Deep Politics Forum

U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe

• By Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter
  
• June 6, 2010 |
  
• 9:31 pm |
  
• Categories: Breaches, Sunshine and Secrecy
  

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.

Bradley Manning (Facebook.com)

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.”
“ 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.”
Ex-hacker Adrian Lamo (Ariel Zambelich/Wired.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.”
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.”

Tags: hacking, secrecy, sunshine, Wikileaks


Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06...z0q9OHdpcz

Long article in The New Yorker about Assange

Fairly typical MSM Glossy puff piece of its type but too long (and much of far too dull) to post here in full. It's written in an irritating folksy, narrative style and the first 30 % or so can safely be skipped completely - it deals with the alleged mechanics of putting that 'Collateral Murder' video together. There are some interesting bits though - and, for me, Assange has an impressive side which I can't help identifying with. He's clearly out to make an MSM name for himself though, which is likely to alienate potential sympathisers and collaborators. In spite of his experiences, I think I detect something of a naive streak vis-vis the Western Elites too. His 'baddies' are resident in China, Russia, Central Asia and the Middle East ! - so maybe he's as co-optible as the next guy eh?

A couple of snippets:

Quote:He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by “patronage networks”—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled “Conspiracy as Governance,” which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.” He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.

Quote:In some respects, Assange appeared to be most annoyed by the journalistic process itself—“a craven sucking up to official sources to imbue the eventual story with some kind of official basis,” as he once put it. WikiLeaks has long maintained a complicated relationship with conventional journalism. When, in 2008, the site was sued after publishing confidential documents from a Swiss bank, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, and ten other news organizations filed amicus briefs in support. (The bank later withdrew its suit.) But, in the Bunker one evening, Gonggrijp told me, “We are not the press.” He considers WikiLeaks an advocacy group for sources; within the framework of the Web site, he said, “the source is no longer dependent on finding a journalist who may or may not do something good with his document.”

Anxious that Wikileaks may be on the verge of publishing a batch of secret State Department cables, investigators are desperately searching for founder Julian Assange. Philip Shenon reports. Plus, Daniel Ellsberg tells The Daily Beast: "Assange is in Danger." (This story has been updated to reflect new developments on Assange's whereabouts, including the cancelation of a scheduled appearance in Las Vegas.)
Pentagon investigators are trying to determine the whereabouts of the Australian-born founder of the secretive website Wikileaks for fear that he may be about to publish a huge cache of classified State Department cables that, if made public, could do serious damage to national security, government officials tell The Daily Beast.
The officials acknowledge that even if they found the website founder, Julian Assange, it is not clear what they could do to block publication of the cables on Wikileaks, which is nominally based on a server in Sweden and bills itself as a champion of whistleblowers.
American officials said Pentagon investigators are convinced that Assange is in possession of at least some classified State Department cables leaked by a 22-year-old Army intelligence specialist, Bradley Manning of Potomac, Maryland, who is now in custody in Kuwait.
And given the contents of the cables, the feds have good reason to be concerned.











