(PFC Bradley Manning in better days.)

I was at the mall yesterday afternoon. There was a promotion party for a guy who was advanced to a Vice Presidency slot at the office down south, near Refuge Farm, and I am trying to get my arms around the logistics of working down there.
 
It was a driving around day; the Bluesmobile is with my son, and I am back in the Hubris fancy car, which makes me nervous, what with all the other idiots on the salt-crusted roads.
 
I parked the car as far away from other vehicles as I could, and decided to kill the half-hour before the affair was scheduled to start at one of the sports bar-restaurants by wandering the vast concourse of the glittering retail destination. The Fair Oaks Mall opened in the recession year of 1980, and was the biggest in the Washington area at the time. It has had a good run since.
 
The complex represents the zenith of American mall retailing.
 
Who knows where we will go from here. Malls make me as nervous as driving the Hubrismobile. I wandered through a couple clothing outlets, Aerospatiale and American Eagle, noting the current fashions are all distressed and pre-frayed, something that in the days when my generation were the punks was something you had to do yourself.
 
I wound up in the Apple Store, which is post-retail. There is no check-out station, per se, and the sales associates wander around with wireless devices with onboard printers to register the sales at point of presence.
 
I did not want to buy anything but an external microphone for my MacBook, so I can go into the Podcasting game, but I also wanted to play with the cool but unfortunately-named iPad.
 
Along the way, I saw the new Mac Air laptop, a conventional computer that approaches the size and weight of the tablet. A girl with punked-out screaming red hair was at the long display table. She kindly walked a few of us through the capabilities of the iPad, and the demonstration filled me with wonder.
 
The touch-pad is frustrating, but of course there are work-arounds; she recommended the Kensington blue-tooth external keyboard equipped slip-cover. The model with the WiFi and 3G AT&T connection might enable me to shut down the satellite broadband at the farm and reap the savings.
 
If the network has been extended that far, that is. AT&T is notorious for spotty coverage and dropped calls.
 
My question then became whether I could find someone with an iPhone to test connectivity before I pulled any plugs. Technology, I mused, so complicated. I thanked the lady and wandered back in the direction of the restaurant, where I am closer to being in an environment I understand.
 
That is exactly where punk PFC Bradley Manning is not. As I passed the kiosks loaded with phone accessories and beauty products, I was thinking about the collision of technology, punks and old farts that had lead to the release of a quarter million classified cables.
 
The whole WikiLeaks affair had slipped off the radar as the holidays steam-rolled over us. The Government is still maneuvering to nail Australian publisher, journalist, software developer, Internet activist and cyber punk Julian Assange. The latest I head was that he was camped out in a 600-acre estate near London with a cardboard sign at the end of the driveway that reads: “Free Bradley Manning.”

(Sign at the entry to the Assange estate near London. Photo by Andrew Testa for the New York Times.)
 
The sign is crudely drawn, sort of punk, which is entirely appropriate. The press is reporting that the subject of the plea, former Specialist and current PFC Bradley Manning, has been traveling. The New York Times claims that the young fellow was departed Kuwait, after being arrested in Iraq, and now is staying in the Brig and Marine Base Quantico, conveniently located off I-95 just south of where I am pecking at the integrated keyboard.
 
It is about time to recount the triangulation of three punks that has brought is to this glorious juncture where ignorance, expediency, cupidity and stupidity has at a stroke rendered all the money spent on the technology of advanced cryptology meaningless.
 
Former Specialist Manning, assigned to a support battalion of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team of the famed 10th Mountain Division, was bored, and surfing the classified web protected by the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet). He apparently became alarmed at the secrets held by his government and decided to do something about it.
 
What he did is well known- he downloaded hundreds of thousands of classified cables from the State Department, two graphic videos of “collateral damage” from Iraq and Afghanistan, and God knows- or Julian- what else.
 
By virtue of his clearance- Top Secret with additional access to Special Compartmented Information (TS/SCI), he also was free to wander around the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, or JWICS.
That highly protected network has become the de facto command and control network with a presence everywhere from the battlefield to the White House.

(Computer note from INTERPOL seeking the whereabouts of cyberpunk Assange.)
 
Julian has darkly distributed a special trove of really dark secrets in a 1.4 gigabyte file that has been downloaded tens of thousands of times, and is consequently now resident on computers all over the world. It is termed his “Cyber Thermonuclear response” to attack on his person or that of his organization.
 
It is completely useless at the moment, since the files are protected by some really good encryption algorithms. I am sure the folks at Ft. Meade are on the case, but even if they crack the password, so what? They will just find out what they already know. Maybe they can get a jump-start on the damage assessment.
 
In the event that Julian or WikiLeaks is threatened, he swears he will release the key to unlock the documents.
 
It is expected to contain all the full, un-redacted documents collected by former Specialist Manning, and possibly everything that Julian has managed to get his hands on from all sources.
 
Maybe even a trove of stuff from JWICS.
 
The story is worth recounting over the next few days, since it is literally just a handful of punks who stole the secrets. The conspiracy has everything: Sex, drugs and Rock n’ Roll in full-tilt boogie.
 
We will have to get to that tomorrow, though, since I have to keep the day-job to provide the cash to buy more technology. Bradley Manning can wait. Julian is comfortable on his estate. And that punk Adrian Lamo, noted Gay and Cyber Activist, hacker, self-publicist and possible patriot, is completely comfortable in his reptilian skin.
 

(Cyberpunk Adrian Lamo with his arrest warrant, 2006.)
 
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
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