The call with the Criminal Investigation Division (CID) led to a meeting with FBI agents. Uber would remember that at this point Lamo was conflicted and even called Uber in the middle of his sit-down with the G-men. “I’m in a meeting with five guys and I don’t want to do this,” Uber says Lamo told him. The older man says he responded, “You don’t have any choice, you’ve got to do this.”
For the next two days, Lamo continued to chat with Manning, now with the knowledge that federal agents would be looking over his shoulder at their conversation. They discussed religion, Lamo’s legal history, and the “crazy white-haired Australian” Julian Assange, with whom Manning had been communicating. At one point, Manning began to wax lyrical about the victims and perpetrators of the Apache helicopter video he had helped to expose, which WikiLeaks had used to send shock waves around the world just a month before. Manning mentioned that he’d recently added several of the people involved as friends on Facebook. Those individuals included thirty-three-year-old ex-soldier Ethan McCord, who had been racked with guilt over his involvement in the highly publicized Apache helicopter attack and would later speak out against the war. “They touch my life, I touch their life, they touch my life again . . . full circle,” Manning wrote.
“Life’s funny,” Lamo responded.
Then Lamo abruptly changed the subject. “*random* Are you concerned about [army counterintelligence] looking into your Wiki stuff?” he asked. “I was always paranoid.”
Manning responded that there was “no open investigation,” a sign that he had likely been doing some investigations of his own—counter – counterintelligence. In later conversations, Manning went on to describe how all records of his leak had been “zerofilled”—irreversibly deleted—and to describe the arsenal of anonymity and privacy tools he had used. Lamo asked him what he would do if his cover was blown anyway. “Try and figure out how I could get my side of the story out . . . before everything was twisted around to make me look like Nidal Hasan,” Manning replied, referring to the army major who quietly became a radical Islamist and went on a shooting spree at Texas’s Fort Hood in 2009, killing thirteen and wounding twenty-nine.
“I don’t think it’s going to happen,” Manning added. “I mean, I was never noticed.”
Near the end of their series of chats, Manning seems to be contemplating more existential questions: “I’m not sure whether I’d be considered: A type of ‘hacker,’ ‘cracker,’ ‘hacktivist,’ ‘leaker’ or what . . .” he mused. “I’m just me . . . really.”
“Or a spy,” Lamo wrote back, adding a smiling emoticon.
On May 26, less than a week into his chats with Lamo, Manning was arrested by army criminal investigators. He was charged with more than two dozen crimes, including violating the Espionage Act and aiding the enemy. The second of those crimes is punishable in the military justice system with death. But Manning’s prosecutors have stated that they don’t plan to argue for Manning’s execution. Only a life sentence in a military prison.
In March 2011, ten months after Manning’s arrest, Daniel Ellsberg stood in front of the White House wearing a navy blue suit and tie, along with hundreds of others protesting Manning’s inhumane confinement in a Quantico, Virginia, military jail.
In July, Manning had been moved from a brig in Kuwait to the Quantico base, where he was kept with virtually no contact with other prisoners, allowed an hour of walking exercise a day and just a few hours of visits a week. One of the few friends who managed to see him on a regular basis, a researcher at MIT named David House, describes Manning’s deteriorating mental condition over the next months, as a bright twenty-three-year-old eager to discuss physics and sociology slowly devolved into a medicated, near-“catatonic” state. When House saw Manning in February, he says it was as if Manning “had been sleeping hard for days, and needed hours to fully wake up.”
At the March protest, the seventy-nine-year-old Ellsberg was asked by police to leave the street in front of the White House, as protesters chanted, “This is what hypocrisy looks like!” He politely declined to leave and was put in handcuffs and taken away in a police van. When he and the other 112 arrested protesters were released later, he promptly traveled to Quantico, where he had trained as an officer in the Marines decades earlier. Outside the base there, he staged another sit-in and was arrested again.
In interviews with reporters around that time, Ellsberg said that he identifies with Manning “more than anyone else I’ve seen in the last forty years.”
