Actually, it very well could be. It's been kind of interesting to note that most of these releases have been kinda' yawners so far. One or two juicy little tidbits, but nothing that's on the scale of damage that the Walker's did, for example. Most of this stuff is pretty ordinary traffic that anyone on a SIPRnet connection might be able to access, and lots of people have access to that. I don't think there is any automatic need for a wider conspiracy to have pulled this off... though the investigation certainly needs to consider that, and I'm sure they are.
Single person infiltrates American military network? Surely not?
Gary McKinnon.
From his girlfriend’s bedroom.
Looking for UFOs.
And he was a rank amateur with NO military knowledge.
Phishing for credentials to get into any system is a lot easier than brute-forcing your way in, and in any system the most dangerous point of failure is the disgruntled (or naive) worker.
Logically, for that amount of data to get out through one disgruntled, er, grunt, only a couple of years after some Aspergers-inflicted Brit hunting for UFOs was able to do it from his girlfriend’s bedroom, and twenty five years after Hollywood picked up on the fact that this was even plausible (WarGames), can only mean one of two things:
1. These “hackers” are all hitting a very skilfully crafted honeytrap and the intelligence services are having a field day following the paper trails of misinformation.
2. The people in charge of locking down your defense systems, are so utterly, utterly, UTTERLY incompetent that they are every bit as culpable as the guy who siphoned this data out of the network to begin with, and I wouldn’t trust those dozy berks to lock their front doors on the way to work.
Go after Assange by all means. Prosecute the traitor.
But while you’re at it, round up anyone who’s been in charge of securing the military network for the past five years... court martial, charges related to negligence.
There is no question that what the Walkers did was truly treasonous and deliberately did immense harm to national security. But that was providing the codes used to encrypt tactical nuclear submarine communications and is in such stunningly sharp contrast to this stuff that a defense lawyer would have a field day with the case.