[URL="http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;225719030;31290385;z?http://ad.n2434.doubleclick.net/clk;225606442;48917484;p"]
[/URL]
As The Daily Beast reported June 8, Manning, while posted in Iraq, apparently had special access to cables prepared by diplomats and State Department officials throughout the Middle East, regarding the workings of Arab governments and their leaders, according to an American diplomat.
The cables, which date back over several years, went out over interagency computer networks available to the Army and contained information related to American diplomatic and intelligence efforts in the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, the diplomat said.
American officials would not discuss the methods being used to find Assange, nor would they say if they had information to suggest where he is now. "We'd like to know where he is; we'd like his cooperation in this," one U.S. official said of Assange.
• Daniel Ellsberg: 'Assange Is In Danger' Assange, who first gained notoriety as a computer hacker, is as secretive as his website and has no permanent home.
He was scheduled to speak Friday in Las Vegas at an International Reporters and Editors conference. But the group’s executive director, Mark Horvit, tells The Daily Beast that Assange canceled the appearance—he was on a panel to discuss anonymous sources—within the last several days as a result of unspecificed “security concerns.” Horvit said he communicated with Assange through email and did not know where he might be.
Last week, Assange was scheduled to join famed Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg for a talk at New York's Personal Democracy Forum. Assange appeared via Skype from Australia instead, saying lawyers recommended he not return to the United States.
Assange was in the United States as recently as several weeks ago, when he gave press interviews to promote the website’s release of an explosive 2007 video of an American helicopter attack in Baghdad that left 12 people dead, including two employees of the news agency Reuters.
Wikileaks has not replied directly to email messages from The Daily Beast.
However, in cryptic messages he sent this week via Twitter, Wikileaks referred to an earlier Daily Beast article on the investigation of Manning and said that it “looks like we’re about to be attacked by everything the U.S. has.”
In an earlier post, the site said that allegations that “we have been sent 260,000 classified U.S. embassy cables are, as far as we can tell, incorrect.”
This morning, a new Wikileaks tweet went out: "Any signs of unacceptable behavior by the Pentagon or its agents towards this press will be viewed dimly."
Pentagon investigators say that particular post may have been an effort by Wikileaks to throw them—and news organizations—off the track as the site prepared the library of State Department cables for release, officials said.
“It looks like they’re playing some sort of semantic games,” one American official said of Wikileaks. “They may not have 260,000 cables, but they’ve probably got enough cables to make trouble.”
• Philip Shenon: The State Dept.’s Worst NightmareIn another cryptic Twitter message, the site said that while the State Department might be alarmed about the prospect of the release of classified cables, “we have not been contacted.”
American officials were unwilling to say what would happen if Assange is tracked down, although they suggested they would have many more legal options available to them if he were still somewhere in the United States.
Pentagon Manhunt
Manning has reportedly admitted that he downloaded 260,000 diplomatic cables and provided them to Wikileaks. In Internet chat logs first revealed by Wired magazine, Manning also took credit for leaking the 2007 video to the website.
“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,” Manning wrote of the diplomatic cables, according to Wired.
Wikileaks has not confirmed that Manning is a source of any information posted on the site. “We do not know if Mr. Manning is our source, but the U.S. military is claiming he is, so we will defend him,” Wikileaks said in another Twitter message.
Manning was turned in to the Pentagon by a former computer hacker based in California, Adrian Lamo, after Manning approached Lamo for counsel. Manning is believed to have contacted Lamo after reading a recent profile of him in Wired.
In the chat log revealed by Wired, Manning bragged to Lamo about having downloaded a huge library of State Department cables, as well as the 2007 video of the helicopter attack, and having provided the material to Wikileaks.
Manning took credit for having leaked a classified diplomatic cable that has already appeared on the site—a memo prepared by the United States embassy in Reykjavik, Iceland, that described a meeting there between American and Icelandic officials over that country’s banking meltdown.
The January 2010 memo may have been of special interest to Wikileaks given the site’s close ties to Iceland, where Assange has based himself at times and where he worked with local lawmakers to draft free-speech laws that give broad freedom to journalists to protect their sources.
A profile this week in The New Yorker magazine depicted Assange feverishly at work with Icelandic colleagues in Reykjavik in March as he organized the release of the 2007 video of the helicopter attack. The edited video was given the title Collateral Murder, and its release infuriated officials at the Defense Department.
With its network of whistleblowers, Wikileaks has published documents and videos on its site that have outraged other foreign governments. To protect the site from attack by intelligence agencies, Assange has placed Wikileaks on several Internet servers, making it all but impossible for any government to shut down the site entirely.
Philip Shenon, a former investigative reporter at The New York Times, is the author of The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-s...ssive-leak

Might be an elaborate counter-intelligence operation: cables weren't leaked to wikileaks, Assange isn't sure what's in the terabytes of stuff unsifted, fake arrest in Kuwait, supporting role by "white-hat" former hacker, wikileaks springs for defense fund, DoD probes deeper into the inner workings, wikileaks is publicly discredited or information gleaned is used later.

Might be the intel person gave the info to the former hacker, claimed he had given it to wikileaks, too, and asked for advice, whereupon former hacker felt he had been implicated by simply revceiving the information, decides it's a counter-intelligence operation and preemptively snitches out the operative who supplied him the information. Information might or might not have been sent to wikileaks in this scenario.

Might be Wikileaks is protecting sources by not revealing existence of State cables at this time.

When Wikileaks did release US embassy Iceland cables and personal profiles of Iceland politicians, US State went into heated investigation, claimed no embassy cables had even been intercepted before (obviously not true). Heated investigation by State Dept security/CIA could involve elbaorate counter-intelligence operations such as described above.

Might be as reported, doubtful though.

Apparently, Assange and his mother were on the run for several years from a MKULTRAish cult based in Australia sometimes called "The Family".

If anybody else has an informed perspective on this group, which seemed to intersect with medical LSD experiments and psychosurgery, it would be great to hear what you think!

I didn't know that Austin. The Family was I think based in Melbourne and surrounding countryside and the 'leader' was a woman who has fairly recently died but I can't recall her name off the top of my head. I do remember there were many interventions by the childrens welfare department. She collected children. I'll see if I can dig up any articles on them.

