18 January 2011

Cracking Bradley Manning

(Troops of the 10th Mountain Division in Iraq. Official US Army photo.)

So, We are getting a taste of winter here in DC this morning. Chill rain fell and froze on the lawns and sidewalks and side-streets.

Everything is closed or on two-hour delay. We don't do winter well here in Virginia, so I dread the idea of an improvised trip Up North.

The news de jour yesterday, the news of the day was that he was found on the floor of the bathroom during lunch, so we are going to have to do something with him to get more care. I made a series of calls yesterday, and am now waiting on a call back from the industrial health warehouse, pending the opening of a bed in the nicer place at the Bluffs in Harbor Springs.

Between that, and the continuing disintegration of the unipolar world, it is easy to lose track of something that might provide the Unifying Field Theory for the rise of the next new order.

A pal asked me why Julian Assange seemed to provoke me in such an excruciating manner. I think the answer is fairly simple. I have managed to live long enough to now realize how wrong some of my old certainties were, and that in the larger parabola of time, life itself is both more and less precious than I could have imagined.

The prim certainty of Mr. Assange rubs me the wrong way. But he would be nothing were it not for the willingness of others to provide him information that is not his.

The leak that put Julian on the map appears to have come from the energetic activities of former Specialist Bradley Manning, who found himself with time on his hands while assigned to the 2nd Regimental Combat Team of the Tenth Mountain Division at COS Hammer, Iraq.


(Shoulder patch of the 19th Mountain Division.)

The Tenth is a legendary unit in the Army, imbued with filled esprit de corps. It is one of the most deployed units in the US Army, which is to say one of the most deployed military formations of recent history. Now based at Fort Drum in western New York State, when they are home, their heritage goes back to the mountains and the Ski Patrol when they were activated on July 15, 1943 at Camp Hale, Colorado.

Then they were known as the 10th Light Division (Alpine), reformed as a Division in November of 1944. The Tenth fought across the mountains of northern Italy, driving north in heavy combat to put pressure on Hitler’s southern flank.

After the German surrender in Italy, May 2, 1945, the division went on security duty, receiving the surrender of various German units and screening the areas of occupation, and then was deactivated. Vets of the Tenth went on to form the modern American Ski Industry, developing resorts all over north America. Maybe Bradley Manning was attracted to the elite status of the unit as he got his orders out of training school at Fort Huachuca, or maybe it is like everything else in the Military: Mountain-trained units went to the flat hot desert of Iraq because that is where the fight was.

At Contingency Operating Station Hammer, manning became a mess. His sexual orientation may- or may not- have been the reason he got into a fight with another soldier that got him busted to PFC. He was sent to the Chaplain for counseling and the bolt removed from his automatic rifle out of concern for his mental safety.

What they did not do was take away the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet-) the basic closed and classified internet used as the backbone for military and diplomatic operations around the world.

The mantra of the Info-centric theory of warfare is the seamless sharing of information. The lessons-learned of military operations from the invasion of Grenada forward are legendary. The Army Captain who directed combat operations with his ATT phone card, routed through Atlantic Command HQ in Norfolk because his tactical radios could not communicate with the Navy, for example. Or the disaster at DESERT ONE, where NSA was monitoring the sand storm that went unreported to the aviators on the ground in Iran.

That sort of thing.

In the new wired world, it was the fervent belief that the sharing of information would enable better decisionmaking, from national to the tactical levels of warfare.

That is where an increasingly isolated PFC Manning lived and worked, and he was becoming increasingly disillusioned with his Division and the conduct of the war it was fighting. He was cracking up.

Coming from the tradition of Crescent, OK, he knew the legacy of the woman who is both reviled as an outsider and haled as a hero- whistle-blower Karen Silkwood.

Manning then blew the whistle on the US Army, and went the next step and blew the whistle on himself in on-line chats with a

He blew the whistle on himself. He began a series of online chats with the self-promoting online hacktivist, Adrian Lamo.

(Noted gray-hat hacker Adrian Lamo. Photo Wired Magazine.)

Adrian must have known he was onto a good thing as PFC Manning boasted of what he had done. "It was one of the hardest decisions I've made", said Lamo about dropping the dime on Manning in an interview with Jason Mick of the Daily Tech, “but lives were at stake.”

Here are Manning’s written words, as published later by Lamo’s publicist cum journalist, Kevin Poulson in Wired Magazine:

“I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga,’ erase the music then write a compressed split file. “…listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history.”

It is truly amazing that Manning was allowed a computer with a working CD burner. Most places control information to be uploaded or downloaded from classified networks at a central point, controlled by Special Securiy personnel. Manning called the alignment of bad security practice “A perfect storm.”

Of course, we seem to be getting used to that sort of thing, and the cascade of perfect disasters is becoming common.

But that is how this all began, and it is not over yet.

In the meantime, I have a storm outside to deal with right here, not a bit virtual at all. We will take a walk with Adrian Lamo tomorrow and get his take on things. Bradley isn’t going anywhere.

Like Julian Assange says, the key to getting him and Wikileaks is entirely dependent on whether the authorities can crack Bradley Manning.


(Bradley Manning in tie. Photo borrowed from thestreetlampdoesntcast.@blogspot.com)

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
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