Non-State and Transnational Threats to the US
Assange/Wikileaks is a good example of a 4th (5th??) Gen Warfare transnational and non-state enemy of the US. They exploit their non-state status and conflicting national laws and priorities of law enforcement among the target nations (US/UK), host nations (Sweden?) and the nations in the middle who have an interest in the method (Internet) and the resulting political vulnerability this creates for the US.
Like any other transnational and non-state threat, Wikileaks should be targetable by the US and the UK. I would suggest that the only area of discussion should be how and to what extent.
I laugh when CNN reports that Wikileaks site has been the subject of a DDS attack today. Maybe they are currently being targeted........
Manning says it was easy...
According to an article in The Guardian Bradley Manning explained how he did it:
Quote:
It was childishly easy, according to the published chatlog of a conversation Manning had with a fellow-hacker. "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." He said that he "had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months".
If it was this easy one wonders how much other stuff was lifted by other people and passed on to other agencies? At least now the US knows that everyone knows.