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<font size=3><br>
</font><font size=4><b>U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested In Wikileaks
Video Probe<br><br>
</font><font size=3>By Kevin Poulsen & Kim Zetter<br><br>
</b>07 June, 2010<br>
<b>
<a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/leak/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/leak/<br><br>
</a></b>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.<br><br>
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 Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. A
family member says he’s being held in custody in Kuwait, and has not been
formally charged.<br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/04/whistleblower-report-leaked-video-shows-us-coverup/">
<b>headline-making video</a></b> 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.<br><br>
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<a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/wikileaks-army/">
<b> evaluating Wikileaks as a security threat</a></b>, 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."<br><br>
"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.<br><br>
Wired.com could not confirm whether Wikileaks received the supposed
260,000 classified embassy dispatches. To date, a
<a href="http://file.wikileaks.org/file/us-watson1-2010.txt%20"><b>single
classified diplomatic cable has appeared on the site:</a></b> 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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 doesn’t have security clearance or
a need to know, you have violated security regulations and potentially
the law."<br><br>
Manning’s 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
"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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Lamo has contributed funds to Wikileaks in the past, and says he agonized
over the decision to expose Manning he says he’s frequently contacted
by hackers who want to talk about their adventures, and he’s never
considered reporting anyone before. The supposed diplomatic cable leak,
however, made him believe Manning’s actions were genuinely dangerous to
U.S. national security.<br><br>
"I wouldn’t have done this if lives weren’t in danger," says
Lamo, who discussed the details with Wired.com following Manning’s
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."<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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 man’s two children were in the van and
suffered serious injuries in the hail of gunfire.<br><br>
"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
officer’s directory. So I looked into it."<br><br>
In January, while on leave in the U.S., Manning visited a close friend in
Boston and confessed he’d 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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
"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 didn’t want to do this just to cause a stir. … He wanted
people held accountable and wanted to see this didn’t happen
again."<br><br>
Watkins doesn’t know what else Manning might have sent to Wikileaks. But
in his chats with Lamo, Manning took credit for a number of other
disclosures.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
As described by Manning in his chats with Lamo, his purported leaking was
made possible by lax security online and off.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
The networks, he said, were both "air gapped" from unclassified
networks, but the environment at the base made it easy to smuggle data
out.<br><br>
"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."<br><br>
"[I] listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s '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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Manning’s 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.<br><br>
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 couldn’t 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.<br><br>
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."<br><br>
An Army defense attorney then phoned Van Alstyne on Sunday and said
Manning is being held in protective custody in Kuwait. "He hasn’t
seen the case file, but he does understand that it does have to do with
that Collateral Murder video," Van Alstyne said.<br><br>
Manning’s father said Sunday that he’s shocked by his son’s
arrest.<br><br>
"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 didn’t
open up to anything."<br><br>
His son, he added, is "a good kid. Never been in trouble. Never been
on<br>
drugs, alcohol, nothing."<br><br>
Lamo says he felt he had no choice but to turn in Manning, but that he’s
now concerned about the soldier’s status and well-being. The FBI hasn’t
told Lamo what charges Manning may face, if any.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
"Everywhere there’s a U.S. post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that
will be revealed," Manning wrote. "It’s open diplomacy.
World-wide anarchy in CSV format. It’s Climategate with a global scope,
and breathtaking depth. It’s beautiful, and horrifying."<br><br>
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