An Icelandic MP, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, was at the forefront of subsequent moves to draw up a proposal the campaigners called MMI, the Modern Media Initiative, which was endorsed unanimously by the Icelandic parliament. The proposal was stitched together by Assange, his Dutch hacker-businessman friend Rop Gonggrijp, and three Icelanders: Jónsdóttir, McCarthy and Herbert Snorrason. They called for laws to enshrine source protection, free speech and freedom of information. Jónsdóttir, 43, is an anti-capitalist activist, poet and artist – an unexpectedly romantic figure to find in the Reykjavik legislature. “They were presenting this idea they called the ‘Switzerland of bytes’,” she explains, “which was basically to take the tax haven model and transform it into the transparency haven model.”
Assange decided to publish some Icelandic tidbits from his newly acquired secret cache of military material to coincide with the MMI campaign: one was a very recent cable from the US embassy in Reykjavik, dated 13 January 2010, describing Icelandic officials’ views about the banking crisis. The deputy chief of mission at the embassy, Sam Watson, had reported that those he met “painted a very gloomy picture for Iceland’s future”. Assange followed this up with leaked profiles of the Icelandic ambassador to Washington (“prickly but pragmatic … enjoys the music of Robert Plant, formerly of Led Zeppelin”), the foreign minister (“fond of the US”), and the prime minister, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir (“although her sexual orientation has been highlighted by the international press, it has barely been noted by the Icelandic public”).
The US authorities took no visible action about these leaks. There was nothing apparently to connect Reykjavik, where this stuff was coming out, with an obscure military base in the Mesopotamian desert, thousands of miles away.
So at the end of March, Assange returned to Iceland from his triumphant conference appearance in Norway, and, bankrolled by an advance of €10,000 ($13,000) from Gonggrijp, set about renting a house and editing his Apache helicopter film. Leigh, back in London, tried hard to get back into contact to propose a deal under which the Guardian would publicise the helicopter video. Assange said he would get back to him, but never did. It was only later that it seemed Assange might have struck a more attractive journalistic deal with the New Yorker, whose writer Raffi Khatchadourian was following Assange about for a major profile. (It appeared in June under the title “No Secrets: Julian Assange’s mission for total transparency”. Assange assured friends later that it was “too flattering”.)
Khatchadourian was present to record Jónsdóttir, the feisty feminist MP for Reykjavik South, rather unwillingly trimming Assange’s hair while he sat hunched over his laptop, engaged in important messaging. The profile writer was also taking notes when the message came back from Baghdad:
The journalists who had gone to Baghdad … had found the two children in the van. The children had lived a block from the location of the attack, and were being driven to school by their father that morning. “They remember the bombardment, felt great pain, they said, and lost consciousness,” one of the journalists wrote …
Jónsdóttir turned to Gonggrijp, whose eyes had welled up. “Are you crying?” she asked.
“I am,” he said. “OK, OK, it is just the kids. It hurts.” Gonggrijp gathered himself. “Fuck!” he said … Jónsdóttir was now in tears, too, and wiping her nose.
Assange premiered the Apache helicopter video at the National Press Club in Washington on 5 April. He chose to title it “Collateral Murder”. Although the video caused a stir, something went wrong. It did not generate the universal outrage and pressure for reform of, say, Seymour Hersh’s earlier exposé of leaked photos in the New Yorker showing Iraqi prisoners being humiliated and tortured in Abu Ghraib prison.
One of the reasons why the video caused less of a storm than he had hoped was that Reuters, whose own employees had been killed, chose not to go on the attack over the leaked information. They had, it transpired, been shown privately a partial clip of the two men’s deaths, within days of it happening, although subsequent freedom of information requests for the actual video had been repeatedly blocked. Reuters’ editor-in-chief, David Schlesinger, wrote a muted, more-in-sorrow column for the Guardian:
“Reuters editors were shown only one portion of the video. We immediately changed our operating procedures. The first portion of the video made clear that anyone walking with a group of armed people could be considered a target. We immediately made it a rule that our journalists could not even walk near armed groups. However, we were not shown the second part of the video, where the helicopter fired on a van trying to evacuate the wounded. Had we seen it, we could have adjusted our procedures further.”
Another reason for the limited response was the tendentious title: “Collateral Murder”. Readers and viewers often hate the feeling they are being bulldozed into a particular point of view. What went on in the video could be interpreted as a much more nuanced event, to eyes not entirely blinded by rage or sorrow.
For the soldiers had clearly made a mistake. Some of the group they fired on were indeed armed, and the Reuters cameraman’s long lens did look like a weapon pointed furtively at “our brothers on the ground” as one of the pilots put it. The cruel decision to treat the Baghdad streets as a battle-space on which all were fair game was made not by individual sadists or war criminals, but by the US military at a much higher level. The pilots were doing the murderous things they had been trained to do – as some soldiers in the ground unit concerned were later to publicly say. Clearly there was far more to be debated than could be encompassed in the crude legend “Collateral Murder”.
