Second day of Manning trial focuses on hacker who turned him in
The Colombian-American computer hacker who turned Army Private Bradley Manning in to authorities surprised courtroom spectators Tuesday when he took the stand during day two of the soldier’s trial.
Prosecutors called Adrian Lamo to testify Tuesday morning, an
unexpected maneuver that brought gasps from within the courtroom
and the nearby media center where only a handful of journalist
gathered to report on the second day of the long-awaited
court-martial of Private first class Manning. Not a single one of
the 70 seats within the Ft. Meade press center was vacant when
the trial kicked off on Monday, but barely two-dozen
journalists assembled a day later when a key witness in the case
was called to answer questions about the Army intelligence
analyst.
Less than a week before he was arrested by American authorities
in May 2010 and charged with the biggest leak of intelligence in
US history, Pfc. Bradley Manning admitted to Lamo in online chats
that he shared a trove of sensitive files with the whistleblower
website WikiLeaks. Lamo told law enforcement officials about
his conversations with Manning shortly after the two began
talking on May 21, in turn prompting the private’s arrest and
ultimately the trial that finally got underway in Fort Meade,
Maryland this week after more than three years of waiting.
The prosecution called Lamo as their third witness on Tuesday and
began their questioning by asking him to discuss his history as a
computer hacker, a tenure he said started in the 90s and
involved a number of high profile intrusions into the networks of
the New York Times, Microsoft and others. Now 32, Lamo was
practically a teenager when he became a fugitive of the law more
than a decade ago before pleading guilty to computer crimes and
ultimately being sentenced to serve a brief stint of house arrest
and probation. Manning later learned of Lamo’s run from the FBI
and reached out to him from Iraq during an apparent time of need.
Now the soldier stands to spend life in prison if convicted of aiding the
enemy — the most serious of the 20-plus counts the US government
charged him with after Lamo turned him in.
When prosecutors began to test their witness, they asked Lamo to
go back to 2010 and recall the computers and software he used
during the random few chats between himself and Manning. The Army
would later enlist forensics experts to scour Lamo’s laptops for
more information about his online encounters with the WikiLeaks
source, but the witness’s own mastery of computers had him
running circles around the prosecution as he spoke from the
stand.
At one point, Lamo — who admittedly suffers from Asperger’s
syndrome and severe depression — eluded attorneys by offering
all-too detailed descriptions of his computer habits, leaving
even Army prosecutors scratching their heads.
“Mr. Lamo, you seem to know more than the common person about
computers,” an Army attorney acknowledged early on during
Tuesday’s questioning. Lamo agreed that he has extensive
experience in the field, including proven knowledge with regards
to finding ways to bypass and improve the security of certain
systems. That know-how eventually led to Lamo’s criminal
conviction, and later defense attorney David
Coombs related it to his client’s own thirst for knowledge.
Pfc. Manning reached out to Lamo initially via emails before the
chats over AOL ever began, and the prosecution asked the hacker
to explain how he knew the correspondence came from the intel
analyst and not anyone else.
“Based on retrieving return address information common to all
email,” Lamo replied dryly.
When prosecutors pushed him to explain what that information
entailed exactly, Lamo said without missing a beat,
“Information indicating where it originated from which allows
the recipient to reply.”
“Is that an email address?” the prosecutors asked
sincerely.
“Yes, it is,” he replied, prompting snickers from the
press gallery.
Lamo went on to speak about the two personal computers he used to
speak with Manning, but wasn’t allowed the opportunity to discuss
the now infamous chat logs until the defense began
cross-examination later that morning.
Manning was the one who initiated those conversations with Lamo
and didn’t wait long at all before revealing his association with
WikiLeaks and his role in sending them files. Earlier this year,
the soldier said in a pretrial hearing that he
sent WikiLeaks US State Department cables, field reports from
the Iraq and Afghan wars and a tome of other sensitive
information.
“I’m an Army intelligence analyst, deployed to eastern
Baghdad, pending discharge for ‘adjustment disorder’ in lieu of
‘gender identity disorder,” Manning wrote in confidence to
Lamo only moments into their first IM chat.
The logs of the Manning/Lamo talks were released to the media by
the hacker himself only days after the soldier was apprehended
outside of Baghdad, but until now the self-taught computer
security expert spoke little publically about the few days the
two talked before he turned him in.
After the prosecution retired, Coombs began his turn at
questioning by having Lamo admit to cracking computer network at
a younger age, a decision on his part that prompted him to run
from the FBI and end up on wanted posters across California.
“I committed a string of offenses, yes,” Lamo said.
Coombs raged on, subtlety intensifying his questions at a pace
that lent to the counsel relentlessly wanting Lamo to enlighten
the court as to his opinions of Manning and his role with
WikiLeaks given what he encountered during the few Internet chats
between the two.
“You were concerned about the type of information?” Coombs
asked.
“Yes,” Lamo replied of the leaked Army data.
“You were also concerned for Pfc. Manning’s life?”
Again, a “Yes.”
The government predicted during opening statements one day
earlier this week that that they will prove that Manning went to
WikiLeaks knowing he would bring harm to America. In particular,
they said the soldier was aware that sharing sensitive files on
the Web would mean enemies of the US — specifically al-Qaeda —
could come across the information and use it to better their own
battlefield strategies. Manning has insisted otherwise, though,
and Coombs coaxed his one-time supposed-confidant into admitting
that he was left with that same impression of the soldier during
those few days of chats in the spring of 2010.
On the defense’s part, Coombs used his opening remarks on
Monday
to depict Manning as a young, naïve and well-intentioned
do-gooder who gave Wikileaks hundreds of thousands of files with
the desire of bringing about change across the globe. But during
his cross-examination of the prosecution’s witness on Tuesday,
Coombs all but made the man who turned his client in agree to
exactly the same.
