The Alleged Wikileaks Leaker Is Arraigned

Doug Bernard | Washington DC

For the last year and a half, U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning has sat alone in a prison cell. A variety of prison cells, to be exact.

Pvt. Bradley Manning, shortly before his arrest in Baghdad, 2010

In Spring 2010, the military identified Manning as the source of several high profile leaks on the Wikileaks website. Among the classified leaks Manning is said to have provided: the “Collateral Murder” video of a Army helicopter strike in Iraq in 2007, the “Iraq War Logs” and the massive release of State Department diplomatic cables. (Manning has never confessed to these charges, and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has refused to identify his source for the documents.)

The shy, some say troubled, young Army private was first taken into military custody May 26 in Baghdad and held in an undisclosed location, widely reported to be Camp Arifjan in Kuwait. In July of that year, Manning was transferred to a maximum security military brig at the Marine Corps’ base in Quantico, Virginia, on charges of copying secure documents to his computer and transferring them to unauthorized sources.

For eight months, little happened while Manning sat in solitary confinement in his 6′ by 12′ cell, unable to see anyone including his defense team. Then in March 2011, he was charged with 22 specific crimes, including theft, fraud and “aiding the enemy.” One month later, the group Amnesty International and several legal scholars labeled Manning’s isolation “harsh, punitive,” and in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. That same month, the military moved Manning to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he has remained until today when he was brought to Fort Meade, outside Washington DC, for formal arraignment.

It was his first day in public view for 18 months.

Manning, Wikileaks, And The Price of Secrecy

Friday’s hearing,technically an “Article 32 Inquest,” is the military’s equivalent of a preliminary hearing, where the military court determines if there is enough evidence to proceed with a full court martial proceeding. (VOA’s Bill Ide has our report on the proceedings here, and Nico Columbant has this report on Manning’s supporters.) It’s a long and sometimes grueling process, but it’s only the start of Manning’s legal woes. The Justice Department has also brought a case against him in civilian court, and several other governments are considering charging him with national security violations.

And he’s not the only one.

While Bradley Manning has never formally admitted guilt to passing documents to Wikileaks, a series of email chats in 2010 with hacker-journalist Adrian Lam0 seem to be both confession and accusation:

12:15:11 PM Manning: hypothetical question: if you had free reign over classified networks for long periods of time … say, 8-9 months … and you saw incredible things, awful things … things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC … what would you do? …
12:26:09 PM Manning: lets just say *someone* i know intimately well, has been penetrating US classified networks, mining data like the ones described … and been transferring that data from the classified networks over the “air gap” onto a commercial network computer … sorting the data, compressing it, encrypting it, and uploading it to a crazy white haired aussie who can’t seem to stay in one country very long =L …
12:31:43 PM Manning: crazy white haired dude = Julian Assange …

“Treat this as a confession or an interview,” Lamo wrote. Manning continued to text the next day:

02:22:47 PM, Manning: i mean what if i were someone more malicious
02:23:25 PM, Manning: i could’ve sold to russia or china, and made bank?
02:23:36 PM, Lamo: why didn’t you?
02:23:58 PM, Manning: because it’s public data …

Since he launched the Wikileaks website in 2006, Julian Assange – the “crazy white haired dude” – has been giving governments around the world fits. Starting as an international whistle-blower site, Wikileaks published leaked documents on Icelandic banking, Kenyan corruption and celebrity misdeeds. But along the way it became largely focused on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; and by extension, the U.S. government.

The Obama administration has been trying to make the case that Assange and others actively assisted Manning in his leaking. The Justice Department has subpoened Twitter records from Wikileaks supporters – including Icelandic member of parliament Birgitta Jónsdóttir – and Assange’s U.S. attorney, Mark Stephens, has alleged there is a secret grand jury seated to charge Assange with violating the Espionage Act. (U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder neither confirms or denies this, saying only that “significant actions” have been authorized.)

But as Raffi Khatchadourian documented in The New Yorker, such efforts have produced few results. Assange has steadfastly denied any conspiracy with Manning, and despite his own legal troubles with Swedish and British authorities, the U.S. has not been able to get any charges to stick to Assange.

Not that it hasn’t cost him, or Wikileaks. Under pressure from Washington, major credit card companies have suspended all supporter donations to the group. Although it continues to publish, just last week launching the so-called “Spy Files” project, Wikileaks’ leadership has begun to fray. As for Assange, he’s spent over one year largely confined to house arrest in Britain, and in his rare public appearances seems noticeably worn.

A Confined Future

Considering the unprecedented size of the secrecy breach, and the significant embarrassment caused to the U.S. government, it’s a sure bet that Bradley Manning will spend the rest of life behind bars. The larger issues remain untested: who is a journalist, what constitutes a secret, and how can they be stopped once they’re out there on the Internet?