Here is some things I found on The Family The woman who led them is Anne Hamilton-Byrne.
http://www.defamer.com.au/2010/06/the-st...n-assange/
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victori...5761971443
http://www.rickross.com/groups/thefamily.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiniketa...ssociation
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~atheist/CruelCultofA.htm
http://www.theatheist.net/previous-lectu...rough-ride

Thanks for this, Magda.

So Assange's life seems to have intersected with "the Octopus" early on, in some kind of strange and undetermined way. This seems to be true of many who are attracted to the sort of projects that Assange is involved with.

Was Assange exposed to any sort of traumatizing mind control techniques during the time he lived with a cult adherent? We may or may not hear more about this as time goes on...

One survivor of the cult said:

Quote:My mother was Anne Hamilton-Byrne, the leader of a small sect in the Dandenongs called the Family or the Great White Brotherhood. I was a small part of her plan to collect children in what she herself once called a "scientific experiment". Later I discovered it was her intention that we children would continue her sect after the earth was consumed by a holocaust. She saw us as the "inheritors of the earth". I didn't know that then. In those days I was just a child. A child of a guru, but a child no less.

Twenty-two to twenty-eight children in all lived at Uptop in its heyday, although the fosters had varying lengths of stay

Why did Anne collect all of us children and make this false 'family'? I often wonder just what it was she wanted of us. Was it just to satisfy her ego? To satisfy her great need to be worshipped and adored by those around her?

Why did she raise us in almost total social isolation, miles from anywhere, with minimal contact with other humans apart from the sect members who looked after us? Why did she subject us to the bizarre and cruel regimen in which we grew up?

I suspect perhaps that there were more sinister motives than these alone. Some of us had multiple birth certificates and passports, and citizenship of more than one country. Only she knows why thus was and why we were also all dressed alike, why most of us even had our hair dyed identically blond. I can only conjecture because I will never know for sure. However I suspect that she went to such great lengths in order to enable her to move children around, in and out of the country. Perhaps even to be sold overseas. I'm sure there is a market somewhere in the world for small blond children with no traceable identities. If she did it, it was a perfect scam. Many ex-sect members have said that they were aware that Anne was creating children by a "breeding program" in the late 1960s. These were 'invisible' kids, because they had no papers and there is no proof that they ever existed. Yet we Hamilton-Byrne children had multiple identities. These identities could perhaps have been loaned to other children and the similarity of our appearance used to cover up their absence. One little blond kid looks very like another in a passport photo.

Excerpt from UNSEEN, UNHEARD, UNKNOWN

by Sarah Moore (Hamilton-Byrne)

http://www.leavingsiddhayoga.net/unseen.htm

This Australian franchise version of "The Family" fits the template for an intel-controlled (im)plausibly deniable cult used to conduct what can loosely be called MK-ULTRA or social control experimentation on children over long periods of time.

Jonestown is an example of the template on a far larger scale. See the threads below for the types of experimentation and drugs used in social/mind control experimentation there:

http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...=jonestown

http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...=jonestown

So, "The Family" was quite possibly an intel operation.

However, there is no clear evidence that the young Assange was ever one of their family experiments.

Below is the relevant passage from the New Yorker article:

Quote:When Assange was eight, Claire left her husband and began seeing a musician, with whom she had another child, a boy. The relationship was tempestuous; the musician became abusive, she says, and they separated. A fight ensued over the custody of Assange’s half brother, and Claire felt threatened, fearing that the musician would take away her son. Assange recalled her saying, “Now we need to disappear,” and he lived on the run with her from the age of eleven to sixteen. When I asked him about the experience, he told me that there was evidence that the man belonged to a powerful cult called the Family—its motto was “Unseen, Unknown, and Unheard.” Some members were doctors who persuaded mothers to give up their newborn children to the cult’s leader, Anne Hamilton-Byrne. The cult had moles in government, Assange suspected, who provided the musician with leads on Claire’s whereabouts. In fact, Claire often told friends where she had gone, or hid in places where she had lived before.

While on the run, Claire rented a house across the street from an electronics shop. Assange would go there to write programs on a Commodore 64, until Claire bought it for him, moving to a cheaper place to raise the money. He was soon able to crack into well-known programs, where he found hidden messages left by their creators. “The austerity of one’s interaction with a computer is something that appealed to me,” he said. “It is like chess—chess is very austere, in that you don’t have many rules, there is no randomness, and the problem is very hard.” Assange embraced life as an outsider. He later wrote of himself and a teen-age friend, “We were bright sensitive kids who didn’t fit into the dominant subculture and fiercely castigated those who did as irredeemable boneheads.”

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/...z0qeRnq0ce