Nevertheless, it was a debate that might never have been held at all, had not one young US soldier somewhere decided the video ought to be seen, and had not Assange boldly put it on public display. From now on, the civilian death that American soldiers so often rained down from the sky would be treated a little less casually by the US public. This was surely what free speech was meant to be all about. In many people’s eyes, Assange deserved to be seen as a hero.
CHAPTER 6
The Lamo dialogues
Contingency Operating Station Hammer, Iraq
21 May 2010
“I can’t believe what I’m telling you”
BRADASS87
At his sweltering army base in the Iraqi desert, specialist Bradley Manning showed signs of considerable stress in the weeks following Assange’s release of the Apache helicopter video. In web chats, he confided that he had had “about three breakdowns” as a result of his emotional insecurity, and was “self-medicating like crazy”. He added: “I’ve been isolated for so long … I’ve totally lost my mind … I’m a wreck.” On 5 May, Manning posted on Facebook that he was “left with the sinking feeling that he doesn’t have anything left”.
Part of this emotional turmoil was probably related to the break-up of Manning’s relationship with Tyler Watkins back in Boston, which took place around the same time. But he was also feeling scared about the possible fall-out from his “hacktivist” activities, as he described them, with WikiLeaks. At one point he boasted that “No one suspected a thing … Odds are, they never will.” But at others he contemplated going to prison for the rest of his life, or even the death penalty.
“I’ve made a huge mess … I think I’m in more potential heat than you ever were,” he would confide online to Adrian Lamo, a hacker in the US who himself had been sentenced to two years’ probation for having hacked into computers in a range of enterprises including the New York Times. The combination of losing Watkins and feeling under threat of discovery by the authorities had clearly left Manning feeling rattled. Days before he began unburdening to Lamo over the internet, he was demoted from the rank of specialist to that of private first class, after he punched another soldier in the face.
Julian Assange had recently publicised, in rapid succession, four leaked classified files he had laid his hands on, all of different types, but all accessible to a member of the US army in Manning’s positio
n. At some point between mid-January and mid-February, Assange received a copy of the cable from the Reykjavik embassy, which he published to good effect during his Iceland media campaign. Posted on 18 February, it was later described by Manning as a “test”.
On 15 March, Assange next posted a lengthy report about WikiLeaks itself, written by an army “cyber counter-intelligence analyst” and headlined by Assange “US intelligence planned to destroy WikiLeaks”. The “special report” dated from 2008 and its author was exercised about lists of military equipment WikiLeaks had managed to obtain. Despite its 32 pages, the report was really a statement of the obvious: that a good way to deter WikiLeaks would be to track down and punish the leakers. But Assange’s bold headline was a sound journalistic method of advertising and attracting donations.
Two weeks later, on 29 March, Assange caused more turbulence in Iceland by posting the series of US state department profiles of top local politicians: they appeared to have been taken from a separate biographical intelligence folder, rather than from a cabled dispatch. Icelandic officials called in the US charge d’affaires, Sam Watson, to make a complaint.
Just one week on, Assange flew from Reykjavik to Washington to publicise the Apache video. It appeared from what Manning said subsequently that he had done detective work on the video and leaked it in February after finding it in a legal dossier, a Judge-Advocate-General (JAG) file, presumably because the Reuters employees’ deaths led to a formal investigation at the time.
These four leaks were, of course, only hors d’oeuvres. Assange had also acquired a whole banquet of data: a file on Guantánamo inmates; a huge batch of US army “significant activities” reports detailing the ongoing Afghan war; a similar set of logs from the occupation of Iraq; and – most sensational of all – following the successful “test” with the Reykjavik cable leak, Manning had, it was later alleged, managed to supply Assange with a second entire trove of all 250,000 cables to be found in the “Net-Centric Diplomacy” database to which his security clearance gave the young soldier access.
Although the precautions practised by Manning and Assange had apparently worked well to date, it was perhaps no wonder that Manning felt exposed.
The process in which he first reached out to, and gained confidence in, Assange had been slow and painstaking, according to the later published extracts from what were said to be his chat logs. Neither he nor his lawyers have disputed their authenticity. The geeky young soldier seems to have first contacted the “crazy white-haired dude” in late November 2009, but tentatively so. He needed to be certain that WikiLeaks could be trusted to receive dynamite material without his own identity becoming known.
For a while he remained uncertain even about the person with whom he was communicating. He was in contact with a computer user claiming to be Assange, but was it really him? Sitting at his workstation in the Iraqi desert, how could Manning be sure? It took him four months to acquire that certainty. In his exchanges with Assange, he asked the Australian for details about how he was being followed by US state department officials. He then checked that information against what Assange was quoted as saying in the press, and the two precisely correlated. He also used his own security clearance to check up on the activities of the Northern Europe Diplomatic Security Team, the intelligence body that was most likely to have been doing the surveillance, and found that, too, correlated with Assange’s description.
