COMMENT: From (UK) Independent. There is some interesting stuff on Wikileaks. Not all of it is US and not all of it is classified. Further, Wikileaks is far from the only site in the business. Oh, and Bradley Manning is very unlikely to be a US IO. He's much more likely to be an E-1 or E-2 Army 96B intel analyst who had a couple of Article 15s and was on his way out of the Army. However, he probably did have the standard USIC clearance package and access to codeword-level computer systems. Lesson (re)learned here: if you're going to take an adverse action against somebody with that kind of access, you probably need to terminate permanently the access before you take the action so revenge can't, at least as easily as it may have here, take the form of an intentional compromise)
Pentagon rushes to block release of classified files on Wikileaks
By Jerome Taylor
Saturday, 12 June 2010
It has the ingredients of a spy thriller: an American military analyst turned whistleblower; 260,000 classified government documents; and rumours that the world's most powerful country is hunting a former hacker whom it believes is about to publish them.
Pentagon and State Department officials are desperately trying to discover whether Bradley Manning, a US army intelligence officer currently under arrest in Kuwait, has leaked highly sensitive embassy cables to Wikileaks.org, an online community of some 800 volunteer cyber experts, activists, journalists and lawyers which has become a thorn in the side of governments and corrupt corporations across the globe.
Reports in the US say officials are seeking to apprehend Julian Assange, the website's founder who has pioneered the release of the kind of information the mainstream media are either unwilling or unable to publish.
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Manning, 22, an intelligence analyst from Potomac, Maryland, who had been serving in Iraq, was revealed earlier this week as the source behind a highly damning leak earlier in the year that showed harrowing cockpit footage of an American Apache helicopter gunning down unarmed civilians in Baghdad three years ago.
But the Apache video may have proven to be one leak too far. Adrian Lamo, a former US hacker turned journalist who had been conversing with Manning online and later gave up his name to the authorities, said he also claimed to have handed 260,000 classified US embassy messages to Wikileaks.
According to Mr Lamo, Manning said the documents showed “almost-criminal political back dealings” made by US embassies in the Middle East which, if true, would cause enormous embarrassment to key allies in a notoriously volatile area of the world. Mr Lamo claims Manning said that “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”.
Phi Beta Iota: The US Military may at some point — using open sources of information — discover that Mr. Assange is the confirmed keynote speaker at Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE), taking place at the Hotel Pennsylvania in NYC, 18-20 July 2010. He will be followed by the founder of OSS.Net, Earth Intelligence Network, and Phi Beta Iota, Mr. Robert Steele, who is now in seclusion in Latin America, but has never missed this event, for which he was the first keynote speaker in 1994. On Friday the 18th Steele will provide a 30 minute presentation on his new book, “Hacking Humanity,” on Saturday the 19th he will do SPY IMPROV from 2200 until the audience runs out of questions–the record is four hours. As with past sessions, video will be provided online for those who cannot stay up late.
This report
