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SPC Bradley Manning 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. |
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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 Army's Criminal Investigation
Division. A family member says he's 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 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 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 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 doesn't have security clearance
or a need to know, you have violated security regulations and
potentially the law."
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.
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.
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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 seems impervious to threats from adversaries.
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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 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.
"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."
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 man's 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
officer's directory. So I looked into it."
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."
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 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."
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.
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 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."
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.
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.
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.
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 hasn't seen
the case file, but he does understand that it does have to do with that
Collateral Murder video," Van Alstyne said.
Manning's father said Sunday that he's shocked by his son's 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
didn't open up to anything."
His son, he added, is "a good kid. Never been in trouble. Never been on
drugs, alcohol, nothing."
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Purported Ex-hacker Adrian Lamo |
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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.
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-sensitive 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 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."
Wired.com