Thursday, October 4, 2012

Bradley Manning Facebook friend was a security and risk management expert

Bradley Manning's Facebook account reveals he friended two soldiers who belonged to unit involved in 2007 "Collateral Murder" video he leaked, which may have alerted a security firm; Three weeks before speaking to Adrian Lamo, Manning also friended a security and risk management expert, who gave PowerPoint presentations on how firms can defend against security breaches from the "bad guys" who are "already" on the inside, and who is also Facebook friends with Manning's ex-boyfriend.

Manning's leaked "Collateral Murder" video puts WikiLeaks "on the map"

On April 5, 2010, WikiLeaks released the "Collateral Murder" video which was leaked by Private First Class Bradley Manning - while stationed with his Army unit in Baghdad, Iraq - in February to Julian Assange.

The press release announced, "WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting three airstrikes from a US Apache helicopter on July 12, 2007 in New Baghdad, Iraq. At least eighteen people were killed in the airstrikes, including two journalists working for Reuters, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen."



"The video was recorded by the gunsight camera on the Apache helicopter, identified as Crazyhorse 18, and is accompanied by the radio communications of the helicopter gunmen as they communicate with their commanders and troops on the ground.

When the video begins, the helicopter is circling above the city. It then focuses in on a group of men walking in the street, including the Reuters journalists. The soldiers in the helicopter state that they see members of the group carrying weapons, ask their commanding officers for permission to engage (fire), and fire upon the group with 30mm rounds.

The camera then follows Chmagh as he crawls along the road, and the soldiers can be heard urging him to pick up a weapon. A van, which was later learned to be carrying two children to school along with their father, arrives and several men pick Chmagh up and begin to carry him toward the van. The helicopter requests and is given permission to fire upon the van as it tries to leave. They fire upon the van with 30mm rounds.

The video then shows ground troops arriving at the area. A soldier can be seen running as he carries one of the children wounded in the attack on the van."
A Washington Post article published on April 16, 2011 - written by Ellen Nakashima - reported that soon after the "Collateral Murder" video was posted "that put WikiLeaks on the map...Manning began to exhibit 'bizarre behavior' at work, including showing 'blank stares when spoken to' and stopping in mid-sentence, according to Master Sgt. Adkins in a memorandum written for an investigation into whether any supervisors should be punished for failing to properly discipline Manning and for failing to run a secure SCIF."

The Post article also noted that "Manning e-mailed friends a link to the video, urging them to check it out."
"Manning’s strange behavior increased in 'frequency and intensity' and gave 'an impression of disrespect and disinterest' to his superiors. Adkins sent Manning not to a therapist but to a chaplain.

On May 7, Manning left his work area about 6:30 p.m. and was found an hour later 'sitting on the floor in a fetal position in a storage room.' It appeared as though he had been cutting open a vinyl chair. Etched in the chair were the words 'I want.'" A Gerber army knife lay at his feet.

Later that evening, having returned to his shift, he struck a female soldier in the face. He would later say he had no intention of hitting her and had no idea why he did."
Bradley Manning Facebook friends conscientious objector Josh Stieber

A week after the "Collateral Murder" video was leaked to the world, conscientious objector Josh Stieber - a member of the unit involved in the 2007 helicopter attacks but who wasn't there when it happened - began giving interviews to the press about it.

A press release issued by Stieber on April 9, 2010, which included contact info for his Media Advisory Sarah Lazare - the Project Director of "Courage to Resist" - titled "Veteran of 'Collateral Murder' Company Speaks Out," stated "that the acts of brutality caught on film and recently released via Wikileaks are not isolated instances, but were commonplace during his tour of duty."

"If these videos shock and revolt you, they show the reality of what war is like," Stieber said in the press release. "If you don’t like what you see in them, it means we should be working harder towards alternatives to war."