“You believed he was ideologically motivated?” Coombs
asked him.
“That was my speculation.”
“You also saw him as idealistic?”
“Yes, I did.”
“He told you during your conversations that he wanted to
disclose this information for public good,” Coombs recalled
from the logs.
“That was his representation, yes,” Lamo said.
Coombs went on draw comparisons between the two, many of which
Lamo admitted were indeed rather accurate. Both men were geeky,
rather introverted computer wizzes, and both had roles in their
respective LGBT communities.
“He told you that he was always the type of person that tried
to investigate to find out the truth?” Coombs asked.
Lamo, in response, said that that was “Something that I could
appreciate.”
The prosecution objected to the questioning made by Coombs no
fewer than four times during what was less than an hour of
testimony, but the courtroom grew tense as the dialogue revealed
not just more in common between the two, but also Manning’s
fragile yet focused state during the online chats.
“He told you he was an intelligence analyst,” Coombs said,
and a person who “reached out to somebody like you who would
possibly understand.”
“Yes,” Lamo responded to both statements.
Coombs went on with his assessments and Lamo further confirmed a
number of allegations brought up during the cross-examination.
Before long the exchanges became emotional and Lamo was
noticeably distraught as he answered the attorney’s inquires
while sitting less than 15 feet from the man who may spend life
in jail because of him. The only other time they’ve been in the
same physical space occurred in late 2011 during a pretrial
motion hearing that came after Manning spent nearly 10 months in
essentially solitary confinement within a military jail cell in
Northern Virginia.
Coombs continued to cite excerpts from the logs, asking Lamo to
agree — which he always did — that those exchanges took place.
“He also told you that he had been questioning his gender for
years but started to come to terms with his gender during the
deployment. He told you he believed he had made a huge mess.”
“Yes,” Lamo responded on both accounts.
Manning confessed to be “emotionally crashing,” and
“said he was talking to you as somebody that needed moral and
emotional support,” Coombs recalled.
Again, Lamo responded affirmatively.
“At this point, you say he was trying not to end up killing
himself,” Coombs said solemnly.
“That is also correct.”
“He told you that he was feeling desperate and isolated . . .
Described himself as a broken soul . . . He said his life was
falling apart and he didn’t have anyone to talk to . . . He said
he was honestly scared . . .There was no one he could trust . . .
And he told you he needed a lot of help.”
“Yes, he did,” Lamo said after each one of Coombs’
purposed pauses.
Coombs asked Lamo to confirm a number of other items from the
chat logs, a rope-a-dope verbal assault that appeared to weaken
the witness while exemplifying the defense’s claims that Manning
only meant to help the world by going to WikiLeaks.
As the exchanges intensified, Coombs paraphrased from a now
widely-quoted quip from the chat logs in which Manning proposed a
hypothetical question that he hoped would elicit an answer from
Lamo as to how to handle the material he encountered while
deployed in Iraq and presented with access to information he
never dreamed of.
“If you had free reign over classified networks for long
periods of time… and you saw incredible things, awful things…
things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server
stored in a dark room in Washington DC… what would you do?”
the original chat quote reads.
“Do you recall him asking you that question?” Coombs
asked.
“Yes I do.”
“And he told you that he thought the information that he had
would have an impact on the entire world?”
“That is also correct.”
Coombs said his client believed the disclosure would reveal the
truth regarding casualties in Iraq, and how the First World — the
US — exploited the Third World solely for America’s own gain.
“He believed that everywhere there was a US post there was a
diplomatic scandal?” said Coombs.
“That he did.”
Manning thought it was “important the info got out,” and
that “it might actually change something.” It was no
longer a “good guys versus bad guys” scenario in America’s
wars and that he couldn’t participate in a program where innocent
lives were being undervalued. Lamo agreed again on all accounts.
Then Coombs painted a picture of a soldier who saw himself a
humanist and valued every live on Earth — even those being
slaughtered by his Army peers.
“He felt connected to everybody,” recalled Coombs.
“Yes.”
“He felt like we were all distant family.”
“Indeed.”
“And he cared.”
“Yes.”
“And he wanted to make sure that everybody was okay.”
“Yes.”
Later, Lamo admitted that Manning confided to him in the chats
that the release of documents attributed to him brought
“immense hope” and that, according to Coombs, “He was
hoping that people would change if they saw the information.”
Then, suddenly, Coombs stopped asking questions whose answers
were well documented in the chats. Before sending Lamo off the
stand, he asked the witness if Manning’s remarks suggested, like
the prosecutions attests, the soldier wanted to aid the enemy.
“At any time did he say he had no loyalty to America?”
Coombs asked.
“Not in those words, no.”
“At anytime did he say the American flag didn’t man anything
to him?”
“No.”
“At any time did he say he wanted to help the enemy?”
“Not in those words, no.”
“Thank you, Mr. Lamo,” Coombs concluded before the witness
was permanently excused from the stand.
“He broke Adrian,” one of the dozen-or-so spectators
inside of the courtroom told RT’s Andrew Blake as the session
went on break. Others said that several witnesses broke into
tears during the exchange between Lamo and the defense, and one
struggled to find the words most appropriate to describe the
moment when Lamo left the stand and walked by Manning, ignoring
the soldier’s stare and exiting the room for good, likely never
to be face-to-face with him again.
The government is expected to call more witnesses throughout the
week who have first-hand knowledge of the early days of the
Army’s criminal investigation into Manning after he was
apprehended. The trial is expected to run through August.
This article originally appeared on: RT
Source: http://rinf.com/alt-news/breaking-news/second-day-of-manning-trial-focuses-on-hacker-who-turned-him-in/39149/
