“[A]n Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks…”  He was turned in by a man, Adrian Lamo, described as a former hacker, with whom he shared stories of his actions.

“Lamo has contributed funds to Wikileaks in the past, and says he agonized over the decision to expose Manning — he says he’s frequently contacted by hackers who want to talk about their adventures, and he’s never considered reporting anyone before. The supposed diplomatic cable leak, however, made him believe Manning’s actions were genuinely dangerous to U.S. national security.

‘I wouldn’t have done this if lives weren’t in danger,’ says Lamo, who discussed the details with Wired.com following Manning’s arrest. ‘He was in a war zone and basically trying to vacuum up as much classified information as he could, and just throwing it up into the air.’

Manning told Lamo that he enlisted in the Army in 2007 and held a Top Secret/SCI clearance, details confirmed by his friends and family members. He claimed to have been rummaging through classified military and government networks for more than a year and said that the networks contained ‘incredible things, awful things … that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC.’”

Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/leak/

Michael