All posts tagged ‘Bradley Manning’

View WikiLeaks insurance seeders in a larger map

Should the U.S. government declare a cyberwar against WikiLeaks?

On Thursday, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told a gathering in London that the secret-spilling website is moving ahead with plans to publish the remaining 15,000 records from the Afghan war logs, despite a demand from the Pentagon that WikiLeaks “return” it’s entire cache of published and unpublished classified U.S. documents.

Last month, WikiLeaks released 77,000 documents out of 92,000, temporarily holding back 15,000 records at the urging of newspapers that had been provided an advance copy of the entire database. On Thursday, Assange said his organization has now gone through about half of the remaining records, redacting the names of Afghan informants. That suggests the final release could still be weeks away.

Pundits, though, are clamoring for preemptive action. “The United States has the cyber capabilities to prevent WikiLeaks from disseminating those materials,” wrote Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen on Friday. “Will President Obama order the military to deploy those capabilities? … If Assange remains free and the documents he possesses are released, Obama will have no one to blame but himself.”

But a previous U.S.-based effort to wipe WikiLeaks off the internet did not go well. In 2008, federal judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco ordered the WikiLeaks.org domain name seized as part of a lawsuit filed by Julius Baer Bank and Trust, a Swiss bank that suffered a leak of some of its internal documents. Two weeks later the judge admitted he’d acted hastily, and he had the site restored. “There are serious questions of prior restraint, possible violations of the First Amendment,” he said.

Even while the order was in effect, WikiLeaks lived on: supporters and free speech advocates distributed the internet IP address of the site, so it could be reached directly. Mirrors of the site were unaffected by the court order, and a copy of the entire WikiLeaks archive of leaked documents circulated freely on the Pirate Bay.

The U.S. government has other, less legal, options, of course — the “cyber” capabilities Thiessen alludes to. The Pentagon probably has the ability to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks against WikiLeaks’ public-facing servers. If it doesn’t, the Army could rent a formidable botnet from Russian hackers for less than the cost of a Humvee.

But that wouldn’t do much good either. WikiLeaks wrote its own insurance policy two weeks ago, when it posted a 1.4 GB file called insurance.aes256.

The file’s contents are encrypted, so there’s no way to know what’s in it. But, as we’ve previously reported, it’s more than 19 times the size of the Afghan war log — large enough to contain the entire Afghan database, as well as the other, larger classified databases said to be in WikiLeaks’ possession. Accused Army leaker Bradley Manning claimed to have provided WikiLeaks with a log of events in the Iraq war containing 500,000 entries from 2004 through 2009, as well as a database of 260,000 State Department cables to and from diplomatic posts around the globe.

Whatever the insurance file contains, Assange — appearing via Skype on a panel at the Frontline Club — reminded everyone Thursday that he could make it public at any time. “All we have to do is release the password to that material and it’s instantly available,” he said.

WikiLeaks is encouraging supporters to download the insurance file through the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay. “Keep it safe,” reads a message greeting visitors to the WikiLeaks chat room. After two weeks, the insurance file is doubtless in the hands of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of netizens already.

We dipped into the torrent Friday to get a sense of WikiLeaks’ support in that effort. In a few minutes of downloading, we pulled bits and piece of insurance.aes256 from 61 seeders around the world. We ran the IP addresses through a geolocation service and turned it into a KML file to produce the Google Map at the top of this page. The seeders are everywhere, from the U.S., to Iceland, Australia, Canada and Europe. They had all already grabbed the entire file, and are now just donating bandwidth to help WikiLeaks survive.*

Continue Reading “Cyberwar Against Wikileaks? Good Luck With That” »

A Pentagon spokesman on Thursday demanded that the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks return and delete all the classified Defense Department documents in its possession, and stop soliciting new ones.

“The Defense Department demands that WikiLeaks return immediately to the U.S. government all versions of documents obtained directly or indirectly from the Department of Defense databases or records,” said spokesman Geoff Morrell, opening the Pentagon’s daily press briefing.

