U.S. Tries to Build Case for Conspiracy by WikiLeaks

NY Times ^ | December 15, 2010 | Charlie Savage

[lbryce]

Federal prosecutors, seeking to build a case against the WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange for his role in a huge dissemination of classified government documents, are looking for evidence of any collusion in his early contacts with an Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking the information.

Justice Department officials are trying to find out whether Mr. Assange encouraged or even helped the analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, to extract classified military and State Department files from a government computer system. If he did so, they believe they could charge him as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.

Among materials prosecutors are studying is an online chat log in which Private Manning is said to claim that he had been directly communicating with Mr. Assange using an encrypted Internet conferencing service as the soldier was downloading government files. Private Manning is also said to have claimed that Mr. Assange gave him access to a dedicated server for uploading some of them to WikiLeaks.

Adrian Lamo, an ex-hacker in whom Private Manning confided and who eventually turned him in, said Private Manning detailed those interactions in instant-message conversations with him.

He said the special server’s purpose was to allow Private Manning’s submissions to “be bumped to the top of the queue for review.” By Mr. Lamo’s account, Private Manning bragged about this “as evidence of his status as the high-profile source for WikiLeaks.”

Wired magazine has published excerpts from logs of online chats between Mr. Lamo and Private Manning. But the sections in which Private Manning is said to detail contacts with Mr. Assange are not among them. Mr. Lamo described them from memory in an interview with The Times, but he said he could not provide the full chat transcript

[lbryce]

Among materials prosecutors are studying is an online chat log in which Private Manning is said to claim that he had been directly communicating with Mr. Assange using an encrypted Internet conferencing service as the soldier was downloading government files. Private Manning is also said to have claimed that Mr. Assange gave him access to a dedicated server for uploading some of them to WikiLeaks.

It all comes down to the lax security that allowed for a low-ranking private, mostly anyone to access this supposedly secure encyclopedic repository of classified data much too easily, conveniently.

[Texas Fossil]

Does anyone seriously think PFC. Bradley Manning is the "source" of the leaked documents? Utter nonsense. He may have handled some of them, but there is no way a PFC would have this access to the classified documents. This is a plant that was planned at a high level....

[Ingtar]

From the numbers I have seen, they were so lax with this “secure” information that 1% of the US population had access to it. Anyone in that group could have dumped it. It is not hard to believe it was done on purpose.

[Godwin1]

It has taken Holder FAR too long on this: he was much quicker to hound Arizona on behalf of illegal Mexicans and Central Americans and to sue a small town school board for not extending leave to a Muslim teacher who wanted to visit Mecca during the school year.

[allmost]

The leftist darling when they distributed Palin’s private emails. How dare they offend the “won”.