On April 12, 2010, Stieber told Democracy Now, "The natural thing to do would be to instantly judge or criticize the soldiers in this video...Not to justify what they did, but militarily speaking, they did exactly what they were trained to do...If we’re shocked by this video, we need to be asking questions of the larger system, because this is how these soldiers were trained to act."

Stieber also was interviewed by Scott Horton from Anti War radio on April 14, 2010, and by Salon's Glenn Greenwald on April 9, 2010.

Greenwald - who is a constitutional law attorney and used to be a political and legal blogger for Salon.com before moving on to The Guardian earlier this year - had spoken to Democracy Now on April 6, 2010, along with WikiLeak's Julian Assange. On his Twitter account, Breanna Manning @bmanningfm, Greenwald was one of the only two people Bradley selected to follow.

"...I had declined a couple of days earlier to follow a command that I didn't feel right in following so, so I was not allowed to go on this mission, or else I would have been in that video," Stieber told Greenwald on Salon radio.

Stieber complained, "And I guess one comparison that I would use is that maybe its being framed like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. If you were going to compare to a movie, when I feel its more like the Saw movies, where a character wakes up with a machine strapped to them and in order to make it out alive, they have to do something horrible to another person, so there's definitely that aspect of it. But its, yeah, its the nature of the machine, rather than, you know, the helicopter pilots just waking up one morning and like, alright, we're going to go out and kill some random people."

A document of Manning's "Facebook back to 2007" posted by Steve Fishman - who wrote an article called "Bradley Manning's Army of One" for New York Magazine on July 3, 2011 which called him a "dangerous soldier" - reveals that Manning Facebook friended Stieber some time between March 30 and April 25, 2010. After Manning was arrested, Stieber left a message on his Facebook page on December 18, 2010: "Happy Birthday Bradley, you're an inspiration!"

Cyberwarriors use "social engineering" for "offensive and defensive missions"

Reporting for The Washington Post on September 26, 2012, Robert O'Harrow Jr. explored how the concept of "social engineering - long favored by con artists, identity thieves and spammers - [has] become one of the leading threats to government and corporate networks in cyberspace."

"Serious hackers investigate their targets online and draw on troves of personal information people share about themselves, their friends and their social networks," O'Harrow Jr. reported. "Facebook, Twitter and other social media have become prime sources for the hackers, specialists said."
"'Everybody has their trigger,' said Bruce M. Snell, director of technical marketing at McAfee Security Systems. 'A good social engineer will find that trigger.'"
"Cyberwarriors at the Pentagon receive social-engineering training for offensive and defensive missions, knowledgeable specialists said," O'Harrow Jr. noted.

"At the same time, technology is transforming social engineering. One online data-mining service favored by hackers — as well as by security researchers and law enforcement — works much like a laser-focused Google. The automated system, called Maltego, enables users to quickly bring together and analyze disparate details about people from all corners of cyberspace, showing an individual’s links to friends, family, work associates and personal interests."
A security firm monitoring Stieber's Facebook account - and perhaps already alerted by friends of Manning - might have noticed the friending between the two conscientious objectors. That firm could have even been potentially hired by the US Government to help track down - and perhaps entrap - the "Collateral Murder" leaker.

Bradley Manning Facebook friends "Collateral Murder" soldier Ethan McCord

Between May 6 and May 30, 2010, Bradley Manning also became Facebook friends with Ethan McCord, another member of Bravo Company, 2-16 Infantry. McCord can be seen in the "Collateral Murder" video that Manning leaked. As Kim Zetter reported for Wired.com on April 20, 2007, "In July 2007, McCord, a 33-year-old Army specialist, was engaged in a firefight with insurgents in an Iraqi suburb when his platoon, part of Bravo Company, 2-16 Infantry, got orders to investigate a nearby street."
"When they arrived, they found a scene of fresh carnage – the scattered remains of a group of men, believed to be armed, who had just been gunned down by Apache attack helicopters. They also found 10-year-old Sajad Mutashar and his five-year-old sister Doaha covered in blood in a van. Their 43-year-old father, Saleh, had been driving them to a class when he spotted one of the wounded men moving in the street and drove over to help him, only to become a victim of the Apache guns.

