When, late Sunday night, Wired reported that Bradley Manning, a young Army intelligence staffer, had been arrested and charged with giving a variety of classified or closely held information to WikiLeaks, the online secret-sharing site didn’t stay quiet.
Someone—likely Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’s founder and primary public face—took to the WikiLeaks Twitter account to warn journalists off against believing the article’s primary source and one of its authors.
Adrian Lamo&Kevin Poulson are notorious felons,informers&manipulators. Journalists should take care. http://bit.ly/chFsGC
Let’s unpack that. Adrian Lamo is an ex-hacker, once convicted on charges stemming from his infiltration of The New York Times’s networks. Most recently, he provided federal investigators with copies of e-mails and chat sessions he had with Manning, in which Manning admitted to leaking information to WikiLeaks. “Kevin Poulson” is actually Kevin Poulsen, the editor of Wired’s Threat Level blog, who coauthored with Kim Zetter the story bringing Manning’s detention to public light. (The tweet’s link takes you to that piece, not to some information demonstrating Lamo’s and Poulsen’s supposed notoriety for informing or manipulation.)
“What’s he citing to call me an informer? No, I’ve never informed on anybody, and I’m no more manipulative than any other journalist,” says Poulsen, with a chuckle.
But there’s no denying the felonious part. In 1994, Poulsen, before entering journalism, was sentenced to 51 months in jail for his own hacking exploits.
“It dates back to about the time that Julian was doing the same thing, coincidentally,” says Poulsen, referencing Assange’s own mid-nineties conviction in his native Australia for hacking. “I’ve been searching my memory for his handle, to see if I can remember having any interaction with him back in the day. Maybe he has some longstanding grudge against me from hacking circles from twenty years ago that I’ve forgotten.”
Poulsen has been reporting on Lamo for about a decade, and has been on the receiving end of Lamo’s tips before.
“As things often do with Adrian, things unfolded slowly and cryptically,” Poulsen says of coming to learn of the ex-hacker’s involvement in Manning’s arrest. “He starts by speaking in generalities and the like, and hinting at some intrigue that on its surface sounds absurd and unlikely. And then, of course, with Adrian it always turns out to be absolutely true.”
So was Poulsen and Zetter’s reporting, which despite WikiLeaks’s warning was never seriously in question. The government confirmed on Monday that Manning had been detained on suspicions of leaking the video.
Assange, or whoever was writing WikiLeaks’s tweets yesterday, followed up the first volley with another:
Did Wired break journalism’s sacred oath? Lamo&Poulson call themselves journalists.Echoes of Olshansky shopping Diaz?
It’s unclear exactly what Assange means by “journalism’s sacred oath,” but presumably it has something to do with exposing or giving up a confidential source. In 2005, Barbara Olshansky, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, received an anonymous letter with a highly sought-after list of names of Guantanamo detainees. According to Wikipedia, “Olshansky suspected the list might have been classified, so she contacted Federal authorities.” That claim is not adequately supported by its citation. Nor is Assange’s claim that Olshansky went “shopping” Diaz: A 2007 New York Times article says that she asked the federal court hearing her Guantanamo cases to take safekeeping of the material, and was instructed to turn it over to law enforcement. They were able to trace the mailing back to Lt. Commander Matthew Diaz, who was convicted and sentenced in military court to six months in prison for improper disclosure of classified information.
WikiLeaks’s Twitter account later doubled down, (again misspelling Poulsen’s last name), tweeting to him and Lamo that “There’s a special place in hell reserved for ‘journalists’ like you and ‘lawyers’ like Barbara Olshansky.” (Zetter, despite being the reporter on the story who unsuccessfully sought comment from Assange before it ran, has escaped WikiLeaks’s Twitter ire.)
Assange has also suggested that, given Poulsen and Lamo’s previous association, Wired may have been “complicit,” presumably in exposing Manning to law enforcement.
Yuck! Kim Zetter's writing style SUCKS. Why was she so hung up on the misspelling of the name? CJR misspelled her own god damn name. Yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck, My English professors would have had a field day with your unclear and wordy, wordy, wordy article. Get to the point Zetter!
#1 Posted by glp, CJR on Tue 8 Jun 2010 at 11:33 PM
Oops I meant Hendler
#2 Posted by glp, CJR on Tue 8 Jun 2010 at 11:35 PM
Yup, I added an extra 's' to Zetter's name. A mistake in any situation, but all the more embarrassing in a piece where where I pointed out that WikiLeaks couldn't spell Poulsen's name right.
Oh well. Consider the crow served and eaten.
#3 Posted by Clint Hendler, CJR on Wed 9 Jun 2010 at 09:20 AM
the name thing is getting pretty meta-funny.
