On June 6, Wired.com published a piece reporting that a U.S. soldier named Bradley Manning, who purportedly claimed to be passing confidential information—including a video showing U.S. helicopter pilots firing on two Reuters reporters—to WikiLeaks, online secret-sharing site, had been arrested. Ever since then, WikiLeaks and allies have been casting aspersions on Wired’s reporting.
Their latest tactic alleges that Wired reporter Kevin Poulsen and Adrian Lamo, the ex-hacker and occasional journalist who informed law enforcement that Manning had claimed to be a prime WikiLeaks source, had concealed their journalistic aims and worked together—along with the FBI—in order to gain Manning’s trust and mislead him into confessing.
WikiLeaks, via its Twitter account and, on Tuesday, in a fundraising appeal, has referred its supporters and others to an anonymous comment posted on the blog BoingBoing underneath video of Micah Sifry jointly interviewing Daniel Ellsberg and, via video link, WikiLeaks editor in chief Julian Assange, at the Personal Democracy Forum days before Wired’s report.
“[N]ote that there are some questions about the Wired reportage,” said the solicitation letter, before providing the link to BoingBoing. (The comment was also passed on by Salon’s Glenn Greenwald and Sifry.)
1) First and foremost, there needs to be more discussion about the potentially enormous ethics violations that seem to have been committed at Wired Magazine. Everyone knows Kevin Poulsen & Adrian Lamo are friends. It is obvious they worked their target, Bradley Manning, for days — in co-operation with the FBI and US Army CID. This hearkens back to COINTELPRO tactics. How likely is it that Lamo worked entirely on his own with no involvement from Poulsen, who only found out about it all after-the-fact, in time to “break the story” for Wired? There is no disclosure provided in the original article and it is written as if Poulsen wasn’t involved at all. Could it really be that, in pursuit of breaking a big story, Wired magazine staff helped set up a situation where the FBI/USACID got to use proxy interrogators, who misled a suspect into believing that he was only answering questions from someone he could trust, instead of federal/military law enforcement, without any Constitutional protections in place? This needs to be more critically examined.
The comment asks other questions about Lamo’s actions (none of those deal so pointedly with Wired’s role) before wrapping up with the following:
Wired Magazine, Kevin Poulsen and Adrian Lamo should be viewed with skepticism, as they are potentially the proud participants in one of the most scandalous breaches of journalist ethics in recent history.
Poulsen sees things differently. He describes Lamo, with whom he has had limited contact over the past eight years, not as a friend but as “a source and a subject.” And the timeline he offers differs significantly from the one offered by WikiLeaks.
According to transcripts posted by Wired, Lamo’s online chats with Manning began on May 21. Poulsen’s initial phone call from Lamo didn’t come until May 24, after Lamo had already contacted federal authorities, and was set to meet with them for the first time the next day.
In that call, Poulsen says Lamo told him only the bare outlines of what the meeting was about: he’d been in contact with someone claiming to be an Army intelligence analyst who said he’d shared classified information, including State Department cables, with a “foreign national.” Primarily, Lamo seemed to be concerned about his own safety. “He was very paranoid,” says Poulsen. “He was going into a meeting with the feds and he wanted to make sure that if it boomeranged on him somehow and he was incommunicado that the story would get out.”
Poulsen says that he asked Lamo to keep him posted. The next day, Lamo let Poulsen know that the meeting had happened and that he remained a free man. More details dribbled out over the next couple of days: Lamo had told him that Manning had claimed credit for leaking a video depicting the death of two Reuters employees at the hands of a U.S. Army helicopter. WikiLeaks came to wide attention after releasing that video on April 5.
I don't see anything in the original comment by the anonymous poster at BoingBoing that establishes that either he or Wikileaks knew anything for certain about the extent of Wired's involvement.
The situation was obviously considered suspicious because it harks back to the case of Kevin Mitnick and the involvement of John Markoff with the FBI's arrest of Mitnick. That is not surprising to anybody familiar with the adverse relationship between hackers and the news media.
Therefore the notion that Wikileaks is just going off half-cocked against Wired and Poulsen just because they refer to the anonymous comment in their solicitation letter is itself without any apparent foundation. Since the details of Poulsen's involvement were not clear prior to this exposition, it was reasonable for Wikileaks and observers to want clarification of the timeline.
In any event, the real issue here is that Adrian Lamo made a decision based on ZERO EVIDENCE of potential harm to rat out a military whistleblower for whom most observers have nothing but respect. I agree with Daniel Ellsberg and others that Manning deserves the thanks of the US public for what he's done.