McCord was captured in a video shot from one helicopter as he ran frantically to a military vehicle with Sajad in his arms seeking medical care. That classified video created its own firestorm when the whistleblower site Wikileaks posted it April 5 on a website titled 'Collateral Murder' and asserted that the attack was unprovoked. More than a dozen people were killed in three attacks captured in the video, including two Reuters journalists, one carrying a camera that was apparently mistaken for a weapon.

McCord, who served seven years in the military before leaving in the summer of 2009 due to injuries, recently posted an apologetic letter online with fellow soldier Josh Steiber supporting the release of the video and asking the family’s forgiveness. McCord is the father of three children."
McCord complained to Zetter, "When it was first released I don’t think it was done in the best manner that it could have been. They were stating that these people had no weapons whatsoever, that they were just carrying cameras. In the video, you can clearly see that they did have weapons … to the trained eye. You can make out in the video [someone] carrying an AK-47, swinging it down by his legs…."

But then McCord added, "I don’t say that Wikileaks did a bad thing, because they didn’t…. I think it is good that they’re putting this stuff out there. I don’t think that people really want to see this, though, because this is war…. It’s very disturbing."

Manning Facebook friends security and risk management expert Naveed Moeed

On April 30, 2010 - apparently right after his boyfriend broke up with him - Manning became Facebook friends with Naveed Moeed. How they met remains unknown and is a mystery, at this time. Moeed's Facebook entries from 2010 appear to have been scrubbed, since there is no sign of any communications with Manning to be found, or anything else from that year.

Naveed Moeed was principal technical consultant for the Middle East and Africa at RSA, the security division, and, according to his LinkedIn resume, spent 5 years, 3 months at the firm from April, 2004 to June of 2009, where he was "[p]art of the two-man team who started the MEA region for RSA, and grew the region from under $500k a year to over $6m a year, in three years." Prior to RSA, Moeed worked for a government agency called Joint Information Systems Committee or JISC - the "UK’s expert on information and digital technologies for education and research" - at the Monitoring and Advisory Unit (MAU) and the Technical Advisory Unit, from April 1999 to May 2000. He earned a PhD. in Physics at the University of Kent, where he studied from 1991 to 2000.

Since July of 2009, Moeed has worked for Verizon Business, according to his LinkedIn resume, as an "In region manager for VzB's Professional Services team for MEA. Responsible for a growing team covering the whole geography, increasing revenue and profitability and providing consistent cusomer experience for best in class Security and IT Services." In August of 2011, Moeed has been "[h]eading up a team as part of an EMEA-wide effort to establish and launch Verizon's new range of IAM products and services under the Terremark umbrella. The team in EMEA is responsible for the technical and sales enablement of these services in Europe as well as business development responsibility to increase Verizon's market share. As part of the wider IAM team, the group represents Verizon conferences and special interest groups including EEMA and Gartner."

Moeed's specialties include "Identity and Access Management, Encryption, Security Management, Security Incident and Event Monitoring (SEIM), Data Loss Prevention, Information Risk Management."

Although his resume claims he is currently a "Professional Services Manager, IAM Strategy and Business Development at Terremark" located in the Amsterdam Area, Netherlands, his Facebook profile lists his current address as Durham, North Carolina.

As Emirates Business reported on February 20, 2008,
"RSA, which provides information security solutions to 90 per cent of the Fortune 500 companies, has seen its Middle East client base grow from one bank the National Bank of Dubai in 2003 to 40 institutions at the end of last year.

We have seen exponential growth from this sector and this reflects how banks are reacting to security and how much they see it as leverage for accelerating the business. Its also about retaining customers.

Moeed, who was attending the Secur Middle East Congress in Dubai, said the extent of the damage caused by a security breach will depend on the size of the bank and type of clients it had."
Moeed is an expert in "social engineering" and gives presentations about warding off "cyber attacks" from within and outside.