“WikiLeaks’s public disclosure last week of a large number of our documents has already threatened the safety of our troops, our allies and Afghan citizens who are working with us to help bring about peace and stability in that part of the world,” said Morrell. “Public disclosure of additional Defense Department classified information can only make the damage worse.

“The only acceptable course is for WikiLeaks to take steps immediately to return all versions of all of these documents to the U.S. government and permanently delete them from its website, computers and records.”

Wikileaks responded on Twitter by calling Morrell “obnoxious,” followed by a second tweet urging WikiLeaks supporters to donate to the organization. “Now is a good time to send WikiLeaks all your money!”

The statements ratchet up the tension between the U.S. government and WikiLeaks, which began in earnest with the May arrest of 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning. Manning has been charged with leaking classified information, including video of a deadly 2007 Army helicopter attack in Iraq that claimed the lives of a number of civilians. WikiLeaks had released that video under the title “Collateral Murder” in April 2010.

On July 25, WikiLeaks angered U.S. officials at the highest levels with it published a detailed and mostly-classified log of 77,000 events in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan from 2004 through 2009. The database, according to both the Pentagon and WikiLeaks, originated from the Defense Department’s Secret-level wide area network SIPRnet. Manning remains a “person of interest” in the leak, Morrell said Thursday.

Since the Afghan war logs were published, it’s emerged the records contain the names of some Afghan informants, who are now face potentially deadly reprisal from the Taliban, according to the Pentagon. In the wake of that discovery, WikiLeaks told the news website The Daily Beast that it was seeking the Pentagon’s help in screening a final 15,000 records from the same database before publishing them in a redacted form.

Morrell disputed that claim Thursday. “Wikileaks has made no such request directly to the Department of Defense,” he said.

Continue Reading “Pentagon Demands WikiLeaks ‘Return’ All Classified Documents” »

An Army intelligence analyst who is charged with leaking classified documents to the secret-spilling site WikiLeaks also allegedly sent classified documents to the hacker who turned him in to the feds, according to a friend and associate of the hacker who helped connect him with federal agents.

Note: Adrian Lamo has now denied this. See the update at the bottom of this post.

Chet Uber, director of Project Vigilant, the volunteer, non-profit arm of a corporate security firm, was one of the first people former hacker Adrian Lamo called after Army private Bradley Manning contacted him and disclosed that he had leaked classified documents and videos to WikiLeaks.

If Uber’s claims about the documents are true, this would be the first indication that Manning had sent Lamo classified documents. Lamo has previously said that he believed some of the information disclosed in his chats with Manning was classified, but he has never mentioned receiving documents.

Lamo, when reached by phone on Sunday, would not confirm or deny to Wired.com that he received documents from Manning, though he confirmed having called Uber at the time.

“I’m not willing to comment on classified documents,” Lamo told Wired.com. “Everything with regard to what Mr. Manning sent to me will come out in the trial.”

Ex-hacker Adrian Lamo (Ariel Zambelich/Wired.com)

Lamo acknowledged that he sought Uber’s advice but said Uber was not the only person he approached. Nonetheless, he said, Uber was “a crucial mover” in the incident, because of his experience and his contacts.

Uber is director of Project Vigilant, a non-profit initiative involving volunteers who gather research and reports that are passed onto intelligence, military and government agencies. Lamo has done some volunteer work for the group.

Uber first mentioned Lamo receiving the documents at a press conference about Project Vigilant held at the DefCon hacker conference on Sunday. He mentioned the Lamo case at the end of his presentation as an example of Project Vigilant’s ability to make quick contact with the “highest level people in the government.”

Continue Reading “Update: Ex-Hacker Denies Alleged WikiLeaker Gave Him Classified Documents” »

An Army private suspected of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks was admonished as a trainee in 2008 for uploading YouTube videos discussing classified facilities, according to an Army official with direct knowledge of the incident.