#4 Posted by quinn, CJR on Wed 9 Jun 2010 at 11:44 AM
“What’s he citing to call me an informer? No, I’ve never informed on anybody, and I’m no more manipulative than any other journalist,” says Poulsen, with a chuckle.
Kevin Poulsen is a liar. He's sent dozens of people to jail, and then gloated about it online. Maybe they deserved to go there, but several commentators didn't think it was his place as a journalist to turn them in. One of those commentators was Adrian Lamo.
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/10/71948
#5 Posted by medicine woman, CJR on Wed 9 Jun 2010 at 09:43 PM
Agreed, Poulsen can not be trusted. I don;t know what his role was in this particular case but he has repeatedly screwed over sources and made promises he never indeed to keep. If you deal with him at all be extra careful.
#6 Posted by Anoymouse, CJR on Thu 10 Jun 2010 at 01:29 PM
Quick muck volleys of emotionally charged and broad scoped allegations on the side of wikileaks makes their case look poor.
I can understand how those that support wikileaks might react to the current situation; therefore, let me just preface my reply by stating my own opinion for the reader. I support Lamo on one hand, and also see the relevance for protections to supporters of wikileaks on the other.
That said, there are a few objective comments that I just felt like making known:
1) This informant was a soldier, sworn to protect our country from all enemies foreign and domestic. He has no place disclosing ANY information. His conscious objection should have been a resignation. I don't believe for one second that Manning was all about free information as he has seemingly advocated for in his chat transcripts with Lamo, that's a red flag- If anything Manning was attempting to gain report with Lamo most likely entertaining some inner fantasy of being a hacker while accessing data from archives to which he already had access to. You don't take and oath, go through training in wartime, and be deployed, suddenly have a revelation of consciousness and decide to betray for whatever reason the trust and position you have been given. His stated motives in the chat transcripts are 100% false in my opinion, and may have only been stated after he had already been in contact with wikileaks, and after he had begun to suspect that Lamo may be a potential informant, or even if he had no reason to suspect Lamo, surely the channel that he had chosen, presumably from somewhere in Iraq was being monitored and in his position Manning was aware of this in his communication. The nature of his patterns in communication and the willful boasting about the need for the public to know, in a job where the public is not supposed to know is just silly, if there is anyone not to trust with respect to communication concerned in this matter is it no one other than Manning. I'm a firm believer that when motive seems uncertain, it always is ulterior. We just don't know it yet.
2)Free speech does have it's place (as an idea; however the current wikileaks.org method will only damage that right). I'm a firm believer in the right to free speech. However you can't say certain things for good reason. This needs to be a matter of moral, ethical, and freakin' commonsense judgment. For example you can't yell certain things on planes, make threats, and go dumpster diving to post peoples credit card statements on facebook. I don't think any of you would like it if your doctor suddenly decided to educate your neighborhood about your herpes or your breast implants because he finds out you lied to someone about them.
3) Some people just like being noticed, and will do anything to get there.
4) Free speech is an imperative and inalienable right. It, just like any right we are granted can be abused, the more you support abuse, the more likely it is to go away. I can't stand by unheard while it is being abused by a soldier. His right to free speech in his case was resignation, not treason.
#7 Posted by ImNoJudge, CJR on Mon 5 Jul 2010 at 05:36 PM
I'm forced to call foul on this piece and, frankly, I don't understand why CJR has not already published a correction. I wonder if part of the reason is that the entire tone of the article would have to change. That might not be a bad idea, though, given that Clint Hendler clearly didn't spend much time (if any) researching the concerns expressed by many readers of Mr Poulsen's work on the Manning/Wikileaks story -- including author and constitutional law attorney Glenn Greenwald from Salon.com, columnist Marcy Wheeler (Guardian Online, FireDogLake) and Micah Sifry (co-founder & editor, Personal Democracy Forum).
Every post about the Manning/Wikileaks case at Poulsen's wired.com blog (Threat Level) has been deluged with legitimate questions about a wide range of problems that become obvious if you actually take time to consider all the facts of the case.
"Ex-hacker" Adrian Lamo decided to work with the FBI and US Army CID after PFC Bradley Manning (an intelligence analyst in Iraq) allegedly found Lamo via Twitter Search and contacted him. Lamo kept Manning talking long enough to extract all the information necessary to arrest & charge him on numerous counts of espionage. He is now facing 50+ years in prison for passing a classified video to the whistle-blower website, Wikileaks.org ... the video shows the gunship view of an Apache helicopter brutally killing a group of civilians, including 2 Reuters journalists.
The problem is that Lamo has been repeatedly caught telling a different version of the story to each journalist who interviews him, he's been caught outright lying to a journalist in one incident and used the disinfo as a platform to call for the resignation of Wikileaks.org's spokesperson, Julian Assage. Lamo admits that he's had a serious hard drug problem and only recently was released after being involuntarily institutionalized by police. Lamo is on the record with Glenn Greenwald talking about how he told PFC Manning that their conversations would be confidential under California's Shield Law because Lamo considered himself a journalist. This list goes on and on and will soon be documented online for everybody to see in its entirety.
