Alleged Leaker Case More Tech than Military
Wednesday, December 28th, 2011Interested in the biggest leak of U.S. secrets in the nation’s history, but don’t know a firewall log from a server file?
Then you would have been up jargon creek without a clue during the first five days of testimony at a military installation outside of Washington, where Pfc. Bradley Manning is fighting efforts to have him court-martialed.
The 24-year-old Army intelligence analyst is a computer whiz who worked as a civilian software developer. He was his unit’s go-to guy for plotting data points and creating Excel spreadsheets in Baghdad, an intelligence officer testified.
But he may have met his match: a former hacker who turned him in, and in two info-tech gumshoes who bored deep into several computer hard drives in search of incriminating evidence.
Army Special Agent David Shaver and civilian contractor Mark Johnson are products of military or intelligence agencies with extensive government-funded training in their fields.
They said they found evidence Manning downloaded and e-mailed nearly half a million sensitive battlefield reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables, and a video of a deadly 2007 Army helicopter attack that WikiLeaks shared with the world and dubbed “Collateral Murder.”
Adrian Lamo, a onetime hacker convicted in 2004 of computer fraud, said his Internet chats with Manning in May 2010 produced “an admission of acts so egregious” that he felt compelled to alert authorities. The “depth of the unsurpassed leakage” made Lamo also concerned that he could get in trouble for remaining quiet.
“I’m a journalist and a minister,” Lamo wrote to Manning in one chat, egging him on to elaborate on his confession. “You can pick either, and treat this as a confession or an interview (never to be published) & enjoy a modicum of legal protection.”
The government, which rested its case against Manning on Tuesday afternoon, wants Manning court-martialed…
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