-9977
www.Freedomarchives.org
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