rigorousintuition.ca

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.

JackRiddler wrote:Of course the State Department is the most corrupt of all the agencies, because for 63 years it's been the premiere CIA front, other than the CIA itself. Every embassy is half made up of spooks pretending they're State Department...

elfismiles wrote:Thanks and WELCOME Dr. Evil!

Allegations in Wired that we have been sent 260,000 classified US embassy cables are, as far as we can tell, incorrect.

The State Department's Worst Nightmare

by Philip Shenon - The Daily Beast

An Army intel analyst charged with leaking classified materials also downloaded sensitive diplomatic cables. Are America’s foreign policy secrets about to go online? Philip Shenon reports.

The State Department and American embassies around the world are bracing for what officials fear could be the massive, unauthorized release of secret diplomatic cables in which U.S. diplomats harshly evaluate foreign leaders and reveal the inner-workings of American foreign policy.

Diplomatic and law-enforcement officials tell The Daily Beast their alarm stems from the arrest of a 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst based in Iraq who has reportedly admitted that he downloaded 260,000 diplomatic cables from government computer networks and was prepared to make them public.

Specialist Bradley Manning of Potomac, Maryland, who is now under arrest in Kuwait, is also accused of having leaked—to Wikileaks, a secretive Internet site based in Sweden—an explosive video of an American helicopter attack in Baghdad in 2007 that left 12 people dead, including two employees of the news agency Reuters. The website released the video in April.

“If he really had access to these cables, we've got a terrible situation on our hands," said an American diplomat. "We're still trying to figure out what he had access to. A lot of my colleagues overseas are sweating this out, given what those cables may contain.”

He said Manning 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.

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.

He added that the State Department and law-enforcement agencies are trying to determine whether, and how, to approach Wikileaks to urge the site not to publish the cables, given the damage they could do to diplomatic efforts involving the United States and its allies.

Wikileaks, a website based in Sweden, that promotes itself as a global champion of whistleblowers, did not reply to emails from The Daily Beast.

In a comment on the social networking website Twitter, Wikileaks said that allegations that “we have been sent 260,000 classified U.S. embassy cables are, as far as we can tell, incorrect.” Wikileaks said it did not know the identity of the source who provided it with the 2007 video from Iraq. If Manning did leak the video, the site said, he is “a national hero.”

The State Department’s chief spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, said Monday that the department was involved in the Pentagon-led investigation to try to track down any cables that Manning may have stolen from interagency computer networks.

“These are classified documents,” he said. “We take their release seriously.” He said the public release of diplomatic cables could do damage to national security since they could reveal the "source and methods" used by the United States to gather intelligence overseas.

Even more alarming, diplomats say, is the idea that foreign leaders will now read what American diplomats have written about them in secret cables sent to Washington—evaluations of the leaders’ personalities, intelligence and honesty, among other things.

Alan K. Henrikson, a professor of diplomatic history at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, said the State Department should be “very nervous” at the prospect of the release of such a huge library of internal cables.

He said he would urge the department to try to comment as little as possible about the situation in hopes that, if the cables do become public, the aftermath can be dealt with foreign governments behind closed doors. “That’s diplomacy,” he said.

The State Department has suggested that, even if Wikileaks does not have the cables at the moment, the government still believes Manning had downloaded a huge library of the department’s cables and stored them somewhere.

Officials said that Pentagon investigators are searching through email accounts maintained by Manning as well as his computer hard drives in search of evidence of what cables he read—and where he may have sent them. It is not clear what, if anything, the American government could do to prevent Wikileaks or other foreign-based websites from disclosing the cables.

The Pentagon, which has said it is conducting an aggressive investigation, has not made Specialist Manning available for comment.

Manning’s arrest was first reported by Wired magazine, which said it had obtained a copy of an internet chat log in which Manning bragged to a former computer hacker about having leaked the video and the diplomatic cables to the website.

Wired said Manning told the former hacker, who had been profiled in the magazine, that he had stolen 260,000 classified American diplomatic cables from government computers and passed them on to Wikileaks.

“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,” he wrote, according to Wired. Kevin Poulsen, a senior editor at Wired, said in an interview that in the chat log, Manning did not specify the dates or identify the subject of the diplomatic cables, except to say that they contained scandalous information.

“Manning clearly did have access to top-secret networks and information, and he had a great deal of detailed information about how he supposedly interacted” with Wikileaks, Poulsen said. “That doesn’t prove that he leaked anything. But he was very convincing in the details he did give.”

Laodicean wrote:

The State Department's Worst Nightmare

by Philip Shenon - The Daily Beast

An Army intel analyst charged with leaking classified materials also downloaded sensitive diplomatic cables. Are America’s foreign policy secrets about to go online?

On December 3, 2001, New York Times reporter Judith Miller telephones officials with the Holy Land Foundation charity in Texas and asks them to comment about what she says is a government raid on the charity planned for the next day. Then in a December 4, 2001, New York Times article, Miller writes that President Bush is about to announce that the US is freezing the assets of Holy Land and two other financial groups, all for supporting Hamas. US officials will later argue that Miller’s phone call and article “increased the likelihood that the foundation destroyed or hid records before a hastily organized raid by agents that day.” Later in the month, a similar incident occurs. On December 13, New York Times reporter Philip Shenon telephones officials at the Global Relief Foundation in Illinois and asks them to comment about an imminent government crackdown on that charity. The FBI learns that some Global Relief employees may be destroying documents. US attorney Patrick Fitzgerald had been investigating the charities. He had been wiretapping Global Relief and another charity in hopes of learning evidence of criminal activity, but after the leak he changes plans and carries out a hastily arranged raid on the charity the next day (see December 14, 2001). Fitzgerald later seeks records from the New York Times to find out who in the Bush administration leaked information about the upcoming raids to Miller and Shenon. However, in 2005 Fitzgerald will lose the case. It is still not known who leaked the information to the New York Times nor what their motives were. Ironically, Fitzgerald will succeed in forcing Miller to reveal information about her sources in another extremely similar legal case in 2005 involving the leaking of the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame.

c2w? wrote:

It's pretty fucking hard to figure what legitimate news-gathering process would lead to a guy calling the target of an ongoing federal investigation the existence of which was then unknown outside the Justice Department to ask them how they feel about the major FBI probe they wouldn't have any way of knowing about if he hadn't asked that.