Hacker turns in US soldier over WikiLeaks Iraq video
Hacker turns in US soldier over WikiLeaks Iraq video
Bradly Manning allegedly leaked footage to website entitled Collateral Murder of US troops shooting civilians
A US army intelligence analyst has been arrested in
Iraq after being turned in by a convicted hacker for allegedly leaking a classified video of US troops Iraqi shooting civilians to the
WikiLeaks website.
Bradly Manning, 22, was arrested after boasting in instant messages and emails to a high-profile former hacker, Adrian Lamo, that he passed on the video, which
shows a US air strike that killed a dozen people in Baghdad, including two Iraqis working for the Reuters news agency. The video, named Collateral Murder by WikiLeaks, proved to be highly embarrassing to the
US military after the air crew was heard falsely claiming to have encountered a firefight and then
laughing at the dead .
Lamo told the
Wired magazine website, which broke the story of the arrest, that he went to the military and FBI about Manning "because lives were in danger" after the soldier also boasted of leaking thousands of pages of diplomatic cables.
Manning, who had top-secret clearance, was arrested at a base east of Baghdad a fortnight ago. He is being held in Kuwait.
He contacted Lamo last month after reading a Wired article on the former hacker, who was convicted in 2004 of breaking into computers at the New York Times, Yahoo and Microsoft.
"If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day, seven days a week, for eight-plus months, what would you do?" Manning asked.
He wrote that he contacted Wikileaks's director, Julian Assange, in November after the site posted 500,000 pager messages sent immediately after the 9/11 attacks. "I immediately recognised that they were from an NSA [National Security Agency] database, and I felt comfortable enough to come forward," he said.
Manning said the video of the helicopters shooting in Baghdad had worried him. "At first glance, it was just a bunch of guys getting shot up by a helicopter," he wrote. "No big deal But something struck me as odd with the van thing, and also the fact it was being stored in a JAG [judge advocate general] officer's directory. So I looked into it."
Manning gave the video to Wikileaks in February, which made it public two months later after breaking the encryption.
But Lamo said what disturbed him was a boast by Manning that he had sent 260,000 pages of confidential diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks.
"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," Manning wrote.
Lamo told Wired he had met military investigators and the FBI because he feared the leak of diplomatic cables endangered US security.
"I wouldn't have done this if lives weren't in danger," he said. "He was in a war zone and basically trying to vacuum up as much classified information as he could, and [was] just throwing it up into the air."
Manning claimed to have leaked a second video of an air strike a year ago near Garani village, in Afghanistan, which the local authorities said killed nearly 100 people, most of them children. The Pentagon at first said it would release the video but then backed off.
WikiLeaks responded on Twitter by calling Lamo a notorious felon, informer and manipulator, and warning against believing his account. It also said it has no record of the 260,000 documents Manning said he had leaked.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/07/hacker-wikileaks-iraq-video-manning