Bradley Manning, now 22, was three months into his 16 weeks of training as an intelligence analyst when about 25 of his fellow students got together to report him for the videos in July 2008, says the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Manning, who enlisted in October 2007, had completed basic training and was receiving his advanced individual training at the Army’s Intelligence Center of Excellence at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

“It was brought up to his command, and his command took action on that,” says the official. “A lot of his actions back then, you couldn’t tell it would come to what it’s come to now, but it was a red flag.”

The videos were messages home to his family that Manning shot in his two-man room in Prosser Village, the barracks for military intelligence trainees at Fort Huachuca. Manning trained the camera on himself, and “was telling them how his day went. But he was giving them a little bit too much information,” says the official. “When you start talking about classified buildings, and classified this and classified that, it’s a no-no.”

The official says Manning did not disclose classified information in the videos, but talked about the base’s SCIFs, secure rooms where classified information is processed — which was viewed as a security risk.

The Pentagon did not return phone calls Thursday. A spokeswoman for the base confirmed that Manning “received non-judicial punishment for violating rules while an advanced individual training student here,” but would not discuss the details, citing Army privacy policies.

“In a training environment, where we’re dealing with young people who aren’t used to the Army, we deal with a wide variety of folks doing inappropriate things,” says spokeswoman Tanja Linton. “They have issues, and it’s dealt with, and they go on to do great things for the Army and the country.”

Manning, who was 20 years old at the time, was ordered to remove the videos, but did not lose his then-provisional Top Secret security clearance, says the Army official. The official and spokeswoman Linton both say Manning graduated from the class in mid-August 2008.

Continue Reading “WikiLeaks Suspect’s YouTube Videos Raised ‘Red Flag’ in 2008″ »

The Pentagon regards Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning as a possible suspect in leaking a classified six-year history of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan that Wikileaks published over the weekend, a spokesman said Monday.

“He is certainly one person that we would be looking at in terms of this leak,” said Col. Dave Lapan. “He’s not the only person. We’ve neither ruled in or ruled out PFC Manning. We’re still assessing the documents to see if we can determine the source of the leak.”

Manning, 22, was arrested in late May after he was turned in by a former hacker he befriended online. In chats with ex-hacker Adrian Lamo, Manning claimed he leaked a variety of classified documents, databases and videos to Wikileaks, and described having direct contact with the site’s founder, Julian Assange, beginning sometime after Thanksgiving, 2009. He also said he’d been digging through classified government and military networks for more than a year.

His case has been subject to renewed interest after the secret-spilling site Wikileaks on Sunday released a breathtaking classified compendium of 77,000 events, from 2004 through 2009, in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.

According to Lapan, those logs were accessible to cleared service members and civilians on the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, or SIPRNet, the Pentagon’s global, secret-level wide area network. In charges filed by the Army on July 5, Manning is accused of exceeding his access to SIPRnet to download and leak classified State Department diplomatic cables, and the classified gun-sight video of a 2007 Army Apache helicopter attack in Iraq that Wikileaks released in April under the heading “Collateral Murder.”

The Afghan log that Wikileaks published this week is not among the leaks that Manning described in his discussions with Lamo. He did claim, however, to have leaked a much larger database from the war in Iraq, covering half a million events from 2004 through 2009, the same years the Afghan log covers. Like the Afghan database, the Iraq database contains latitude-and-longitude information, timestamps and casualty figures, according to Manning’s description of it to Lamo.

Lapan said the Pentagon’s first priority with the new Afghan leak is determining if the information exposed in the documents could “cause risk to the lives of service members or allies, or if any of them compromise our sources and methods or operations or national security in any way.”

“Right now we’re doing an assessment of the documents,” said Lapan. “We’ve only had access to them since last night, when Wikileaks first posted them. With 75,000 docs it will take some period of time to go through all of those.”

Once the government finishes this assessment of the log, it will focus on who had access to it, said Lapan, including Manning.

The government continues to investigate Manning for his alleged leaking of U.S. diplomatic cable to Wikileaks, and still hasn’t determined the exact number of cables at issue, even several weeks after Manning’s hard drives were flown to Washington for forensic analysis.

“We know that PFC Manning downloaded a large number of State Department cables,” said State Department spokesman Darby Holladay, in an e-mail on Wednesday. “We are working to pinpoint that exact number, a process that is difficult and time consuming.”