The Pentagon and State Department have tightened access and constricted their use of the SIPRnet computer network Manning used to access military logs and diplomatic cables. And the Defense Department has launched several initiatives, one of them called “PRODIGAL,” to catch would-be snoops and leakers.

But leaks are unavoidable, as the Pentagon well knows. And in the Internet era, plugging the leak once it has begun can be next to impossible.

Bradley Manning’s military trial is expected to begin in earnest sometime in the Spring. Until then, he will make his home back in his prison cell at Fort Leavenworth.

Our complete Wikileaks coverage can be found here.

The Full Truth Is Hard To Know

Doug Bernard | Washington DC

Five times a year, in cities as diverse as Prague, Washington, Brasilia, Dubai and Kuala Lumpur, thousands of buyers and sellers of electronic gear gather for a series of events that have come to be known as “The Wiretapper’s Ball.”  On display are some of the most sophisticated electronic products available that allow for practically any kind of electronic surveillance, from monitoring and intercepting mobile phone calls to recording user’s web traffic and physically locating individuals to within a meter. The manufacturers are ready to sell, and the thousands of governments and other organizations that attend are eager to buy.

While many of the products are not for public discussion, their existence is hardly a secret. Writing in the Washington Post recently, reporters Sari Horwitz, Shyamantha Asokan and Julie Tate found over 35 U.S. government agencies registered to attend the Washington surveillance conference. They were only outnumbered by those peddling their high-tech wares:

“One German company, DigiTask, offers a suitcase-size device capable of monitoring Web use on public WiFi networks, such as those at cafes, airports and hotels. A lawyer representing the company, Winfried Seibert, declined to elaborate on its products. ‘They won’t answer questions about what is offered,’ he said. ‘That’s a secret. That’s a secret between the company and the customer.’”

But just who are those customers, and what kind of technology is being made available to governments around the world? Wiretapper Ball coordinator Jerry Lucas says clearly repressive governments such as Syria, Iran and North Korea are not allowed at the events, but that’s no guarantee these advanced technologies don’t wind up in those places.

There are no solid estimates for the size of the international surveillance industry.  However it involves hundreds of firms – many based in the United States, Germany, Britain and Israel – and thousands of clients, including corporations, police forces and governments. Tracking where all that technology flows is tricky, and that’s raising alarms among human rights organizations. For example, following the fall of the Tunisian and Egyptian governments, rebels documented advanced surveillance equipment used by those governments to monitor and track rebels’ online activities.

More recently, Internet monitors have learned that surveillance equipment from two U.S. firms, NetApp and Blue Coat Systems, have been installed and are being used by Syrian officials to unknown ends; U.S. Senators Robert Casey and Mark Kirk have requested an investigation. And last month the Italian tech firm Area SpA announced it was halting development of a surveillance project in Syria that, if finished, would have given Damascus “…the power to intercept, scan and catalog virtually every e-mail that flows through the country.”

In a new document release this week, the group Wikileaks has compiled a public database it calls “The Spy Files.” Sorted by factors such as manufacturer, year of contract and products offered, the “Spy Files” document what Wikileaks founder Julian Assange calls the unregulated spread of the “mass surveillance industry”:

“International surveillance companies are based in the more technologically sophisticated countries, and they sell their technology on to every country of the world. This industry is, in practice, unregulated. Intelligence agencies, military forces and police authorities are able to silently, and on mass [sic] .. secretly intercept calls and take over computers without the help or knowledge of the telecommunication providers. Users’ physical location can be tracked if they are carrying a mobile phone, even if it is only on standby.”

160 firms in all are listed in the “Spy Files,” along with brief specs of their products and details of some of their customers. There’s also a searchable map for further research.

And while it is illegal to sell high-tech equipment to those nations hit with sanctions, such as Iran or Burma, those sanctions are often a nation-by-nation patchwork, and no guarantee that some middleman won’t legally buy surveillance equipment from one firm, and then transfer it to a banned nation.

But privacy advocates want more, including a comprehensive global agreement that would heavily regulate who can buy what sort of equipment. Until then, however, the global surveillance market will likely remain healthy, if shadowy.

You can read more on the Wikileaks “Spy Files” here at Technorati, and here at Forbes.  Also, the French media company OWNI has this deeper look at how Western-made surveillance equipment was used by the Gaddhafi government to spy on and track rebel activities.  It’s well worth the read.

Finally, although you can’t attend, you can view the “Wiretapper’s Ball” ISS Mideast conference agenda online here.

The Web’s Most Overused – and Least Understood – Word

courtesy Creative Commons

Take a short hike around the Internet and it’s almost guaranteed you’ll stumble over a wiki-something.

Wikileaks.  Wikipedia.  Wikispaces or Wikispots.   The Apple Corporation has a wiki (although not open to the public)  as does IBM, and GE, and just about every other Fortune 500 firm.  And be careful not to get your WikiMedia mixed up with your MediaWiki.