The problem is that Poulsen paints us an entirely different picture. In Poulsen's articles, Lamo is a reformed ex-hacker who is now on the straight-and-narrow; indeed, he only snitched on PFC Manning after wrestling with the morality of it all, per Poulsen's story.
Except Poulsen's story doesn't seem like reporting so much as it seems like a whitewash, especially compared to everyone else who has reported on the story. That could be because Poulsen has a special relationship with Lamo stretching back to when Lamo was still a teenager. Lamo had been hacking corporate websites and, finally, the New York Times websites pressed charges against him. The entire saga was covered by Poulsen and the two starting working together more & more, right up into May 2010 when Lamo was sent to the psych ward. Lamo has admitted he was abusing hard narcotics at the time but in Poulsen's version, Lamo was diagnosed with Asberger's Syndrome, a "trendy syndrome" that seems to be common with "computer geniuses" within the last few years.
Aside from these discrepancies in what really happened, Wired.com originally published the chat transcripts that included Lamo's offer of confidentiality to Manning. When that started to become an issue by readers who point out that Lamo would then be obligated to keep quiet under the Shield Law, Wired quickly cut that part out of the transcripts they published online.
Given limited space here, let's just start with 3 key items: (1) Poulsen appears to be intentionally whitewashing Lamo's actions, (2) Wired seems to have colluded with Lamo to protect him from civil action by PFC Manning, editing already-published material to remove incriminating evidence.
And, for our dramatic conclusion, we'll finish w
#8 Posted by Manuel Piñeiro, CJR on Wed 14 Jul 2010 at 01:58 AM
Manuel:
For the record, I had never met, spoken, or corresponded with Poulsen before he broke the Manning/Lamo story. Beyond my communications with him on this matter, we have no personal or professional relationship of any kind.
I was not aware of Poulsen’s role in the MySpace sex case at the time I spoke with him about WikiLeaks’s tweet accusing him of being, among other things, a “notorious” informer. This conversation was within four or five hours of that particular tweet going out. Poulsen told me he had been on a flight and said he had not seen the tweets before I got him on the phone—so the quotes are his immediate reaction upon a first read. I was aware of Poulsen’s felony conviction, so I did ask him about that, and did mention it in the article. I would have done the same about the informing allegation, had I known about the case at the time. I regret that I didn't.
Here’s my understanding of what happened in the MySpace instance: Poulsen wrote a simple computer script that cross referenced entries in the federal sex offender database with the public pages of MySpace users. He alerted a local police department that he’d found a registered sex offender in their jurisdiction carrying out a public correspondence with a minor on the site. He then observed the police’s subsequent investigation and arrest efforts, and used those events as a central narrative in an article. The OED defines informing as “provid[ing] (a magistrate or other person in authority) with accusatory or incriminatory information against a person or group.” Poulsen may have had a narrower idea of what informing meant in mind when we spoke, but his actions during the MySpace story clearly meet the dictionary’s definition.
As for your quoting from Liz Cox Barrett’s 2006 interview with Poulsen, I’d like to encourage readers of this exchange to take a look at the full published transcript (which you failed to link in your comment) especially the portion surrounding Poulsen’s phrase, “It wasn’t the first time I got someone arrested”:
LCB: Did you have any qualms as a reporter about working in concert with authorities [like that] to, eventually, put someone behind bars?
KP: Generally, the whole story isn’t the kind of story I normally do. My last piece on MySpace was an attempt to deflate what I thought was a lot of the hype over the site being unsafe. That is much more in tune with my personality. Just because it was not in my normal experience in the beats I cover to call the police … I don’t think saying I had qualms about it would be accurate … I have called law enforcement in stories before.
It wasn’t the first time I got someone arrested. There was a hacker named Adrian Lamo, who had a long history of breaking into corporate networks, pulling some sort of harmless and clever hack, and then calling the press and telling them about it. I reported on him extensively and when he hacked into the New York Times Web site a couple of years ago I broke that story and he was indicted for it and arrested. He turned himself in.
Excising the fact that when Poulsen said he had “got someone arrested” he was talking about Lamo is a truly bizarre choice, Manuel, given its relevance to the Manning story. Beyond that, your extremely selective quote gives the misimpression that that Poulsen admitted to regularly going out of his way to arrange to have his subjects arrested. The full context makes it clear that he’s saying the articles he wrote on Lamo—which Lamo fully participated in—resulted in his arrest, not any act of informing. Though Poulsen is not all that clear in this portion of the interview, to me it also seems more likely than not that when he says “I hav
#9 Posted by Clint Hendler, CJR on Wed 14 Jul 2010 at 01:53 PM