I personally wouldn't trust Lamo with any information, from past experience.
Few things you should know about Lamo:
1) He loves attention, he will go to some length to make noise so that people will talk about it/him.
2) He was responsible for leaking his own movie on bit-torrent.
3) Lamo was responsible for leaking wikileaks donor list and he bragged about it to me.
I personally don't have high regard for Wikileaks either, as they have their own biased spin on their leaks.
Bottom line. If you are responsible for seriously damaging leaks on the most powerful government in the world the last thing you want to do is to talk about it with someone who has questionable ethics. I also think Bradley Manning is an idiot.
Brad Manning violated the very core values of integrity involved in operating as an IA. In my opinion he doesn't deserve the 'whisteblower' status some people are trying to protect him under.
Leaking a single controversial guncam footage because his conscience gave in is one thing, but continuing to leak documents and material and then boast about it to someone like Lamo is another. As a former Marine, I have seen and done things that keep me awake at night, but I will never violate my own integrity by doing what Manning did and end up endangering more lives.
Lamo ended up turning Manning in for another 15 minutes of fame. Anyone ethical with real national interest in mind would distance himself from this mess. Either way the leaked material will end up doing nothing but costing more lives.
If you're referring to the video of the Apache assult, how does leaked video of war crimes cost lives? If you're referring to other material he leaked, which material are you referring to?
FTA: "He said he also leaked three other items to Wikileaks: a separate video showing the notorious 2009 Garani air strike in Afghanistan that Wikileaks has previously acknowledged is in its possession; a classified Army document evaluating Wikileaks as a security threat, which the site posted in March; and a previously unreported breach consisting of 260,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables that Manning described as exposing 'almost criminal political back dealings.'"
GP probably means the diplomatic cables. Sure they can be abused, but generally speaking, they are secret for good reasons.
"I will never violate my own integrity by doing what Manning did and end up endangering more lives."
Has it ever occurred to you that sacrificing some more lives is not necessarily a bad thing? As far as I know, the U.S. invasion of Iraq was (highly) illegal. The U.S. citizens do not know what their military is doing, and do not care. The only deterrent preventing U.S. government from engaging in "nation-building" around the world is the political cost of a few hundreds / thousands of flag-draped caskets. Sometimes one must sacrifice a few to save many.
It's possible that Manning's actions would cost lives. It's also possible that Manning's actions would save lives, perhaps by aborting pending military actions.
Actual metrics are impossible to calculate, but we should acknowledge that both possibilities exist.
I also think it's useful to consider that you can betray a nation or government, but net a positive for the world as a whole. Many people believe that the US government has overused classification of documents which could prove embarrassing to those in positions of power. Perhaps people like Manning act as a natural counterweight, ensuring that those in power never believe that their actions will remain secret for eternity; someday, some loudmouth kid might spew your secrets to the world.
If the (in)famous video leaked by Wikileaks showed U.S. servicemen following the ROE, why is that the Pentagon was so upset by its release? Generally speaking, U.S. citizens greatly romanticize war, and videos such as this one show the crudeness of warfare, something few people want to see.
Do people really think that this video will enrage Iraqis further? Well, think about it. Iraqi citizens have endured decades of opression under Saddam, they had their country bombed to the ground in 1991, they endured a decade of embargo, they were bombed and invaded again in 2003, and have lived the past 7 years in chaos. I think the Iraqis are pretty jaded about violence by now. If someone is going to be upset about that video, that someone is the U.S. citizen who pays taxes and, unwillingly, subsidizes such slaughter.
I don't oppose Wikileaks leaking the video. What I oppose is Wikileaks editing for propaganda purposes. A raw video would have been more than enough.
How much more serious trouble could Manning get into?
I'm not trying to be argumentative. It's a serious question. He had a very high security rating, and was dumping highly classified documents -- the work of tens of thousands of man hours and billions of dollars of intelligence -- on to the web.
What's the next step past that?
EDIT: wrong guy -- changed name to be what I meant and not what I typed
Accidentally publishing a document that causes an operational crisis is worse than purposely doing what he did?
Aside from the "accidentally" part, I don't know know could you prove that a particular document created an operational problem without knowing everything other people have to make decisions with and how they made them. I think with this standard of "worse" it's an extremely difficult thing to know with any certainty.
With the size of the information he dumped, I don't know how anybody would be able to walk back which operational problems he caused where. That's how intelligence works -- lots of little pieces making a case one way or another. Do we really want to have a trial that cross-references all TSSCI operations with the information in his leaks?