There are wiki sites for term papers, pop stars who wear meat, and  funny cat pictures.  There’s even a wiki for people who like to throw potluck parties.

But what, exactly, is a wiki?  And do we really need them all?

Read the rest of this entry »

Is the “Wiki” Generation Too Wired For Its Good?

This week we’re partnering with our pals who run the really-worth-your-time blog “VOA Student Union” with this question: what does the Internet generation think about all the wired devices that have come into our lives?

It’s a question we’ve been returning to as we’ve read, and re-read, Ethan Wilkes’ provocative essay “Generation Wiki’s web savvy“, first published in the Guardian on December 14.   Spurred by the controversy still swirling around the Wikileaks organization – and to some degree its just-as-controversial co-founder Julian Assange – Wilkes steps into the discussion with a bit of a generational slap-down.

“We are Generation Wiki,” he begins.  “We are the first of our kind.”

Wilkes goes on to make a new form of a very old argument: you grown-ups just don’t understand us.  The Internet revolution, Wilkes says, and all the devices and changes its spawned have created an entirely different set of expectations of privacy and speech.  And it’s those devices that are pushing a new social order – still undefined – where information necessarily runs free:

“We are aware of these ambiguities of the digital age, and we are comfortable with them. They are the products of a networked world where information is in abundance and easily diffused; it is the only world that we have known…What seems to be missing is an understanding of what Generation Wiki has known all along about information gone viral: we consume, comment and move on; the story dies when we are done with it. Trying to put the genie back in the bottle is no way to deal with an expose once it has gone online. “

OK…perhaps.  Arguably this generation does have different expectations of the boundaries between public and private.  And certainly growing up in an increasingly networked world has changed everyone’s relationship with  information – free or otherwise.

But then again, perhaps not.  You don’t need to have lived so many decades to know it’s the folly of youth to believe it is somehow unique and new, completely different from what came before and freed from the old strictures.  And then, as youth slides into something else, the experiences and shared knowledge of those that came before take on greater resonance.

Pretty heady stuff.  All of which has lead both Digital Frontiers and VOA’s Student Union to pose this question: what devices rule your life?

“What technologies rule your life?  Do you spend a lot of time on your computer or your mobile phone, and what do you use them for?  If you’ve traveled or lived in different countries, how were their tech habits different than your own?  What devices do you wish you had, and which could you live without?”

We expect many of the Student Union’s responses will come from “Generation Wiki.”  We’re hoping here to hear from everyone – young or old, fresh or experienced, wired or not.

Does National Security Trump Freedom of the Press?

Elizabeth Lee | Washington

Sensitive information released by the Wikileaks website has generated a  heated debate in the United States: should the news media publish  classified information, and does it compromise national security?  And who decides?

Those questions, and others, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Once a Secret is Out of the Bag, Can It Ever Go Back In?

Kate Woodsome | Washington, D.C

The U.S. Justice Department is reportedly considering whether to file espionage charges against the WikiLeaks Web site and its founder Julian Assange. The case has raised broad legal questions about how the government will protect the freedom of information and an open Internet, while also protecting privacy and national security.

And it begs an even older question: once a  secret is revealed, can it ever go back to being secret again?  That, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Wikileaks and the Cyber-War it Launched

“The Jester” says he’s responsible for knocking Wikileaks off the Internet. “Anonymous” say they’re targeting MasterCard and PayPal as punishment for stopping transfers to the controversial site. Across the web, a war is waging between supporters and opponents of Wikileaks. Will it be enough to tear a hole in the Internet?  VOA’s Doug Bernard takes a deeper lo0k, after the jump.

How Wikileaks Exploits Technological, and Human, Weaknesses

Kate Woodsome |Washington DC

Founder of the WikiLeaks website, Julian Assange, at a recent press conference in London (Tom Turco - AP)

Historians, anti-war activists and armchair observers of human nature will have plenty to mull over in the coming years, thanks to the online group WikiLeaks.

The website has published hundreds of thousands of previously unreleased U.S. military and diplomatic documents, dating from February of this year to as far back as the 1960s.  The latest round of leaks, involving diplomatic cables, has renewed efforts by the U.S. government to tighten security on its computer systems.  But cyber-security experts point out the leaks were less a breakdown of technology than of trust.

Their thoughts, and the full story, after the jump.

How One Website is Changing Journalism

Wikileaks first came online in 2007, promising any individual a forum to anonymously publish previously classified, hidden or sensitive documents and make them publicly available.

The idea was relatively simple: given the viral nature of the Internet – and the ease of duplicating digital documents – once secret information was published, it could never become secret again.

From this one idea, hundreds of thousands of secrets have now become public.

Read more after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »