Vietnam had never been a true civil war. It was a war of conquest, initiated and perpetuated for more than two decades by the United States, fueled by presidential secrecy and lies. It was no catastrophic accident. As Ellsberg wrote, it was simply “a crime.”
After his time on the ground, Ellsberg didn’t need much convincing of the war’s folly. But the Pentagon Papers put the stamp of historical confirmation on his determination to end it. And in 1969, that education as a leaker would be capped by a fateful trip he took to a Haverford College peace conference.
For Ellsberg, simply attending a meeting full of peaceniks was a radical step. After the first day at the small Quaker school, he found himself on the sidewalk in nearby Philadelphia handing out antiwar pamphlets to passersby, a tactic that at first felt awkward and ridiculous for a high-level insider who had vowed to end the war through his influence in Washington’s power structure.
The second day on Haverford’s campus, a young man named Randy Kehler stood up to speak to the crowd. Like Ellsberg, he had attended Harvard, then graduated from Stanford. Ellsberg was impressed with his poise and levelheaded intellect, and remembers thinking that Kehler was “the best that we’ve got” as a country.
In a strong and steady tone, Kehler explained that he had become the last remaining male member of the War Resisters League in San Francisco. All the others had been imprisoned for violating the draft. As Kehler’s voice cracked onstage, he told the audience how proud and happy he was that he would soon be joining his friends in prison.
The crowd at first seemed stunned at the thought that the young man in front of them was about to be treated as a criminal. Then thunderous applause broke out.
But Ellsberg couldn’t stand. He was emotionally devastated. The senior military analyst stumbled out of the auditorium and into an empty bathroom, where he collapsed and sobbed for an hour. “It was as though an ax had split my head, and my heart broke open,” he writes. “But what had really happened was that my life had split in two.”
When Ellsberg recovered, he made a promise to himself: He would do whatever he could to end the war. Even if it meant going to prison.
Two essential traits of a leaker are an abundance of knowledge and a lack of power. And Bradley Manning both had access to far more information and wielded far less power than Ellsberg ever did. As the young soldier would later write, he was “smart enough to know what’s going on, but helpless to do anything.”
Manning’s army career would quickly become as troubled as his premilitary life. By the middle of 2010, he had been demoted for hitting another soldier and shouting down a superior, assigned to hauling around boxes in the supply closet and working at events like a sparsely attended barbecue for a visiting team of cheerleaders. On one occasion, an officer found him curled in a fetal position on the floor. On another, he was found sitting alone with a knife, the two words I want carved into a wooden chair. Fear for his safety and his mental state had led a superior to remove the bolt from his rifle. Even then, he retained his secret classification privileges.
Manning’s demotion may have also been linked to the fact that he now made little effort to conceal his homosexuality, even attending demonstrations against California’s anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 while stationed in upstate New York. He told a reporter that he had been kicked out of his home and lost a job because of his sexual orientation. He said that the military’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy was forcing him to live “a double life.”
His Facebook statuses referred to a Boston boyfriend, Tyler Watkins, whom he had met while on leave there prior to shipping out to Iraq. “Bradley Manning is glad he is working and active again, yet heartbroken being so far away from hubby,” read one status update. And another: “Bradley Manning is in the barracks, alone. I miss you, Tyler!” Manning would write later of his decision to “transition” to becoming a female named Breanna Manning. On one of his leaves, he spent days dressed as a female in public, and had begun planning for electrolysis and other sex change procedures after his discharge.
But the moment that Manning would cite as setting him on the path to become his era’s most prolific leaker didn’t come during his social struggle in the army’s ranks. It occurred during his work as an analyst, one of the hundreds of thousands with access to the army’s endless classified troves of information. And it happened far more quickly than Ellsberg’s long-burning transformation from hawk to dove.
Fifteen detainees had been taken in by the Iraqi Federal Police for printing “anti-Iraqi literature,” and Manning was assigned to investigate the situation. He soon determined that the prisoners hadn’t advocated violence, but had simply written what Manning described as a “scholarly critique” of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, looking into possible corruption in the prime minister’s cabinet. “I immediately took that information and ran to the officer to explain what was going on,” Manning would later write. “He didn’t want to hear any of it . . . he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the [police] in finding more detainees. . . .”
“I had always questioned the way things worked, and investigated to find the truth. But that was a point where I was a part of something. I was actively involved in something that I was completely against,” he wrote. “Everything started slipping after that. . . . I saw things differently.”
Manning dug deeper, browsing the State Department database he would later be accused of spilling to WikiLeaks: 251,000 memoranda describing the intimate dealings of the world’s leaders in candid terms. He described “crazy, almost criminal political back dealings, the non-PR versions of world events and crises, all kinds of stuff like everything from the buildup to the Iraq War during Powell, to what the actual content of “aid packages” is.
“There’s so much . . . it affects everybody on Earth. Everywhere there’s a US post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed. . . . Iceland, the Vatican, Spain, Brazil, Madagascar, if it’s a country, and it’s recognized by the US as a country, it’s got dirt on it,” Manning wrote. “It’s open diplomacy . . . world-wide anarchy in CSV format. It’s beautiful, and horrifying.”