Manning’s test with the Reykjavik cable dummy run would have confirmed not only that they could communicate safely, but also Assange’s ability to publish what he sent. With mounting confidence, Manning could press ahead with the big stuff.
What precisely were the transactions between the two men? By his own admission to Lamo, Manning “developed a relationship with Assange … but I don’t know much more than what he tells me, which is very little”. In interviews, Lamo has gone further, claiming that Manning told him he used an encrypted internet conferencing service to communicate directly with Assange, and that though they never met in person Assange actively “coached” Manning as to what kind of data he should transmit and how. Those claims have only come from Lamo, and have never been substantiated by supporting evidence.
What seems more certain is that some form of secure connection was created chiefly, or perhaps exclusively, for Manning, allowing him to pipe secret documents and videos directly to WikiLeaks. In his exchanges with Lamo, Manning described his technique. He would take a file of material, having scraped it out of the military system somehow, and encrypt it using the AES-256 (Advanced Encryption Standard, with a key size of 256 bits) cipher, considered one of the most secure methods.
He would then send the encrypted material via a secure FTP (file transfer protocol) to a server at a particular internet address. Finally, the encryption passcode that Manning devised would be sent separately, via Tor, making it very hard for any surveillance authorities to know where the information began its journey.
Matt Blaze, an associate professor in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in cryptology, says the system believed to have been constructed by Manning was a pretty straightforward technique for secure transmission. “From a computer security point of view straightforward ways are usually pretty good. Complex ways are liable to go wrong.”
Kevin Poulsen, the senior editor at Wired who published a partial version of the Lamo web chat – and himself a notorious former hacker – points out that the passage in the conversation in which Manning describes the transmission technique is hypothetical. Manning’s response is to a hypothetical question from Lamo: “how would I transmit something if I had damning data?” But if Manning was indeed describing the way he passed documents to WikiLeaks then it was very significant. “It goes way, way beyond the usual WikiLeaks method of uploading material to its website,” Poulsen says. “If it was the way he transmitted to WikiLeaks then it shows there must have been some degree of contact with WikiLeaks that went beyond the normal procedures.”
By 21 May, it can be assumed that Assange and any of their mutual links in the Boston hacker scene were strictly avoiding all contact with Bradley Manning – for his sake as much as theirs. It was unfortunate for them that Manning then started sending messages to Adrian Lamo instead. He made contact with him the day a piece appeared in Wired magazine sympathetically quoting Lamo on his own recent diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome, his depressions, and his experience of psychiatric hospitalisation.
According to Lamo’s version, published in Wired, in that first chat, Manning, who was using the pseudonym Bradass87, volunteered enough information to be easily traced. (The logs have been further edited here, for clarity).
“I’m an army intelligence analyst, deployed to eastern Baghdad, pending discharge for ‘adjustment disorder’ … I’m sure you’re pretty busy. If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day, seven days a week for eight-plus months, what would you do?”
The next day, he started to blurt out confessions. The statements this tormented 22-year-old made about the biggest leak in US official history – some intimate, some desperate, some intelligent and principled – have to serve, for now, as the nearest thing we have to Bradley Manning’s own testament. They make it clear that he was not a thief, not venal, not mad, and not a traitor. He believed that, somehow, he was doing a good thing.
“Hypothetical question: if you had free rein 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? (or Guantánamo, Bagram, Bucca, Taji, VBC [Victory Base Complex] for that matter) Things that would have an impact on 6.7 billion people, say, a database of half a million events during the Iraq war from 2004 to 2009, with reports, date time groups, lat[itude]-lon[gitude] locations, casualty figures? Or 260,000 state department cables from embassies and consulates all over the world, explaining how the first world exp
loits the third, in detail, from an internal perspective?”
Manning confessed: “The air gap has been penetrated.” The air gap is computer jargon, in this context, for the way the military internet is kept physically separate, for security reasons, from civilian servers, on which the ordinary commercial internet runs.
Lamo prompted him: “How so?”
“Let’s 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.”
He went on: “Crazy white-haired dude = Julian Assange. In other words, I’ve made a huge mess. (I’m sorry. I’m just emotionally fractured. I’m a total mess. I think I’m in more potential heat than you ever were.)”
Lamo continued to press him: “How long have you helped WikiLeaks?”
“Since they released the 9/11 pager messages. I immediately recognised that they were from an NSA [National Security Agency] database, and I felt comfortable enough to come forward.”
“So, right after Thanksgiving timeframe of 2009?”
“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.”
“What sort of content?”
“Uhm … crazy, almost criminal, political back-dealings. The non-PR versions of world events and crises. Uhm … All kinds of stuff, like everything from the buildup to the Iraq war … to what the actual content of ‘aid packages’ is. For instance, PR that the US is sending aid to Pakistan includes funding for water/food/ clothing. That much is true, it includes that, but the other 85% of it is for F-16 fighters and munitions to aid in the Afghanistan effort, so the US can call in Pakistanis to do aerial bombing, instead of Americans potentially killing civilians and creating a PR crisis. There’s so much. It affects everybody on earth.
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