2010-12-27 FireDogLake and Glenn Greenwald: Adrian Lamo, Kevin Poulsen and Mark Rasch

Image The story of Bradley Manning's arrest has had one crucial detail missing for the last six months. The chat logs allegedly between Adrian Lamo and Bradley Manning have had 75% of their alleged content redacted by the journalists allowed access to them, and the details of the initial contact between Manning and Lamo have never been understood. While the NY Times is content to run a front page article detailing testimony from a mentally unstable ex-felon who is suddenly remembering details that directly contradict what he stated last fall, other journalists have dug much deeper.

Glenn Greenwald continues to call for an end to the chat logs suppression by Wired, as he also continues to pursue the relationships between Wired, the FBI, and Adrian Lamo (the sole provider of evidence against Bradley Manning). A few things we now know, courtesy of Greenwald and the sources he references, about Lamo, his friend Kevin Poulsen who published the chat logs story, and their accomplice Mark Rasch who put Lamo in touch with federal law authorities in order to inform on Manning:

  • Lamo and Poulsen are both convicted felons who were prosecuted by the FBI and have maintained contact with at least one former adversary.
  • Lamo was involuntarily hospitalized for severe psychiatric distress three weeks before his chats with Manning.
  • Poulsen was the initial recipient of the Lamo / Manning chat logs and the journalist who initially published the chat logs story.
  • Rasch is the former chief of the DOJ's Computer Crimes Unit in the 1990s.
  • Rasch is the General Counsel of "Project Vigilant," the vigilante group that claims to gather Internet communications and hand them over to the U.S. government.
  • Rasch is the person who put Poulsen in prison for several years.
  • Rasch is a regular contributor to Wired.
  • Rasch is a long-time associate and source for Poulsen.
  • Poulsen's first job when getting out of prison was with Security Focus, the same entity for which Rasch also regularly wrote.
  • Although it was Poulsen who almost always and exclusively wrote about Lamo, Rasch filled in when Poulsen was unavailable.
  • Rasch has been a long-time source for Poulsen going back to 1999 and 2001, including when Poulsen was writing about Lamo, and was also Poulsen's source repeatedly for articles he wrote at Wired.
  • Rasch has also been a regular source for Wired's Kim Zetter, who was Poulsen's co-author on the Manning articles (on November 29, an ABC News story on Manning featured Rasch as an "expert" analyzing the accusations without any disclosure of the key role he played in Manning's arrest).
  • While many convicted hackers had very rigid restrictions placed on them when leaving prison Poulsen not only quickly began writing online as a journalist about the hacker world, but did so at the very same publication that also published articles by his prosecutor, Mark Rasch.

Meanwhile Marcy Wheeler asks some very good questions regarding When Did Adrian Lamo Start Working With Federal Investigators? and FireDogLake presents a wonderful pieced together version of the chat logs as we know them so far.

As the DoJ tries to assemble a case of conspiracy against the first media organization to provide a truly anonymous, untraceable, completely automated, no-contact, document drop off, this is the evidence they will be relying on and these are the people bringing it. These are also the people and evidence keeping Bradley Manning in solitary confinement. Thank you to Glenn Greenwald and FireDogLake for diligence and integrity in journalism.

Kevin Poulsen has tweeted that he will respond to Greenwald's latest tomorrow. We will link if he does.

Photo Credit Adrian Lamo Facebook via Glenn Greenwald