I understand that if there were operation X in which we knew enough about how it crashed that we could show it was a result of his action -- that might make a better legal case. But the amount of damage he's done isn't directly measurable like that. It's not like knocking over a liquor store. He didn't do less or more damage because it's more or less easily demonstrable. And I'm still trying to figure out how doing something accidentally -- without intent to harm -- is worse than doing something intentionally.
My subtext is that this kid was a moron. It's possible that the worst thing he's done is fed Assange a propaganda video. If so, be aware that the Washington Post had published more or less a transcript of that video a year before Assange took it on a media tour.
The "accident" I'm talking about is handing over documents without fully comprehending what their operational impact is. I'm not letting the kid off the hook here.
But you combine a moron, access to information, lax security policies, and Julian Assange and what you have is a recipe for something far worse than a PR black eye. And I doubt very highly that Assange was thinking too carefully about this dumb kid's welfare before publishing the stuff he was getting.
Agreed that it is a catastrophe all the way around.
Unfortunately, morons can kill people. I hope there are serious changes in the psych tests for these positions. People who are careless playing with explosives shouldn't be allowed around them -- but that doesn't make them any less dead when they go off.
I think we are in violent agreement. My only point was that by turning him in, Lamo (who I am not sticking up for) may very well have saved his life, by disengaging the moron from an extremely hazardous situation that had him bridging a circuit between Julian Assange and the Department of Defense.
We don't really know what he's published (consider the source here). It could be very bad. Hopefully it's not. Either way, it would only gotten worse if he had been left to broker the DoD for Assange.
I think after this Lamo will probably not hear from any more people confessing crimes. Hard to say what the right course of action would be in this situation although if I were Lamo I probably would not voluntarily announce my participation in the investigation.
Lamo was kind of backed into a corner. Even aside from the moral issues (I personally would have turned in Manning; if you volunteer for a role where you will get classified data, you need to play by those rules!)
1) If SPC Manning was talking recklessly to Lamo, Lamo had to assume he was also talking to other people, and generally behaving recklessly. Manning was going to get caught. If Lamo didn't say anything, but Manning later was caught, it would be likely discovered that he'd confessed to Lamo as well. This would not be good for Lamo, especially if that information were not yet public knowledge. An investigator might suspect conspiracy, and might suspect Lamo had data -- he could then be subject to intelligence activity or law enforcement activity himself.
2) If he cooperated with authorities in secret, it's likely his involvement would become known later once the trial happened (or at any time of Manning's choosing). People who interacted with Lamo between his initial contact with Manning and the eventual disclosure would be afraid they had been compromised as well.
I think Lamo was in a difficult situation even if he didn't want to turn the guy in.
On the other hand, Lamo might have argued that his status as a famous hacker makes him a regular target for the fabricated tales of script kiddies and weirdos worldwide.
Encountering a boastful liar on the internet isn't a freak occurrence by any means. Whether or not this is a viable defense is another matter.
Even if something is a viable defense against conviction in court, being the subject of an investigation, or even worse, CI investigation, is way before that point -- and highly unpleasant I'm sure, especially for someone with previous criminal convictions and ongoing involvement with "hackerdom".
> The video, he said, was an encrypted AES-256 ZIP file.
Does this mean Assange broke the AES-256 encryption on a ZIP file in 6 months? I mean, I'm sure the password didn't have 256 bits of entropy, but dang that's scary!
Brute-forcing a relatively long passphrase is actually a reasonable accomplishment, especially in secret, and with a limited budget. I will bet 99% that is what he did, and the 'moderately hard' part was in getting resources to run a covert distributed break.
Addressing the decryption question, the author writes, "Assange, a cryptographer of exceptional skill, told me that unlocking the file was 'moderately difficult.'"
But it does, although there is a specific carve out for bringing charges in the 5th Amendment:
"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger...."
"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district where in the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense."
Which of the above, as defined by the relevant parties (the Congress (UCMJ) and the Federal courts) is he not going to benefit from?
Civilian juries are based on English civilian common law juries. I would strongly suspect military court-martial juries have the same basis, although Wikipedia notes "Members of a court-martial are commissioned officers, unless the accused is a warrant officer or enlisted member and requests that the membership reflect their position by including warrant or enlisted members."
I personally wouldn't trust Lamo with any information, from past experience.
Few things you should know about Lamo:
1) He loves attention, he will go to some length to make noise so that people will talk about it/him.
2) He was responsible for leaking his own movie on bit-torrent.
3) Lamo was responsible for leaking wikileaks donor list and he bragged about it to me.
I personally don't have high regard for Wikileaks either, as they have their own biased spin on their leaks.
Bottom line. If you are responsible for seriously damaging leaks on the most powerful government in the world the last thing you want to do is to talk about it with someone who has questionable ethics. I also think Bradley Manning is an idiot.