Continue Reading “Pentagon Says Bradley Manning a Possible Suspect in Afghan Leak” »

The secret-spilling website WikiLeaks appears to be a frugal spender, tapping less than 5 percent of the funds received through two of its three donation methods, according to the third-party foundation that manages those contributions.

WikiLeaks has received 640,000 euros (U.S. $800,000) through PayPal or bank money transfers* since late December, and spent only 30,000 euros (U.S. $38,000) from that funding, says Hendrik Fulda, vice president of the Berlin-based Wau Holland Foundation.

The money has gone to pay the travel expenses of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and spokesman Daniel Schmitt, as well as to cover the costs of computer hardware, such as servers, and leasing data lines, says Fulda. WikiLeaks does not currently pay a salary to Assange or other volunteers from this funding, though there have been discussions about doing so in the future, Fulda adds. The details have not yet been worked out.

“If you are drawing from volunteers who are basically doing stuff for free and if you start paying money, the question is to whom, and to whom not, do you pay, and how much?” Fulda said. “It’s almost a moral question: How much money do you pay?”

The spending figures were first reported by the German paper Der Freitag, after a series of anonymous posts circulated online accusing WikiLeaks of misusing donor funds. The posts were authored by an anonymous person who claimed to be a WikiLeaks insider, and appeared on Cryptome.org, a competing transparency site.

The limited financial disclosure by the Wau Holland Foundation this week offers the first look at how WikiLeaks spends some of its money. WikiLeaks does not publish such figures itself, but has claimed to have $200,000 a year in operating costs, and to have raised about $1 million in total.

Fulda said Assange and Schmitt travel coach when they fly on behalf of WikiLeaks, and that they have focused expenses on building and maintaining the site’s infrastructure, submitting original receipts to the foundation whenever WikiLeaks needs expenses reimbursed. Fulda would not provide a more detailed breakdown of all the money paid out so far, but says his foundation is producing a report that will be available in August that should provide more transparency.

The foundation manages donations sent to WikiLeaks from people around the world through PayPal and wire transfers directed to a bank account controlled by the foundation. It does not handle donations submitted through Moneybookers, a PayPal-like service, that WikiLeaks also lists on its website as a method for donating.

Fulda says WikiLeaks may have other sources of funding — perhaps from private donors and other foundations — but he has no knowledge of them.

“But I believe we are taking in the majority of the donations that are coming in through Europe and elsewhere,” he said.

Continue Reading “WikiLeaks Cash Flows In, Drips Out” »

A U.S. Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking videos and documents to Wikileaks was charged Monday with eight violations of federal criminal law, including unauthorized computer access, and transmitting classified information to an unauthorized third party.

Pfc. Bradley Manning, 22, was charged with two counts under the Uniform Code of Military Justice: one encompassing the eight alleged criminal offenses, and a second detailing four noncriminal violations of Army regulations governing the handling of classified information and computers.

According to the charge sheet, Manning downloaded a classified video of a military operation in Iraq and transmitted it to a third party, in violation of a section of the Espionage Act, 18 U.S.C. 793(e), which involves passing classified information to an uncleared party, but not a foreign government.

The remaining criminal charges are for allegedly abusing access to the Secret-level SIPR network to obtain more than 150,000 U.S. State Department cables, as well as an unspecified classified PowerPoint presentation.

Manning allegedly passed more than 50 classified diplomatic cables to an unauthorized party, but downloaded at least 150,000 unclassified State Department documents, according to Army spokesman Lt. Col. Eric Bloom. These numbers could change as the investigation continues, Bloom said. Both numbers are lower than the 260,000 cables Manning claimed, in online chats, to have passed to Wikileaks.

Between Jan. 13 and Feb. 19 this year, Manning allegedly passed one of the cables, titled “Reykjavik 13,” to an unauthorized party, the Army states. The Army doesn’t name Wikileaks as the recipient of the document, but last February the site published a classified cable titled “Reykjavik 9″ that describes a U.S. embassy meeting with the government of Iceland.