The following paragraphs are taken from the University of Washington's Autumn 2005 course Wiki for Cyber Security and Homeland Security:
"Traditional hacking is no longer as big a problem as in the past, due mainly to current technology which can counter it. A different type of hacking, however, in the form of 'social engineering' (which includes attacks such as phishing), is on the rise. This is the view of Naveed Moeed, RSA Security technical consultant for the Middle East and Africa region, who spoke to ITWeb while on a recent visit to SA. Banks and financial institutions, some of which have recently been the targets of phishing attacks, are constantly facing the threat of fraud, he said. Phishing, he argued, is difficult to combat due to its innocuous nature, and takes advantage of users' perceptions that they are acting correctly by submitting information to an 'authentic' online banking site, for instance.

'It is becoming widely accepted that [banks and insurance companies] have to take responsibility for security – it cannot be left up to the users,' Moeed stated. With only four or five personal details, hackers are able to create a limited set of passwords, Moeed maintains, highlighting that about 80% of a Jordanian bank's online clients were affected after completing a bogus survey."
At the Web Security Summit 2007, held in South Africa, Dr. Naveed Moeed presented a PowerPoint slide show called "Avoiding Bad Security Practice by Hitting the Panic Button (cache link."

One of Moeed's slides contained a header which stated, "THE DATA SECURITY PARADIGM HAS SHIFTED" - underlined in bright red - with the subheaders, "YESTERDAY'S VIEW: Keep the Bad Guys Out" and "TODAY'S VIEW: Assume They Are Already In."
Underneath "TODAY'S VIEW," Moeed's slide stated that the "THREAT" OF "[p]rivacy breach, intellectual property theft, insider attack" should entail a "FOCUS" on "[a]uthorization and accountability", and the "APPROACH" should be to "[m]anage and protect information: Identity management, data encryption."

In 2006, Moeed belonged to a group called UAEQuakers, Quakers in United Arab Emirates (Dubai) and he hosted at least one meeting at his own residence that same year in June.

As the BBC notes, "Quakers believe that war and conflict are against God's wishes and so they are dedicated to pacifism and non-violence. And from a practical point of view they think that force nearly always creates more problems than it solves."

"Many conscientious objectors (those who refuse to join the armed forces) are Quakers, but Quaker pacifism is not simply the refusal to fight: it includes working actively to bring about or preserve peace, by removing the causes of conflict."
Many of the Yahoo group's activity appears to be scrubbed (clicking on a link produces the Yahoo note: "There is no group called UAEQuakers. Please make sure you typed the web address correctly. If you have done so, the group may no longer exist.") but the following message sent by Moeed on June 6, 2006 was found in a cache link:
Hey Friends,

It looks like I will be travelling again for two weeks back on the 2nd of June. I would like to take the opportunity to host at that time if Friends are in agreement?

I look forward to seeing you all on my return,

In Peace,

Naveed
-- Naveed Moeed, Technical Consultant (Middle East & Africa)
RSA Security ME, Bldg 12 Off. 207, Dubai Internet City, P.O. Box 502318 Dubai

Mobile: +971(0)506577815, Landline: +971(0)43625496, Fax: +971(0)43686752
The group apparently sought and recruited Quakers from America, Great Britain and other countries, as well as Dubai residents, and another message noted, "Naveed and I were talking together recently and agreed that we thought it might be useful if we talked as a group to think about how we might raise our profile a bit as Dubai Quakers."
"Perhaps we can send out a missive, a photo, some news about us, etc. We also ought to register who can attend for us at Middle East Yearly Meeting, coming up in Lebanon in September. Let me know if anyone wishes to host meeting any time soon, maybe this Friday for example."
Quaker meetings would be a great place to spot potential "conscientious objectors" or "war resisters" who experienced changes of heart after enlisting with their countries' military forces. But there is no evidence that Moeed joined the UAEQuakers for such a purpose.

