Stealing tremendous amounts of information from American embassies is easy when you disguise it as Lady Gaga

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Stealing tremendous amounts of information from American embassies is easy when you disguise it as Lady Gaga

So the US government has identified the source of the hundreds of thousands of leaked embassy cables as Bradley Manning, a 22 year old soldier who stole the information from military networks while working at a base near Baghdad. But how did he do it? According to him, it was pretty easy and it just involved smuggling files out on a CD labeled “Lady Gaga”… presumably because he knew no one would try to listen to it.

Manning’s been held in solitary confinement since April, after his unauthorised downloads were discovered. According to the soldier, it was all too easy to gain access to the network and download the files:

“I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like ‘Lady Gaga’ … erase the music … then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing … [I] listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history.” Amounting to 1.6GB of data, Manning claims that “information should be free. It belongs in the public domain,” however he made the mistake of IMing another hacker, Adrian Lamo, and boasting of his deeds. Lamo then dobbed him in, while Manning uploaded all of the files to WikiLeaks.

In the wake of the leak, Manning may end up having the largest book thrown at him in history, giving him plenty of time to work on his po-po-po-po-poker face. Sorry, that was awful, but I couldn’t resist.

Via