#1 Posted by Richard Steven Hack, CJR on Fri 18 Jun 2010 at 01:14 PM
Mr. Hack hits the nail on the head in criticizing Mr. Hendler's attempt, and the CJR as his vehicle, to spin the Wikileaks comment, and the entire story.
The CJR is engaged here in a textbook example of intellectual dishonesty by inviting an unsubstantiated implicature that Wikileaks is not to be trusted but Poulson is. CJR and Hendler lead with the inflammatory statement: "Their latest tactic alleges that Wired reporter Kevin Poulsen and Adrian Lamo, the ex-hacker and occasional journalist who informed law enforcement that Manning had claimed to be a prime WikiLeaks source, had concealed their journalistic aims". But they end with a carefully crafted conceit: "And while, according to Poulsen’s timeline, it is accurate that their first detailed discussion of the case came after Manning’s arrest, neither Poulsen nor Lamo knew so at the time."
The emotive language in the statement intended to set the tone for the article in the reader's mind differs strikingly from the disingenuous conditional language of the latter. Taken together they clearly are intended to invite the implicature on the part of the reader that CJR endorses Poulsen's credibility and therefore so should the reader. The unambiguous and neutral language "it is accurate" and "knew so at the time" is not accidental and it distracts attention from any question about the veracity of the passively worded predicate statement "according to Poulson's timeline". But for those consequent statements to actually be true, the predicate must be true and the CJR's editors clearly have not required Hendler put independent facts into evidence supporting Poulsen's timeline. On the other hand, we know that Poulsen and Lamo have demonstrated behavior in the past that argues fairly for prudence in vouching for their veracity.
What's at least as important about the unfolding Manning-Wikileaks story is how irrelevant the mainstream American press, as the messaging arm of the elite cultural status quo of which institutions and individuals like Columbia, the CJR, and Mr. Hendler are a part, have been to a story that threatens to rock the status quo to it's corrupt foundation. The bottom line is that the video of US military attacks on Afghani civilians is going to be released to the entire world by Wikileaks and we would be quite justified at ridiculing the American press and the likes of CJR as being reduced through their own efforts to impotent bystanders.
#2 Posted by Careful Reader, CJR on Sat 19 Jun 2010 at 10:35 PM
Tor
immi
courage
contagious
GGreenwald
Birgitta Jónsdóttir
#3 Posted by nader paul kucinich gravel mckinney, CJR on Wed 23 Jun 2010 at 02:43 PM
What do you make of the May 20 article here, published around the same time as the collusion? The arrest for Asperger's seems highly suspect.
I think what might have happened is he was working for Manning, got caught in a crazy drug bust, and confessed to save himself? I go into detail in this post last night here.
#4 Posted by moran, CJR on Fri 25 Jun 2010 at 10:55 AM
According to Kevin Poulsen at Wired, Lamo contacted him regarding the leak source first on May 24th. However, just four days (4) prior, Mr. Poulsen had just published an article with personal information in regards to Lamo:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/05/lamo/
Clearly, Mr. Poulsen was in personal contact with Lamo up to that time. As you can also clearly see in the picture published in the middle of this article (shows Lamo and Poulsen with Mitnick - the picture is also at the top of Adrian Lamo's wikipedia page) there is more of a personal relationship going on between Poulsen and Lamo than Poulsen will admit. He is claiming it's just reporter-source.
Because the relationship apparently goes beyond reporter-source, there are other factors which the reader should be aware of. Today, the location of Julian Assange is unknown, he was last reported in Australia - http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-06-10/wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-hunted-by-pentagon-over-massive-leak/2/
With Wikileaks showing a lack of maintenance, there are concerns Assange is either dead or in US custody.
If there is anything that Poulsen feels he has to hide that would make anything on this case more clear, he should release it. The chat logs (unedited - with any claims Lamo made about confidentiality as other laws would apply) certainly, as well as a more honest statement about the nature of their relationship - minimum.
#5 Posted by McGreggor, CJR on Thu 1 Jul 2010 at 07:45 PM
"Wired’s happy to set the timeline straight "
uh-huh. It's Dec 27, 2010, and we're still waiting for Wired (Poulsen) to do what the subtitle says. And now we find that Wired's relationship with the DoJ is even more incestuous than it looked when CJR and Mr Hendler officially left the ranks of "journalists" (and I mean those quotes to indicate ironic emphasis) and became propagandists. Anyone else here think the US Government is to be trusted?
#6 Posted by disillusion me some more, CJR on Tue 28 Dec 2010 at 01:02 AM