PBS Frontline later "obtained access to Manning's Facebook account", but only published an "edited version", which blurred out all the names of Manning's friends, and didn't include the dates on when he friended them.

"We have blurred the identities of those other than Manning posting comments or in pictures, as well as the names of people mentioned in the posts, with the exception of public figures and in several cases Manning's ex-boyfriend Tyler Watkins," PBS Frontline's article stated.

Security and Risk management pro also friended Manning's ex-boyfriend

Bradley Manning and Tyler Watkins became Facebook friends on November 17, 2008.

As Gawker's John Cook noted on May 24, 2011, after Frontline posted "Bradley Manning’s Lost Facebook Page," the soldier wrote openly about his relationship with Tyler Watkins, including being 'utterly lost and confused' after their break-up and referring at one point to his 'hubbie,' apparently without concern that his military colleagues would find out."

Nakashima's April 16, 2011 Washington Post article added, "Manning now had a love interest: Tyler Watkins, a freshman interested in neuroscience at Brandeis University who was an active member of Triskelion, the Brandeis club for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students. Manning began to make weekend visits to Watkins’s dorm at the tranquil, wooded campus west of Boston. On his Facebook page, Watkins declared that he was 'totally in love with Bradley Edward Manning!!!!!!!'"

In an article published by The New York Times on August 9, 2010, Ginger Thompson reported, "Before being deployed to Iraq, Private Manning met Tyler Watkins, who described himself on his blog as a classical musician, singer and drag queen. A friend said the two had little in common, but Private Manning fell head over heels. Mr. Watkins, who did not respond to interview requests for this article, was a student at Brandeis University. On trips to visit him here in Cambridge, Private Manning got to know many in Mr. Watkins’ wide network of friends, including some who were part of this university town’s tight-knit hacker community."

"Friends said Private Manning found the atmosphere here to be everything the Army was not: openly accepting of his geeky side, his liberal political opinions, his relationship with Mr. Watkins and his ambition to do something that would get attention.

Although hacking has come to mean a lot of different things, at its core, those who do it say, is the philosophy that information should be free and accessible to all. And Private Manning had access to some of the most secret information on the planet.
"
On June 6, 2010, Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter reported for Wired, "In January [of 2010], while on leave in the United States, Manning visited a close friend in Boston [- Tyler Watkins -] and confessed he’d gotten his hands on unspecified sensitive information, and was weighing leaking it, according to the friend."

Watkins told Wired that Bradley Manning "wanted to do the right thing. That was something I think he was struggling with."

On January 21, 2010, Manning posted on his Facebook page that he "misses Tyler Watkins."

After WikiLeaks posted his "Collateral Murder" video, Manning reportedly spoke to Watkins about the reaction in the United States.
"'He would message me, Are people talking about it?… Are the media saying anything?' Watkins said. 'That was one of his major concerns, that once he had done this, was it really going to make a difference?… He didn’t want to do this just to cause a stir…. He wanted people held accountable and wanted to see this didn’t happen again.'

Watkins doesn’t know what else Manning might have sent to Wikileaks. But in his chats with Lamo, Manning took credit for a number of other disclosures
"
In her Washington Post article, Nakashima noted, "Since the Wired story, Watkins has not spoken to the media and did not return phone calls for this article. (After Manning’s arrest, federal investigators swooped into Boston looking for leads on WikiLeaks among Manning’s friends in the tech community, which one called a chilling experience.)"

According to Manning's Facebook page, he and Watkins apparently broke up on April 30, 2010, and at 5:13 PM wrote, that he was "utterly lost and confused over Tyler's relationship status." Watkins seemed to be ducking Manning, even though both were online that night. At 7:19 PM, Manning despondently wrote, "Anyone want to be my official 'next of kin?'"

