is bradass87 a hero?

The Guardian has the fascinating backstory of the Afghan war logs. The insider fingered for the leaks is Bradley Manning, whose online name was Bradass87. Manning contacted a well-known Californian computer hacker, Adrian Lamo, and immediately told him about his job and his access to massive amounts of confidential information:

Bradass87 suggested that "someone I know intimately" had been downloading and compressing and encrypting all this data and uploading it to someone he identified as Julian Assange. At times, he claimed he himself had leaked the material, suggesting that he had taken in blank CDs, labelled as Lady Gaga's music, slotted them into his high-security laptop and lip-synched to nonexistent music to cover his downloading: "i want people to see the truth," he said.

(Should have known Lady Gaga would play a role in this somewhere.)

Unfortunately for Manning, Lamo contacted the security services, who immediately arrested him and locked him up. For Daniel Ellsberg, and for many others, Manning is a "new hero". For me, not so much. I suppose one of the qualifications for hero-status, in my mind, is that the person shouldn't be overly concerned with their own heroism. My impression is that the man who styled himself "bradass" longed a bit too much for the limelight. This is how Manning opened the conversation with Lamo - a complete stranger, remember:

"hi... how are you?… im an army intelligence analyst, deployed to eastern bagdad … if you had unprecedented access to classified networks, 14 hours a day, 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?"

This is how he continued:

He said this had allowed him to see "incredible things, awful things … that belong in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC … almost criminal political backdealings … the non-PR version of world events and crises."

The breathless tone pretty much screams LOOK AT ME, I'M A HERO WAITING TO HAPPEN.

Well he is, now, by virtue of his massive data-dump which reveals, when all is said and done, two things about this war:

- It's really shitty for Afghans.

- It's chaotic.

Not that these don't bear repeating, but they're hardly revelations in the manner of Ellsberg's leak of the Pentagon papers, which really did tell us things we didn't know - things we needed to know - about the decision-making process behind the Vietnam war.

I can't say if this has harmed the security of our troops. But I don't think it's advanced the cause of peace. This information gives us a measure of insight into what it's like on the ground of a massive war - but how much did we need that, and what cost was it worth paying to obtain? As far as I can see, two things have been satisfied by this leak: bradass87's desire for notoriety, and our need for voyeurism.

Comments

[Alan]

An alternate possibility is that he started off as an idealist (Information wants to be free and all that) and then got addicted to the rush of his espionage pet-project. Then a bit like the car thieves you mentioned this time last week, couldn't resist getting a bigger high by telling people about it.

Either way, he doesn't look very heroic at the end of this. I'm just glad it didn't turn out to be a leak in the Wikileaks processs that got him fingered. The Americans are right that undermining the confidentiality of it's sources would deal a heavy blow to Wikileaks.

[ejoch]

I agree about this leak- and the points you make about Manning apply to Assange too. Vastly overinflated sense of their own importance. And as far as 'revelations' go- civilians sometimes get killed by mistake, the military don't broadcast everything they do- who on earth didn't know that already??
(also from the quotes you have there Manning is clearly too stupid to be working in Intelligence)

I can't agree about the Pentagon Papers. Perhaps the public did need to know -although most of them at the time apparently ignored the whole thing - but it wasn't Ellsberg's decision to make. And the recent documentary about him seemed to me to make pretty clear that he's the same sort of personality as the current leakers. ("look at me! aren't I noble!")

[t1]

The thing that amazes me is that so many people were able to read and digest 90,000 pages in only a matter of hours and form an opinion about the value of the documents.

(While 10,000 of the 90,000 pages were made available to select newspapers a while ago, that leaves 80,000 pages...)

[Scott]

From what little I've read, Manning is something of a tragic hero - hubristic, caught up in something way bigger than he is, trying vainly to understand it, and trying vainly to do what he thinks is right.

As for the documents, it's a sign of how tame they are that the story has so quickly become about the leak itself rather than what is leaked.

[L.]

Mostly agree with you and your commenters (good point, Scott) but I also think it's possible for people to do the right thing out of the wrong motivation. If Ellsberg, for instance, was the same sort of hubristic vain type, the upshot of his release of the documents was still important to the public and American society as a whole.

[gucci handbag]

That's great, I never thought about Nostradamus in the OR (Insights from Eugene Litvak at IHI) like that before.