“I was that young man,” he told a CNN reporter. “I was Bradley Manning.”
President Barack Obama disagrees. After a fund-raising event a month later, the president was confronted by a protester doggedly asking him about Manning’s confinement. Obama didn’t shrink from offering his views, which were caught on camera and soon posted to YouTube. “We’re a nation of laws,” the president says with a smile to the Manning supporter questioning him. “We don’t let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate. He broke the law.”
“Isn’t that just the same thing as what Daniel Ellsberg did?” Obama’s interlocutor asks.
“No, it wasn’t the same thing,” Obama responds dismissively. “Ellsberg’s material wasn’t classified in the same way.” The president turns away, and the conversation is over.
Obama is right, of course. It wasn’t the same thing. The materials that Ellsberg leaked were actually of a higher top-secret classification. But the president was right on a deeper level too. Ellsberg, despite his sympathy for Manning, is not “that young man.”
Daniel Ellsberg’s story is that ultrarare conversion of an elite military leader into a radical dissident. Only a handful of officials had the authorization to read the Pentagon Papers. For Ellsberg to both have had the privileged access to the documents that he leaked and to actually have leaked them required a unique combination: a highly distinguished career that brought him to the pinnacle of Pentagon secrecy and a complexity of conscience that allowed him to execute a 180-degree turn in his loyalties near the peak of that career.
Manning, by contrast, was one of the millions of Americans with lower-level security clearances. He fitted the profile of a leaker from the moment he entered the Pentagon’s employ: disaffected, powerless, strong-willed, and antiauthority.
In comparing Manning to himself, Ellsberg cites Manning’s statement in his chats with Lamo that he “wouldn’t mind going to prison or being executed.” “I never thought, for the rest of my life, I would ever hear anyone willing to do that, to risk their life, so that horrible, awful secrets could be known,” Ellsberg told the CNN reporter. “Then I read those logs and learned Bradley was willing to go to prison. I can’t tell you how much that affected me.”
But Ellsberg generously overlooks the fact that although Manning says he was willing to go to prison, he never expected to. Everything in Manning’s conversations with Lamo indicates he felt that the anonymity and privacy tools he had used—along with the army’s negligent lack of security precautions—had rendered him immune from punishment. Ellsberg, by contrast, assumed he would spend much if not the entire rest of his life in prison, and even made practical preparations for the day when he would be separated by bars and razor wire from his wife and children.
The conclusion to this story, that today Ellsberg is free while Manning is shuttled between jail cells and courtrooms to potentially face a life behind bars, might be misleading. In fact, while the technical play-by-play of each leak shows the evolution of leaking technology and methods, the outcome of those cases is a counterintuitive fluke. If not for his ill-fated conversation with Adrian Lamo, Manning’s high-tech leak would likely have gone unpunished. And if not for Nixon’s flubbed attacks on Ellsberg, the older man might still be in prison even four decades later.
The barriers to modern megaleakers like Manning have crumbled: They needn’t spend a year photocopying. T
hey needn’t be Eagle Scouts or war heroes who penetrate the government’s most elite layer only to go rogue—just one of the millions of Americans with access to secret government documents or the many, many uncountable millions more with access to secret corporate information. And perhaps most important, they needn’t risk reprisal by exposing their identities to the journalists they hope will amplify their whistleblowing.
The forces that caught Manning are real and significant: The greatest vulnerability for any leaker remains his or her human connections. But the lesson of Manning’s story for a generation of digital natives will be, above all else, that he nearly got away with it. Use the right cryptographic tools, keep your mouth shut, and you, too, can anonymously, frictionlessly, eviscerate an entire institution’s information.
There may not be many Daniel Ellbergs in the world, ready to push through the twentieth century’s stubborn barriers to leaking. But the twenty-first century would be wise to expect more Bradley Mannings.
PART TWO
THE EVOLUTION OF LEAKING
“Insiders know where the bodies are.”
