The Strange and Consequential Case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks
June 18th, 2010This is a lengthy meditation on the Manning/Lamo/WikiLeaks situation.
It’s very worth going through, but don’t expect to come away with any clear conclusions as to what actually happened here.
Via: Salon:
From the start, this whole story was quite strange for numerous reasons.
“Adrian Lamo and Kevin Poulsen have a long and strange history together. Both were convicted of felonies relating to computer hacking: Poulsen in 1994 (when he was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison, ironically because a friend turned government informant on him), and Lamo in 2004 for hacking into The New York Times. When the U.S. Government was investigating Lamo in 2003, they subpoenaed news agencies for any documents reflecting conversations not only with Lamo, but also with Poulsen. That’s because Lamo typically sought media publicity after his hacking adventures, and almost always used Poulsen to provide that publicity.
Despite being convicted of serious hacking felonies, Poulsen was allowed by the U.S. Government to become a journalist covering the hacking world for Security Focus News. ”
Well, it seems one can at least reasonably infer that Lamo and Poulsen are government COINTEL pawns held hostage by deals made with the proverbial government devil after being caught for prior misdeeds.
As for Manning’s so-called bizarre behavior, it may have been a frame-job on someone viewed as expendable, since it was done over the Internet, it could have been anyone pretending to be Manning, as part of a psy-op to discredit Wikileaks.
One interesting thing Greenwald said to Lamo was that he couldn’t have been accused as an accessory for not reporting his knowledge of the activity. Lamo said he thought this too, and wished Manning had asked him to play the role of a journalist who would be covered by special 1st amendment confidentiality privilege provided to journalists. Previously, I would have thought otherwise. There have been a list of street crimes in the news where fellow gang members are indicted for their awareness but no obvious abetting of a crime. Also, in the Eric McDavid trial, the three were convicted of conspiracy by discussing a crime suggested by the informant, and the judge said that as soon as one performed the overt act of researching hydropower dam locations on the internet – it was a conspiracy.
But Greenwald is an attorney and says this isn’t the case.
Let’s say Lamo was acting as a journalist. Lamo was located in California, but Manning was in Kuwait. In the famous Josh Wolf case, where he was sent to jail for not turning over a tape in California, the state claimed it was a federal case because the lens of a police car was broken, and some federal funds had been used to purchase the city police car. They also challenged his journalist status for not having his degree yet or lacking a city press pass, and the issue became whether the state has the right to license journalists who are then entitled to first amendment protection, particularly when there are fewer and fewer paid journalists as newspapers fail. Anyhow, I’m still not 100% clear on the accessory count.
Damn good story Kevin. I’ll never be as smart as you about spotting shenanigans, but I am smart enough to appreciate a good caper like this one.
The one thing that is hard to do, is to remember to give the bad guys credit for being pretty damn smart to. It is too easy to have nothing but utter and complete contempt for them, and hence underestimate them.
The smartest troll I ever ran into was a guy who told me you can’t successfully troll people, if they know you are trolling. So, what he would do is set up 3 or 4 puppets that were obvious trolls and feed that to the forum regulars so everyone would know what a ‘troll’ looked like. Unbeknown to the forum regulars he had another 10,20, 30 … who knows how many identities that he would then use to get under their skins, because these other identities behaved themselves and would only occasionally attack others. Damnedest thing I ever saw. I had to leave the forum, when I realized the guys wife who usually talked to the ladies about ‘girlie’ things was also most likely another of his identities. At that point I decided the puppet-master was just a little too weird for my tastes. But it does illustrate the point, you can’t fool people if they know you are trying to fool them.
FWIW, I’ve set up a website in support of Manning at http://www.bradleymanning.org/. Please sign the petition!