Finally, he writes of a video shot from the cockpit of an Apache helicopter, showing a group of men being killed by the aircraft’s heavy weaponry. “At first glance, it was just a bunch of guys getting shot up by a helicopter. No big deal, about two dozen more where that came from,” wrote Manning. But the video was being stored in the file of the Judge Advocate General, implying that it was being used in some sort of military justice proceeding.
So Manning tracked down the video’s date—a day in July 2007—and its coordinates, a Baghdad suburb called New Baghdad. And he linked those facts with a story in The New York Times that revealed two Reuters journalists had been killed in the helicopter airstrike, along with nine insurgents on the ground and in a black van, who the military said had been firing on U.S. soldiers.
Manning knew that the men on the ground hadn’t, in fact, been firing on anyone. The Apache helicopter had mowed down the group from above without any evidence that they were insurgents. And the black van that had pulled up beside the wounded and dying men to help them had similarly been mere civilians, a family hoping to save the lives of a group of strangers who lay dying on the street and sidewalk. But the helicopter had rained down bullets on the van, too, wounding two children and killing their parents. “Well it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle,” one soldier quipped in the clip’s audio track.
“I kept that in my mind for weeks . . . probably a month and a half,” says Manning. Then he decided: He would hand it over to WikiLeaks, where it would become the prologue for a classified exposé to dwarf all others in history.
Adrian Lamo seems to have fallen asleep. His head hangs suspended over his lunch, a plate of salmon, plantains, and vegetables next to a cup of coffee that he has filled to the brim with cream and five packets
of sugar.
We’re sitting in a restaurant that serves Colombian food, a few blocks from his home in a dreary town that he’s requested I not name. Instead, the thirty-year-old hacker has asked me to write only that we met on “an island,” a taunting clue to the legions of angry supporters of WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning who would like to locate Lamo and harass or harm him. Those pursuers aren’t a figment of Lamo’s imagination. Just days before, a news crew from Al Jazeera posted a TV interview of Lamo that included a momentary shot of his computer. One of his many online stalkers quickly spotted an Internet protocol address on the screen, performed a Whois lookup to find a registered location in Carmichael, California, and posted screenshots of the information online. Luckily for Lamo, it was an old address.
Still, Lamo hasn’t shaken his paranoid compulsions, partly residual from his years as a hacker and homeless drifter. When we sit down at the restaurant, he insists on switching seats “to face the door,” despite the fact that both of our seats are perpendicular to the exit.
The question that seems, a few minutes into our meal, to have had such a soporific effect on Lamo is this one: Now that Bradley Manning has been placed in an isolated cell in a Quantico, Virginia, brig awaiting trial, largely deprived of exercise and visitors and forced to strip and wear nothing but a coarse smock every night to prevent him from committing suicide with his underwear’s elastic band, does Lamo regret having turned Manning over to authorities? Looking back, would he still have drawn him out in online conversations that stretched over days as Manning confessed every detail of his leaks, and then turned those incriminating logs over to the authorities?
Lamo has responded by closing his eyes and allowing his head to bob and sink slowly for several seconds. I consider reaching over to tap him on the shoulder. Before I do, he suddenly looks up and answers me.
“The man is the equivalent of a spy. He’s our next Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen,” Lamo says, naming two convicted double agents who sold information to the USSR over several decades. Lamo’s speech is a robotic slur, a result of the cocktail of psychoactive prescription drugs he takes daily. But his hazel eyes have opened wide and he’s now staring at me with surprising lucidity. “The only difference is that instead of giving information to the Soviets, he’s giving it to an antisecrecy organization. In another country, he’d get a bullet in the head. Here, he gets donations and approbation.”
Lamo’s hair is slicked back away from a pudgy, almost feminine baby face. In his pierced left earlobe is a small screw he wears as an earring. He wears a blue shirt tucked into his jeans over a potbelly that’s likely another side effect of his medical regimen. Earlier, Lamo listed five names of drugs he says he takes to treat his Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism. But when I consult with a doctor after our meeting, I learn that the drugs are generally used for treating chronic pain, depression, and schizophrenia. There is no prescription drug for the treatment of Asperger’s.
Lamo goes on to argue that the story of Manning’s mistreatment comes from just the few supporters that have managed to visit him: Manning’s friend David House and his lawyer, David Coombs. “Manning is being treated as any maximum security detainee would be treated,” Lamo slurs. “It’s being played up as a sideshow to garner sympathy.”
But House and Coombs aren’t the only ones to point out Manning’s mistreatment. Just the week before, P. J. Crowley, the State Department public affairs official, called Manning’s treatment by the military “ridiculous, counterproductive, and stupid” before resigning his government post. Later, a UN torture investigator would also speak out after being barred from visiting Manning.
The waitress comes over, and Lamo, who spent part of his childhood in Colombia, makes her laugh with a few words in slurred Spanish. Then he takes a sip of coffee, but his mouth doesn’t seem to function properly, and he moves the liquid around in his cheeks for several seconds before swallowing.