JULIAN ASSANGE
CHAPTER 2
THE CRYPTOGRAPHERS
Tim May stewed in his apartment complex’s outdoor Jacuzzi in Sunnyvale, California. He had recently split with his girlfriend, but the burly six-foot-one, bearded physicist wasn’t the type to dwell on female troubles. His gray matter was plagued with a more vexing problem: the mystery of the failing semiconductors.
In 1974, May had joined a small computer chip company called Intel. The little-known firm was gambling on using metal oxide semiconductors or MOS in its memory chips instead of the bipolar transistors used in traditional chips from IBM or Fairchild Semiconductor. That new approach was designed to squeeze more tiny gates containing ones or zeros of information onto a single chip, and it had recently won the microprocessor maverick an eight-figure contract from the AT&T division Western Electric to provide the memory chips in its Denver data center PBXs, the boxes that still serve as network hubs for phone systems inside of large companies.
The deal was an enormous windfall for a three-thousand-person firm competing with much larger chip giants. But it had hit a potentially fatal snag. Western Electric’s PBXs were crashing frequently and unpredictably. Because the problem had arisen only after its switch to new chips, the AT&T execs put the blame squarely on Intel. And when Intel engineers were dragged in to check on the PBX malfunctions and monitored the PBX’s memory for errors, they confessed: As often as every hour, a single bit would flip on their chips—one unit of data switching from a one to a zero or vice versa seemingly of its own accord—leading to maddeningly random software glitches.
Intel’s engineers tried every test they could think of to find the source of that bit-flip. But they couldn’t even reproduce the problem, much less solve it. They even hypothesized that the magnet from a janitor’s floor buffer’s motor might be causing the errors as it swept past the PBXs. The theory didn’t pan out. As a task force of engineers was assigned to the problem, AT&T’s patience was starting to wear thin.
Twenty-five-year-old May wasn’t meant to be working on the problem. But one of May’s colleagues, knowing the young engineer had a background in particle physics, had stuck his head in May’s office and passed on a new theory that none other than Intel founder Gordon Moore wanted May to check out: Perhaps cosmic rays—subatomic particles bombarding Earth from space at near-light speeds—could knock chips’ electrons out of place, causing the same sort of problems that were now leading to AT&T’s PBX debacle.
May whipped out his trusty Hewlett-Packard calculator and did the math. Some quick operations showed that even at Denver’s altitude, not enough cosmic rays could be reaching the chips to explain Western Electric’s errors. The ray theory was bunk.
But Moore’s question had gotten May thinking. And as he basted in the hot tub that spring evening, he looked down at the granite walls of that outdoor tub and experienced his own bit-flip of intuition. Granite and other stones, May knew, give off extremely low levels of radioactive alpha particles due to their hundredths-of-one-percent thorium and uranium content. And Intel had recently switched its chips’ casing to a new type of ceramic material to save a few extra bucks per chip.
On an atomic scale, alpha particles are big and clumsy boulders that plow into objects’ surfaces, compared to the cosmic rays that hit Earth from space. Perhaps the radiation necessary to knock those chips’ data off kilter wasn’t coming from the cosmos. Instead, May thought, what if it came from a source as close to the vulnerable computing jewels as May’s skin to the granite hot tub wall at his back?
Drying off and pulling out his calculator, he determined that an alpha particle would be five times the size necessary to affect the distinction between a 1 and a 0 as stored on one of AT&T’s chips, corrupting a semiconductor’s data storage like a tennis ball crammed into bathroom piping. The next day at Intel’s lab, he put a handful of the chips’ ceramic material into a radiation-measuring counter chamber, left it there for twenty-four hours, and measured the results. Sure enough, the material was throwing off so much radiation that it maxed out the chamber’s meter.
