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In the wake of 9-11, the multifaceted American intelligence community recognized that it was much too compartmentalized. Prior to those attacks, the CIA, FBI, NSA and other alphabet agencies jealously guarded their own pieces of the intelligence puzzle. It was realized – far too late to save the World Trade Center – that if those agencies had shared information, we might have understood what Al Qaeda was planning and stopped it. And so, the sharing of intelligence between agencies and the military became all the rage after 9-11. That new paradigm created what Pfc. Bradley Manning described as the “perfect storm.”
Manning had clearance to two key high-security networks: SIPRANET, which manages information classified as “secret,” and JWICS, which deals in “top secret” communications. How could a Pfc have access to two such networks? Because, in the post-9-11 world, even lowly privates were important cogs in the machinery of intelligence, ensuring that important information would continue to flow in the right direction. While both SIPRANET and JWICS were configured to detect and report any unusual pattern when it came to document downloads, neither anticipated massive, unauthorized downloading of e-mail files. That’s how Manning got away with it. He copied the Microsoft e-mail files (designated as *.pst files) and sent them along to Julian Assange and company. Once that was done, Manning erased the server logs that would have exposed his activities.
But for the actions of a twenty-nine year old California hacker by the name of Adrian Lamo, Manning’s traitorous actions would have taken a lot longer to discover. Lamo struck up a friendship with the private over the Internet and, once he realized what Manning was up to, Lamo reporter the Pfc to the authorities. “I am certain that more information would have come out had I not acted. Bradley would have continued compromising computer files,” Lamo said.
Adrian Lamo’s decisive actions to expose Manning stand in stark contrast to the Obama administration’s pathetic response. While a young hacker living on the west coast recognized that Manning and Wikileaks represented a clear and present danger to the security of the United States, the Obama administration whistled in the wind, wishing the crisis away by pretending it didn’t matter. Now that the Wikileaks scandal has hit particularly close to their political home, the president and his staff seem to be slowly awakening to the danger that Julian Assange and his cohorts represent. This may be a case of too little, far too late. While the Obama administration is finally, tepidly attempting to plug the hole in America’s security dike, the tidal wave of sensitive information rushing through the gaps that Manning and his cohorts have exploited might just well be too powerful to stop.
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