

Glenn Greenwald dissects Adrian Lamo's role in the arrest of whistleblower - mcantelon
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2010/06/18/wikileaks

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tptacek
This is over-the-top political hyperbole that has more to do with keeping
point scores than actually analyzing events. My politics are closer to
Greenwalds than, say, Glenn Reynolds, but I found this writeup nauseating.

What exactly is Greenwald's point?

That Adrian Lamo isn't a superhero? Ok! Stipulated!

That Kevin Poulsen might have had reasons other than national security and
journalistic ethics to run the stories he ran in the fashion he ran them in?
Ok! Stipulated!

Lamo bad. Poulsen bad. Ok. But it does _not_ therefore follow that Manning is
good. Or that Wikileaks is acting ethically and performing a vital service.

Greenwald has no new facts to add to our understanding, only opinions about
whether it's plausible that Manning could have had access to truly damaging
information. Greenwald's opinions about how the DoD manages classified
information aren't relevant, because Greenwald has never seriously reported
the IA practices in the DoD.

Greenwald also chooses to highlight the notion that Manning was leaking
information "to the public", instead of "making bank by selling it to China"
(wait, I thought it was implausible that he had valuable information?), and
that he may be a whistleblower "in the purest sense". But Manning broke an
extremely serious set of laws and betrayed his explicit duty to protect that
information. If he's right (spoiler alert: he's not), we'll soon know when
Wikileaks orchestrates its next media tour around the Manning documents.

All Greenwald is doing here is trying to assign people to roles of "good guy"
and "bad guy". He's no more trustworthy than Wired is. And this story isn't
about good guys and bad guys.

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MichaelSalib
_What exactly is Greenwald's point?_

I took away three main points:

(1) That we've heard only one side of the story so far, and that side has come
from a man who seems obsessed with getting news coverage.

(2) Lamo has said contradictory things to different sources; that suggests
that Lamo is lying.

(3) Lamo admits to lying to Manning in order to convince him to share this
information with him. Specifically, he told Manning that he was a journalist
and that their conversation would be confidential because of journalism shield
laws. He also told Manning that he was ordained minister and their
conversation would be held confidential because it was considered a
confession. If you have to lie to people and abuse social trusts in order to
get them to confess, then you have no scruples whatsoever. I can't see why we
should trust anything that Lamo says at face value. I mean, do we have
independent confirmation about the 15,000 cables? Or is that just another of
Lamo's (many, many) lies?

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tptacek
I had a hard time articulating what bothered me about Greenwald's article
originally, but thanks to this comment I've put my finger on it.

This article is about fake sideline controversies. It's premise is that we
care about whether Lamo was serving the country or his own interests, and that
we've been poorly served by the media in making that determination.

But that's not a controversy at all. In reality nobody cares why Lamo turned
the guy in. What we care about is that (a) a career military IA agent fed
confidential information to Wikileaks, an organization that --- _by design_
\--- nobody knows anything meaningful about, and that (b) he got caught.

These aren't even value judgements. They're just the atoms of newsworthiness
in the story. People with _actual access_ to _real secrets_ will feed things
to random people on the Internet, and it is possible for them to get caught
when that happens.

Lamo and Poulsen's motivations are a sideshow designed to get us all hyped up
about the good-guy-bad-guy narrative, so we can conclude the story with a warm
fuzzy "wikileaks good, big governments bad" feeling. Big governments may
indeed be bad, but we have to use our brains, our judgement, and our own sense
of ethics to make those determinations. Editorial sleight of hand can't do it
for us.

~~~
niels_olson
just a minor point, as a military officer: no 22 year-old Private is a career
IA agent. 22 year-olds generally aren't a career anything, yet. And I say that
having been a 22 year-old. This is basically a kid who had certain scores on
some of the military entrance exams during boot camp and therefore got
extraordinary access. Why do these kids get such access? Mainly because 1) the
American taxpayer is to cheap to hire more qualified help and 2) the military
still uses some wildly outdated thinking about information security.

~~~
tptacek
Thanks. You're right. I overstated. I'd also like to add: I think this kid is
lucky he got caught now. However much he managed to leak already, he could
have made things even worse for himself.

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wrs
Oh look, Wikileaks leaks.

<http://cryptome.org/0001/wikileaks-costs.htm>

