These four leaks were, of course, only hors d’oeuvres. Assange had also acquired a whole banquet of data: a file on Guantánamo inmates; a huge batch of US army “significant activities” reports detailing the ongoing Afghan war; a similar set of logs from the occupation of Iraq; and – most sensational of all – following the successful “test” with the Reykjavik cable leak, Manning had, it was later alleged, managed to supply Assange with a second entire trove of all 250,000 cables to be found in the “Net-Centric Diplomacy” database to which his security clearance gave the young soldier access.
Although the precautions practised by Manning and Assange had apparently worked well to date, it was perhaps no wonder that Manning felt exposed.
The process in which he first reached out to, and gained confidence in, Assange had been slow and painstaking, according to the later published extracts from what were said to be his chat logs. Neither he nor his lawyers have disputed their authenticity. The geeky young soldier seems to have first contacted the “crazy white-haired dude” in late November 2009, but tentatively so. He needed to be certain that WikiLeaks could be trusted to receive dynamite material without his own identity becoming known.
For a while he remained uncertain even about the person with whom he was communicating. He was in contact with a computer user claiming to be Assange, but was it really him? Sitting at his workstation in the Iraqi desert, how could Manning be sure? It took him four months to acquire that certainty. In his exchanges with Assange, he asked the Australian for details about how he was being followed by US state department officials. He then checked that information against what Assange was quoted as saying in the press, and the two precisely correlated. He also used his own security clearance to check up on the activities of the Northern Europe Diplomatic Security Team, the intelligence body that was most likely to have been doing the surveillance, and found that, too, correlated with Assange’s description.
Manning’s test with the Reykjavik cable dummy run would have confirmed not only that they could communicate safely, but also Assange’s ability to publish what he sent. With mounting confidence, Manning could press ahead with the big stuff.
What precisely were the transactions between the two men? By his own admission to Lamo, Manning “developed a relationship with Assange … but I don’t know much more than what he tells me, which is very little”. In interviews, Lamo has gone further, claiming that Manning told him he used an encrypted internet conferencing service to communicate directly with Assange, and that though they never met in person Assange actively “coached” Manning as to what kind of data he should transmit and how. Those claims have only come from Lamo, and have never been substantiated by supporting evidence.
What seems more certain is that some form of secure connection was created chiefly, or perhaps exclusively, for Manning, allowing him to pipe secret documents and videos directly to WikiLeaks. In his exchanges with Lamo, Manning described his technique. He would take a file of material, having scraped it out of the military system somehow, and encrypt it using the AES-256 (Advanced Encryption Standard, with a key size of 256 bits) cipher, considered one of the most secure methods.
He would then send the encrypted material via a secure FTP (file transfer protocol) to a server at a particular internet address. Finally, the encryption passcode that Manning devised would be sent separately, via Tor, making it very hard for any surveillance authorities to know where the information began its journey.
Matt Blaze, an associate professor in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in cryptology, says the system believed to have been constructed by Manning was a pretty straightforward technique for secure transmission. “From a computer security point of view straightforward ways are usually pretty good. Complex ways are liable to go wrong.”
Kevin Poulsen, the senior editor at Wired who published a partial version of the Lamo web chat – and himself a notorious former hacker – points out that the passage in the conversation in which Manning describes the transmission technique is hypothetical. Manning’s response is to a hypothetical question from Lamo: “how would I transmit something if I had damning data?” But if Manning was indeed describing the way he passed documents to WikiLeaks then it was very significant. “It goes way, way beyond the usual WikiLeaks method of uploading material to its website,” Poulsen says. “If it was the way he transmitted to WikiLeaks then it shows there must have been some degree of contact with WikiLeaks that went beyond the normal procedures.”
By 21 May, it can be assumed that Assange and any of their mutual links in the Boston hacker scene were strictly avoiding all contact with Bradley Manning – for his sake as much as theirs. It was unfortunate for them that Manning then started sending messages to Adrian Lamo instead. He made contact with him the day a piece appeared in Wired magazine sympathetically quoting Lamo on his own recent diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome, his depressions, and his experience of psychiatric hospitalisation.
According to Lamo’s version, published in Wired, in that first chat, Manning, who was using the pseudonym Bradass87, volunteered enough information to be easily traced. (The logs have been further edited here, for clarity).
“I’m an army intelligence analyst, deployed to eastern Baghdad, pending discharge for ‘adjustment disorder’ … I’m sure you’re pretty busy. If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day, seven days a week for eight-plus months, what would you do?”
The next day, he started to blurt out confessions. The statements this tormented 22-year-old made about the biggest leak in US official history – some intimate, some desperate, some intelligent and principled – have to serve, for now, as the nearest thing we have to Bradley Manning’s own testament. They make it clear that he was not a thief, not venal, not mad, and not a traitor. He believed that, somehow, he was doing a good thing.
“Hypothetical question: if you had free rein over classified networks for long periods of time, say, 8-9 months, and you saw incredible things, awful things, things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC, what would you do? (or Guantánamo, Bagram, Bucca, Taji, VBC [Victory Base Complex] for that matter) Things that would have an impact on 6.7 billion people, say, a database of half a million events during the Iraq war from 2004 to 2009, with reports, date time groups, lat[itude]-lon[gitude] locations, casualty figures? Or 260,000 state department cables from embassies and consulates all over the world, explaining how the first world exploits the third, in detail, from an internal perspective?”
Manning confessed: “The air gap has been penetrated.” The air gap is computer jargon, in this context, for the way the military internet is kept physically separate, for security reasons, from civilian servers, on which the ordinary commercial internet runs.
Lamo prompted him: “How so?”
“Let’s just say ‘someone’ I know intimately well has been penetrating US classified networks, mining data like the ones described, and been transferring that data from the classified networks over the ‘air gap’ onto a commercial network computer: sorting the data, compressing it, encrypting it, and uploading it to a crazy white-haired Aussie who can’t seem to stay in one country very long.”
He went on: “Crazy white-haired dude = Julian Assange. In other words, I’ve made a huge mess. (I’m sorry. I’m just emotionally fractured. I’m a total mess. I think I’m in more potential heat than you ever were.)”
Lamo continued to press him: “How long have you helped WikiLeaks?”