However, Manning and Watkins must have had some kind of contact by the next morning, since on May 1, 2010 at 9:51 AM, he wrote on Facebook that he was "livid: first lectured by ex-boyfriend despite months of relationship ambiguity; then personally attacked by uncle over 'ex-'boyfriend'' (with scarequotes) and 'lifestyle.'"

Interestingly - and perhaps intriguingly - Bradley Manning's ex-boyfriend Tyler Watkins and security and risk management expert Naveed Moeed are friends on Facebook, too. Watkins' Facebook messages from 2010 are also scrubbed.

Manning arrested nearly one month after Facebook friending Naveed Moeed

On May 26, Bradley Manning was arrested five days after contacting a hacker, who has a long history of manipulating online web articles, and was convicted for computer crimes, and ordered to pay $65,000 to the federal government in restitution to the New York Times nearly a decade ago. That hacker now "volunteers" for a strange security firm, and has given inconsistent accounts about his communications with Manning, his tenure with the firm, and the circumstances on why and how he "snitched" - as many liberals refer to his actions.

On May 30, a mutual friend of Watkins and Manning, Danny Clark left the following message on his Facebook account, "Hi, are you okay? Haven't seen you on IM for a while. Posting here in case others worry as easily as I :-)." Clark refused to speak to federal agents, but the hacker who turned in Manning interviewed him - while working as a confidential informant for the Army Criminal Investigation Command(CID) - and turned the logs over to the government.

The Guardian's Ed Pilkington reported on August 30, 2012, "A military judge presiding over the court martial of the WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning has set the date for what is likely to be the biggest whistleblower trial in US history."
"Judge Denise Lind set aside six weeks for the trial of the US soldier, between 4 February and 15 March. Manning faces 22 counts relating to charges that he leaked hundreds of thousands of secret US state documents, including war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq and diplomatic cables, to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.

The trial start date looks likely to hold firm despite months of postponement. By February Manning would have been in custody for almost three years – far longer than the 120-day period normally allowed under military rules between charges being preferred and the start of a trial.

The judge made her ruling at the end of a three-day pre-trial hearing at Fort Meade in Maryland, which was attended by Manning. The soldier, who worked as an intelligence analyst at forward operating base Hammer outside Baghdad, where he was arrested in May 2010, faces life in military custody."
Afterword

Readers who have been following my reporting on Neal Rauhauser and Adrian Lamo at this blog and on my twitter account Ron Brynaert @RonBryn know that I've been reporting on how both worked for a firm called Project Vigilant, which had some involvement in Manning's arrest.

Both Rauhauser (who sent a public tweet to Lamo @6 on the same day the convicted hacker first spoke to Manning, but claims he was "inactive" in PV throughout 2010, because he was concentrating on progressive politics and writing diaries at the popular Daily Kos blog) and Lamo refuse to answer direct questions, and have instead mocked me and - almost definitely - have directed trolls and sock accounts to menace and smear me. And last weekend private info about my family - including the possible Social Security number for my father who died in 1996 - were leaked onto the Internet.

My Twitter timeline going back to June of 2011 contains many links and exclusive reporting on Rauhauser, Lamo, Project Vigilant chief Chet Uber, and other members of Project Vigilant, for those who don't want to wait for the next installment.

"[W]e have two mutual friends, how interesting," Manning said to Lamo - who would turn him in a few days later, after allegedly contacting Uber - according to the Manning-Lamo logs published by Wired.com on July 13, 2011. "[S]mall world."

As www.usdayofrage.org founder Alexa O'Brien noted on her blog, "Lamo reportedly told PBS, when asked if he knew if Manning reached out to anybody else, confessed to anybody else?: "I've heard reports that he asked his significant other to help him with the couriering of information and was rebuffed in that. Again, I don't know if that's true."

"And looking at his Facebook page, he had posted angrily after disputes and incidents with his significant other in the past," Lamo also told PBS. "There didn't seem to be a lot of restraint there, although there were certainly good intentions."

