The U.S. Army detained one of its own Monday for allegedly leaking classified information to the anonymous website Wikileaks.org, according to the Washington Post.
“The Department of Defense takes the management of classified information very seriously because it affects our national security, the lives of our soldiers, and our operations abroad,” the U.S. military command in Iraq said in a statement.
The New Yorker’s Raffi Khatchadourian described Wikileaks’ covert operation, which aims for total transparency.
Key members are known only by initials —M, for instance— even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources (and that is designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public) will have serious adversaries.
Army Spec. Bradley Manning, the soldier detained, was turned in by Adrian Lamo, a 29-year-old hacker.
“At the moment he gave me the information, it was basically a suicide pact,” Lamo told BBC News. “I was worried for my family – that if I were obstructing justice that they could be caught up in any investigation.”
“I wanted to do this one by the book, by the numbers. I didn’t want any more FBI agents knocking at the door,” he said.
The site is only three-and-a-half years old, but it has already leaked a number of controversial documents and videos, including:
-Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantánamo Bay
-the “Climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England
-the contents of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo account
-the thirty-eight-minute video taken from the cockpit of an Apache military helicopter in Iraq in 2007 depicting American soldiers killing at least eighteen people, including two Reuters journalists
WATCH WIKILEAKS’ FOUNDER ON COLBERT
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