Later, he pulled the chunk of radioactive americium out of a smoke detector and attached it to the test chips with only a strip of masking tape in between, a barrier thick enough to stop the progress of any alpha particles. No errors. Then he stripped the tape away, and sure enough, the radiation reproduced AT&T’s problem many thousands of times over in its silicon victim. He saw the problem plaguing Intel’s chips laid out before him in all its radioactive simplicity. “When that chip lit up like fireflies,” says May, “it was a peak moment in my life.”
Intel responded to May’s breakthrough by creating a new chip design that used less radioactive materials and more shielding. The entire semiconductor industry, from IBM to Fujitsu, followed suit—an astounding coup for an upstart like Intel. Even years later, the chip giant would hold up May’s work as an example of the company’s groundbreaking spirit from the start. “Creative, innovative, brilliant, all of the above. Tim May had imagination,” former Intel CEO Craig Barrett told a journalist twenty-five years later. “He . . . wasn’t encumbered by history. He went off and did something wonderful.”
For May, nothing at Intel was ever quite so much fun again. His alpha particle glory earned him his own lab and several promotions. But Intel was growing from a gritty start-up to a corporation full of middle managers and stove-piped divisions. May had no stomach for management, especially under the rise of the gruff Hungarian immigrant chief executive Andy Grove, where the bottom 10 percent of each division continually feared for its jobs.
As the years went by, May occasionally performed a calculation with his well-worn HP calculator based on his stock options, Intel’s ballooning share price, his cost of living, and projected interest. Unlike colleagues in Silicon Valley who spent their wealth on boats and beach homes, May lived a largely ascetic life, avoiding restaurants, skipping travel, and saving almost everything he made. By 1986, the results of May’s arithmetic showed he had enough money for roughly the rest of his life without ever working again. In July 1986, four months after a critical performance review, he quit.
At thirty-four, May was retired. And he was altogether unsure what to do with the majority of his life that still lay ahead of him. But Intel’s Barrett was right: May had imagination, and he wasn’t encumbered by history. A few years later, he would list his new interests in the signature of his e-mails: “Anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, reputations, information markets, black markets, collapse of governments.”
One spring afternoon in 2010, close to a year after the release of Bradley Manning’s Collateral Murder video, I rented a Volkswagen in San Francisco and drove it south over the nearby hills and down California’s treacherously winding Highway 17 to Santa Cruz into a region that harbors two
of the great figures in the subversive crypto-history that led to WikiLeaks.
One of those men was Tim May. But I had little hope of actually tracking down that controversial crypto-anarchist and anonymity innovator. Several contacts had already warned me that he didn’t take kindly to visits from journalists. One laughed at the mere idea of my trying to find him. A 2003 article I’d read in the German newspaper Die Zeit described rumors that May had become a long-bearded hermit, living in a well-fortified redoubt in the mountains. A WikiLeaks associate alluded to claymore mines planted in trees around May’s home, a final line of defense should the jackboots finally come for him. I resigned myself to the conclusion that he had achieved the ultimate trick of untraceable anonymity: disappearing completely.
Instead, I’m meeting with a different Santa Cruz crypto-activist, one whose work also helped to spark a movement of anarchist code freaks—and to nearly land him in jail: Philip R. Zimmermann.
When I step into Zimmermann’s dining room, a few blocks from the city’s rocky coastline, he’s wearing a PRZ-monogrammed dress shirt untucked over his round hobbit’s torso and drinking tea out of a mug from the annual Black Hat hacker conference in Las Vegas. The trim-bearded, wide-featured, and perpetually grinning programmer takes great pleasure in handing me the NSA mug he bought in the gift shop of the Fort Meade cryptology museum.
As we sit down, he offers a short commentary about how restaurants don’t understand that handing someone a lukewarm cup of water and a tea bag isn’t an acceptable way to serve Earl Grey. Then we wait for him to eat some microwave noodles before he’s ready to begin the interview. “My brain will work better after I’ve eaten,” he says slowly.
When I start to ask him questions, he reminds me, still grinning, that he won’t answer them until he’s finished his lunch. It occurs to me that this is not a man who would have adjusted well to prison life.
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