If convicted of all charges, Manning could face a prison sentence of as much as 52 years, Bloom said.

Manning was put under pretrial confinement at the end of May, after he disclosed to a former hacker that he was responsible for leaking classified information to Wikileaks. He’s currently being held at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait and has been assigned a military defense attorney, Capt. Paul Bouchard, who was not available for comment. Bloom said that Manning has not retained a civilian attorney, though Wikileaks stated recently that it commissioned unnamed attorneys to defend the soldier.

The next step in Manning’s case is an Article 32 hearing, which is an evidentiary hearing similar to a grand jury hearing, to determine if the case should proceed to court-martial.

Manning, who comes from Potomac, Maryland, enlisted in the Army in 2007 and was an Army intelligence analyst who was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer 40 miles east of Baghdad, Iraq, last November. He held a Top Secret/SCI clearance.

Continue Reading “Army Intelligence Analyst Charged With Leaking Classified Information” »

An Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking classified information to Wikileaks has still not been charged with any crime, three weeks after being arrested and put in pre-trial confinement.

PFC Bradley Manning, 22, is being held at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, and has been assigned a military defense attorney. The Army and State Department are investigating claims Manning made to an ex-hacker in online chats that he disclosed classified information.

An Army legal advisor in Washington, D.C., says the delay in filing charges is unusual but is not a violation of regulations.

“I think if you were able to make a timeline of all the cases, [three weeks] would be at the high end,” said Lt. Col. Chris Carrier, chief of the policy branch of the criminal law division in the Judge Advocate General’s office (JAG) in Washington, D.C.

Carrier, who has no direct knowledge of the Manning case, said the military is required to produce a charge sheet “in a timely fashion,” but the complexity of this case may be causing the delay.

“It strikes me that this [case] may be relatively complicated in terms of obtaining, handling, managing the evidence and explaining things,” he said. “They have to figure out what they’re dealing with.”

Beyond the complex nature of the case, there may be other reasons for not jumping to charge Manning too quickly.

In 2004, the Army accused a military Muslim chaplain named James Yee of espionage and sedition after investigators found a document in his possession that listed the names of Guantanamo detainees and interrogators — information deemed classified at the time. The military formally charged Yee with mishandling classified information, but later dropped those charges, claiming a trial would reveal sensitive information. Critics suspected the real reason was lack of evidence.

In Manning’s case, in his chats with former hacker Adrian Lamo last month Manning described a crisis of conscience that led him to leak a headline-making video that Wikileaks published in April. The video depicted a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians.

Manning also boasted of leaking a separate video to Wikileaks showing the notorious 2009 Garani air strike in Afghanistan, a classified Army document evaluating Wikileaks as a security threat, a detailed Army chronology of events in the Iraq war and a database of 260,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables.

Lamo tipped off Army investigators to Manning’s claims, prompting the soldier’s arrest at the end of May in Iraq, where he was deployed. Now investigators are searching for evidence to determine if his claims were true. On Friday, a State Department spokesman said Manning’s computer hard drives had been sent from Iraq to Washington for forensic examination.

Lamo said he met with Army and State Department investigators for 12 hours in California on Sunday to give a sworn statement, and that he also provided investigators with his computer hard drives. He said investigators gave him assurances in writing that information on his drives would not be used against any targets other than Manning — such as other hackers who might have had contact with Lamo.

Lamo said paperwork that investigators gave him to sign indicated that Manning was under investigation for possible violations of three federal criminal laws: unauthorized disclosure of classified information, espionage and the anti-hacking Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Any trial, regardless of whether the charges involve federal statutes or military codes, would unfold in a military court, not a civilian criminal court, said Carrier. It would be “highly unusual,” he said, for the Justice Department to be involved in the prosecution.

“Certainly somebody [from Justice] might provide advice,” he said, “but as far as [being] on the actual prosecution team, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen that.”

Carrier also said that the local military jurisdiction would be in charge of the case, and that there is great sensitivity about interference from military personnel outside that jurisdiction. That means investigators and prosecutors in Iraq would be calling the shots.