I continue: Doesn’t it open Lamo to charges of hypocrisy that he turned Manning in for the same information-wants-to-be-free attitude that Lamo himself preached during his years as an illegal hacker?
Lamo looks down into his plate, closes his eyes, and his neck muscles seem to relax. After a few seconds I fear again that he’s finally passed out in his chair. When he looks up suddenly, this time I twitch in surprise. “I know that saying this isn’t going to make me very many friends,” Lamo says. “But had Manning released just that video and nothing else, I wouldn’t have told anyone about it. I would have even exfiltrated it myself if I were him.” Lamo pauses, as if to let this sink in.
“He should have gone through the files,” he continues. “Instead, he said, ‘Here are a million documents. I’ve read one millionth of a percent of them, but I’ve established there’s no harm in releasing them.’”
Lamo goes through a convoluted arithmetic he says he used to make his decision, first weighing the good of the victims of the helicopter strike and their families versus the good of the soldiers who carried out that strike—and then the good of Manning versus that of the secrecy of the entire United States military and State Department. And since the moment that he committed to handing over his instant messenger chat logs to the authorities, Lamo says he hasn’t doubted the conclusions of his moral calculus.
Lamo’s lids fall to half-mast. “He wanted to make the world a better place. He just didn’t know what he was doing,” he intones flatly. “I wish there could have been some other resolution. I actually suggested to the agents that they keep him around and feed him disinformation. Instead, they chose to grab him.”
This is the stranger, of all possible strangers, to whom Bradley Manning chose to confess a leak that may put him in prison for the rest of his life.
When Manning sought out Lamo as a confessor and friend, he had some reason to believe that the older hacker was a kindred spirit. For several years at the beginning of the last decade, Lamo was one of the media’s favorite digital deviants: the so-called “homeless hacker.” Traveling back and forth across the United States by Greyhound, fueled by amphetamines and painkillers, sleeping in abandoned buildings and on friends’ floors, Lamo would stop into twenty-four-hour Kinko’s to use their computers for marathon hacking sessions.
Lamo avoided traditional network intrusion, which uses unpatched vulnerabilities in the victim’s software. Instead, he often exploited misconfigured proxy servers, meant for use by outsourcing firms and other corporate partners, as hidden gaps in corporate firewalls. Using Internet Explorer as his only tool, Lamo would pry open those gaps and enter forbidden networks.
Once, he tells me, he could have transferred the entire cash pool set aside for bonuses at the telecom giant MCI WorldCom to any account he chose. On another occasion, he found a bug in AOL’s network that allowed hackers to hijack users’ instant messenger accounts, and he later hacked a Yahoo! website to insert a dig at President Bush into a news story. He carried a stun gun on his travels and used it for electrocuting various objects like electronic locks and vending machines, which sometimes responded by spitting out change or food.
In 2002, Lamo dug up a flaw in The New York Times’ corporate password system, and exploited it to add his name to the paper’s list of op-ed contributors beside the former head of the NSA, Robert Redford, and Rush Limbaugh. On that same field trip inside the Times’ network, he also used the paper’s account to run the equivalent of three hundred thousand dollars in searches on the paid research service Lexis-Nexis.
Lamo made a point of minimizing the damage from his hacks and alerting the administrators of the systems he exploited, going so far as to walk them through the necessary steps to close their security holes. But in the case of the Times adventure, Lamo’s victim didn’t see his intrusion as a favor. The company turned his case over to the FBI, which put out a warrant for his arrest and tracked the twenty-two-year-old’s itinerant wandering for five days before he surrendered h
imself to police in Sacramento. After a year-long trial, Lamo pled guilty and was sentenced to pay sixty-five thousand dollars in fines and spend six months under house arrest at his parents’ home.
After the New York Times case, Lamo became a poster boy for the well-intentioned hacker misunderstood by society. He starred as the central character in a documentary film titled Hackers Wanted that focused on his mistreatment at the hands of federal law enforcement. In the final message of that film, Lamo gives a soliloquy on digital ethics that transcend what’s legal or illegal, delivered at fast-forward pace that sounds nothing like his drug-swamped speech today:
I hoped and believed that I could [hack systems] in a way that would set a precedent that would allow people to come forward in good faith to try to do the right thing, to let them believe that maybe motives did matter, that it wasn’t all black-and-white. I think this is symptomatic of something we’re seeing in the government today. In many ways they’re eliminating shades of gray. They want to polarize people. It’s important to our national agenda today to see good guys and bad guys. Because as soon as we start to believe that maybe it’s not all black-and-white, that someone can do wrong for a good reason, that not every action of law is inherently infallible, it strikes a very dangerous precedent for the government the way it wants to operate today.
After the documentary’s filming was completed in 2003, Hackers Wanted went unreleased for seven years until it was finally leaked in May of 2010 onto copyright-flouting BitTorrent file-sharing networks, where it became a modest hit in the world of hackers and information security. Lamo insists he wasn’t the source of the leak.
This Machine Kills Secrets Page 4
