WikiLeaks: Lessons from the Manning-Lamo Chat Logs
Counter-intelligence bloodhounds are no doubt still sniffing around the disclosure to WikiLeaks of some 260,000 diplomatic cables and a trove of military logs from Iraq and Afghanistan, trying to understand how such an unforeseen breach of security happened — and how to reduce the chances something similar could be repeated in the future. If they are smart, they will look for the right answers in the logs of online chats between pfc. Bradley Manning, the former army intelligence analyst who became a source for WikiLeaks, and the reformed computer hactivist who outed him, Adrian Lamo. Their chats indicate that security at Manning's army post in Baghdad — physical as well as electronic — was lamentable. They also suggest that the old intelligence paradigm of cold-war moles and spies has little relevance in the age of WikiLeaks.
The 22 year-old Manning comes across as troubled but lucid about his own motivations."I'm just emotionally fractured, I'm a total mess,'' he tells Lama at one point. There is a bit of self-agrandizing bravado in his saying, "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.'' Nevertheless, Manning was telling the intelligence community something it badly needs to comprehend when he said of himself,
"Maybe I'm just young, naive, and stupid.''
There appears to be no malice in the American soldier who set some kind of record for spilling government secrets, no ideological attachment to a foreign foe, and no mercenary motive for doing what he did. He was shocked when 15 Iraqis were turned over to the Iraqi Federal Police merely for writing a "scholarly critique'' of corruption in the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. And when a superior officer belittled his complaint about the incident, Manning felt he had become part of something that was unjust and he needed to do something to relieve his conscience of complicity. He had reached a point, he told Lamo, "where I was a part of something... I was actively involved in something that I was completely against.''
The bloodhounds will have found what they should be looking for when they see that Manning, if considered as a security problem, is the complete antithesis of a conventional spy. Manning himself understands this distinction. If he were inclined that way, he says, he "could have sold to Russia or China.'' He did not do so because of his belief that "information should be free, it belongs in the public domain.'' This belief is, in itself, a security threat that the United States and many another nation-states in the computer age will be grappling with for some time to come.
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