“So here in Washington, certainly people are interested in what’s going on, and there is some information passed up the chain, but … people in Washington are not going to be calling up and telling them what to do or managing this from afar,” said Carrier.

Carrier said that pre-trial confinements are not very common, since most cases involve less serious allegations. But when they do arise, there are a number of procedures for a local jurisdiction to follow.

Under the rules for military judicial proceedings, a soldier’s company, battalion or brigade commander can order his pre-trial confinement, based on information provided by Army Criminal Investigation Division officers or other investigators.

Generally, a probable-cause review must be conducted within 48 hours to determine if the reasons for confinement are valid, said Carrier. The informal review is conducted between the commander who ordered the confinement, the JAG officer representing the government, the defense counsel and a “neutral and detached” officer. If the confinement was ordered by someone other than the soldier’s immediate commander, the soldier has the right to also have his commanding officer review the information within 72 hours to determine that his confinement is appropriate.

A military magistrate who is independent of the soldier’s command must then conduct a more formal review within seven days of the start of the confinement to determine if the soldier should continue to be held.

According to Army spokesman Lt. Col. Eric Bloom, Manning had this latter review on May 30, and the military magistrate determined that “continued pretrial confinement was warranted.”

Once prosecutors have finished gathering evidence, a military court will hold a hearing to determine if the case should proceed to a court martial. The so-called Article 32 hearing involves a judge, prosecutors and defense counsel.

If the case involving Manning proceeds to trial, it’s unclear where the proceedings will occur. Lamo said officials have not told him where a trial would be held. Carrier said that generally a court martial is held where the soldier’s unit is based.

Manning’s unit is currently in Iraq. But the 10th Mountain Division, in which Manning serves, is headquartered at Ft. Drumm in New York, which could also become a venue for trial if Manning’s attorney were to argue that his defense could be more easily conducted in the United States, where witnesses (such as Lamo) live. Manning’s friend Tyler Watkins, who could also be called as a witness, is in Massachusetts. Last April, according to Watkins, Manning indicated to Watkins that he was responsible for leaking the Iraq helicopter video to Wikileaks.

Continue Reading “3 Weeks After Arrest, Still No Charges in Wikileaks Probe” »

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange wants a copy of the chat logs in which a U.S. intelligence analyst discussed providing classified materials to the whistle-blower site, according to an e-mail shown to Wired.com by the ex-hacker who turned the analyst in.

Assange says he’s arranging the legal defense for 22-year-old Bradley Manning, now in his third week in military custody.

In the Friday e-mail to Adrian Lamo, Assange (or someone convincingly posing as him) claims he wants to forward the logs to attorneys he says he’s hired to represent Manning, though the e-mail doesn’t explain why the unnamed lawyers aren’t approaching Lamo directly.

The e-mail also contains talking points Assange would like to see Lamo adopt in describing Manning, and in explaining his decision to report the suspected leaker to law enforcement.

Continue Reading “Wikileaks Commissions Lawyers to Defend Alleged Army Source” »

On May 21, 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning initiated a series of online chats with former hacker Adrian Lamo after a story on Lamo was published at Wired.com.

The chats continued over several days, during which Manning claimed that he was responsible for leaking classified material to the whistleblower site Wikileaks.

Lamo tipped off the FBI and the Army about Manning’s claims, and on May 26, Manning was seized by Army authorities and put into pre-trial detention in Kuwait. He remains in Kuwait while the Army Criminal Investigation Division and other agencies investigate whether he leaked classified information and determine if he should be charged with any crime.

Below are excerpts from the chat logs, which Lamo provided to Wired.com. As received by Wired, the logs contained timestamps but not dates, so the dates below are approximate. We have substituted the instant messenger screen names with real names. The excerpts represent about 25 percent of the logs. Portions of the chats that discuss deeply personal information about Manning or that reveal apparently sensitive military information are not included.

Continue Reading “‘I Can’t Believe What I’m Confessing to You’: The Wikileaks Chats” »