In another article at her blog, Alexa O'Brien noted,
"Special Agent Antonio Patrick Edwards, CCIU, testified that he attempted to interview Danny Clark between 18 and 23 June 2010, but that he did not interview Clark, because Clark invoked his right to counsel. Edwards testified that he had knowledge that Danny Clark communicated with Adrian Lamo, because Adrian Lamo provided Edwards with the chat log between Lamo and Clark 'around July 22 [2010].' Edwards testified that Adrian Lamo did not receive the suggestion or 'specific guidance' by law enforcement to search for information, 'but if [Lamo] does collect information, [Lamo] should let [law enforcement] know.' Edwards testified that Lamo 'knew there were other individuals involved and opportunities in that community with other hackers,' and if Lamo 'was to discover anything' that it was suggested by law enforcement that Lamo 'should share that information.' On cross examination, Edwards testified that law enforcement was interested if Lamo found something, but 'tread lightly. Do not be deceptive. Don't do anything illegal.'"
According to theDecember 20, 2011 Article 32 Pretrial hearing in U.S. v Pfc. Manning transcript, published by O'Brien - which she wrote "was obtained from a respected journalist in attendance that day at Fort Meade" who "wished to remain anonymous, but wanted the transcript to be made public - Bradley Manning defense attorney, military-appointed JAG Captain Paul Bouchard asked Special Agent Edwards, "Anyone from law enforcement direct Lamo to have communications with Clark? Suggest it?"

"No," Special Agent Edwards replied. "No. We said he has no specific guidance to search, but if he does collect information, he should let us know. I think he knew there were other individuals involved and opportunities in that community with other hackers. If he was to discover anything, he should share that information."

Captain Bouchard then asked, "Was Mr. Lamo encouraged [to speak to Danny Clark, while acting as a confidential informant for the Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) in late July of 2010]?"

"If he found something, yes of course we're interested," Edwards responded. "But tread lightly. Do not be deceptive. Don't do anything illegal."

However, since Lamo later admitted while under oath that he had told Clark on July 21, 2010, "Let's agree neither of us is gonna share these logs," Lamo was deceptive, and, yet the Army CID retained him as a confidential informant for a year.

Lamo told Manning defense attorney Coombs, "At the time, I found there was a necessity that overrode that implied agreement, yes." But the agreement wasn't implied, it was explicit. Lamo claimed that sharing the logs with law enforcement "was not [his] intent in contacting Danny Clark," but his explanation that he was only "curious regarding [Clark's] role in the WikiLeaks affair," seems dubious, since he was working with the government at the time.

"What in this chat with Danny Clark made you want to report to law enforcement?" Lamo was asked.

Lamo responded, "I found it unusual that someone would install additional encryption software on an Army computer, and that they would employ a civilian in so doing."

I published this article before contacting Naveed Moeed, primarily because I'm skeptical he'll talk to me, and I'm being menaced, smeared, and harassed by enough trolls, socks, security firm employees and even liberal bloggers, as it is. But I'll be sending him a link to this article, in hopes that he can help fill in the blanks or correct errors I've made. I haven't tried contacting Tyler Watkins, either, since I believe he still is avoiding the media.

[CORRECTION: I mixed up Naveed with another one of Manning's Facebook friends so I removed the line]

TO BE CONTINUED.......

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

There are numerous inaccuracies -- including that Lamo worked for the Army CCIU as an informant, not the FBI.

Ron Brynaert said...

Thanks, you're partially correct.

I fixed that mistake, except it was Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) not CCIU.

http://www.alexaobrien.com/secondsight/wikileaks/bradley_manning/transcripts/transcript_us_v_pfc_bradley_manning_article_32_pretrial_december_12_20_2011.html

Please inform me what other "inaccuracies" you find and I'll fix them.

PB said...

Good article; it always struck me as odd that Breanna posted two tweets and was arrested the next day, there are a lot of coincidences out there. Least he didn't get busted on TinyChat. More worried about his future than his past today but I'll follow this story with you.