Manning Aided By Civilian

It’s beginning to look more and more like Wikileaks is a bit more involved than merely being the data repository. 

A military official, who was not identified, acknowledged to the Times on Friday that Army investigators were looking into whether Manning physically handed compact discs containing classified information to someone in the U.S. Manning, an intelligence analyst who was deployed over the past year in Iraq with the 2nd Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division at a remote base east of Baghdad, visited friends in Boston during a home leave in January, the Times reported.

Adrian Lamo, the Sacramento, Calif.-based computer hacker who turned in Bradley to military authorities in May, claimed in a telephone interview Saturday he had firsthand knowledge that someone helped Manning set up encryption software to send classified information to WikiLeaks.

Lamo, who’s cooperating with investigators, wouldn’t name the person but said the man was among a group of people in the Boston area who work with WikiLeaks. He said the man told him “he actually helped Private Manning set up the encryption software he used.”

Lamo said the software enabled Manning to send classified data in small bits so that it would seem innocuous.