vRRitti.com, providing sentiency

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41023584/ns/technology_and_science-security/

http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/world/66136/extradition-hearing-date-set-for-assange

WikiLeaks will step up its publication schedule of secret documents, founder Julian Assange announced Tuesday, promising more revelations based on the group’s stash of confidential U.S. embassy cables and other leaks.

“We are stepping up our publishing for matters related to Cablegate and other materials,” Assange said. “Those will shortly be occurring through our newspaper partners around the world — big and small newspapers and some human rights organizations.”

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9KM50OO1.htm

The public first learned about Manning’s arrest not from the New York Times or the Washington Post but from Wired.com, the sister website to the magazine Wired. The scoop came from reporters Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter. And here’s where the story gets interesting.

In the late 1980s, Poulsen was a computer hacker. Under the nom de guerre “Dark Dante,” Poulsen accomplished a number of inventive, if not strictly legal, feats. As a 17-year-old he allegedly hacked his way into the Defense Department’s ARPANET. He later hacked private corporations, such as Pacific Bell, and various federal systems, where he uncovered information about ongoing FBI investigations. This was enough to get the feds after him; he was indicted in 1989. At the time, the Department of Justice’s cybercrime unit, which rode herd on Poulsen’s case, was headed by a fellow named Mark Rasch.

With the FBI at his heels, Poulsen went on the lam for 17 months. During his run, he hacked into the phone system of a Los Angeles radio station, 102.7 KIIS-FM. He took control of their phone bank and used it to win various contests by arranging things so that he could always be the 102nd caller. His fabulous prizes included a Porsche 944 S2, a vacation to Hawaii, and $20,000 in cash. When Poulsen was featured on the true-crime TV program Unsolved Mysteries, the show’s 1-800 tip line was mysteriously disabled.
The fun ended in April 1991 when Poulsen was arrested at a supermarket in Sherman Oaks, at 10 o’clock at night. In 1994 he pled guilty to an array of charges, including wire and computer fraud. He served a total of five years in jail.

Upon his release, Poulsen became a journalist. He wrote first for Security¬Focus, a website dedicated to information and cybersecurity. Oddly enough, one of SecurityFocus’s other contributors was Mark Rasch, who by that time had left the Justice Department and gone into the private sector.
Poulsen has become an enterprising-and quite excellent-reporter. He occupies an unusual position in journalism, possessing not only an enormous amount of technical expertise, but also contacts in both the reformed and unreformed hacker worlds. In 2000, Poulsen was working on a piece about security issues at AOL when he interviewed a hacker named Adrian Lamo.

As Poulsen later explained, “Lamo was nearly unique among hackers of that period, in that he had no evident fear of discussing his unlawful access, regardless of the inevitable legal consequences. He cracked everyone from Microsoft to Yahoo, and from MCI to Excite@Home. And he freely discussed how he did it, and sometimes helped the victim companies close their security holes afterward.” Over the years, Poulsen and Lamo became friendly, with Poulsen frequently using Lamo as a source.

In May 2010, Poulsen wrote a story for Wired.com about Lamo’s having been institutionalized for Asperger’s syndrome. The piece was read by Private Manning in Iraq and it struck a chord; he immediately reached out to Lamo and initiated a series of online chats and emails. It was during the course of these conversations that Manning confessed to Lamo that he had given a mountain of classified material-including the “Collateral Murder” video-to WikiLeaks.

Lamo was a hacker who operated on the fringes of the law, but he knew the difference between computer crime and offenses like Manning’s that could get people killed. He was troubled by what Manning had told him and consulted some people in cybersecurity. One of them was Chet Uber, the head of a rag-tag volunteer group, Project Vigilant, which attempts to (legally) compile evidence of cybercrime and forward it to the authorities. Uber asked Lamo to talk with Rasch, who is listed as Project Vigilant’s general counsel. (There is some dispute as to how serious Project Vigilant is; Rasch demurely describes the group as mostly “aspirational.”) Both Uber and Rasch urged Lamo to give his chat logs to the FBI. On May 25, he met with FBI agents at a Starbucks near his house in Carmichael, California.

The entire affair lasted barely a week: Manning reached out to Lamo on May 21 and was arrested within days. Lamo told Poulsen about his contact with Manning, and Poulsen, after Manning was taken into custody, convinced Lamo to give Wired.com a copy of the chat logs and to go on the record.

Much more: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/01/11/opinion/main7233405.shtml

See also: http://vrritti.com/2011/01/08/9-essential-questions-about-bradley-manning-and-wikileaks/

And: http://vrritti.com/2010/12/29/putting-the-record-straight-on-the-lamo-manning-chat-logs/

Picture Gallery: Adrian Lamo, Rop Gonggrijp, and Cryptome‘s John Young at H2K2, July 2002
http://www.mccullagh.org/theme/h2k2-july02.html

http://mashable.com/2011/01/11/wikileaks-to-u-s-politicians-media-stop-inciting-murder/

and:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-20028099-503543.html