Fed Turns Up Heat in State Department Cable Case

The hacker who turned in Army Specialist Bradley Manning has had his hard drive taken by the Fed:

Lamo said in an interview Saturday night that he had voluntarily turned over his computer records, including contents of one of his hard drives, to the Pentagon earlier in the day. He said criminal investigators from the Defense Department were scheduled to interview him again on Sunday near his home in California.

Lamo said he first learned that Manning might face espionage charges, a crime that could carry the death penalty, when the word “espionage” appeared on a formal release form that he was asked to sign by the Pentagon criminal investigators who took custody of his electronic records. “It’s one of the statutes that was written down on a piece of paper that I signed to authorize the search,” Lamo said. Calls to the Pentagon press office were not immediately returned Saturday night.

Lamo said he understood that the Defense Department and the State Department were alarmed by the damage that might be done to national security if Wikileaks, which is based nominally on a server in Sweden and bills itself as a whistleblowers’ website, posts all of the information that it had received from Manning in recent weeks. Manning, who had been based in Iraq, is reported to be under arrest in neighboring Kuwait.

Logs of an internet chat that began in May between Lamo and Manning, first made public by Wired magazine, show that Manning bragged of having provided Wikileaks with an explosive video of a American helicopter attack in Baghdad in 2007 in which a dozen people were killed, including two employees of the news agency Reuters; the video appeared on Wikileaks in April. Manning also boasts in the logs of having downloaded 260,000 State Department cables and turned them over to Wikileaks. Among them: classified material prepared by department officials in the Middle East regarding the workings of Arab governments and their leaders, according to an American diplomat.

I am not opposed to the Fed trying to limit the leaks of self important fools who risk lives and national security, but wouldn't it be nice to see the sense of urgency that the government is now showing over these cables in regards to all matters under its jurisdiction.