Editor’s note: This is a two-part article, in which Wired.com editor-in-chief Evan Hansen and senior editor Kevin Poulsen respond separately to criticisms of the site’s Wikileaks coverage.
The Case for Privacy
Six months ago, Wired.com senior editor Kevin Poulsen came to me with a whiff of a story. A source he’d known for years claimed he was talking to the FBI about an enlisted soldier in Iraq who had bragged to him in an internet chat of passing hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the secret-spilling site Wikileaks.
It’s probably nothing, Poulsen said. The source in question, an ex-hacker named Adrian Lamo, often sees himself as at the center of important events in need of public attention. But sometimes, Poulsen added, he’s right.
Acknowledging the long shot, Poulsen wanted to drive up to Sacramento, California, to meet Lamo in person and try to get a copy of the alleged chats. I agreed.
What followed was a days-long negotiation of two steps forward, one step back, familiar to investigative reporters whose social networks and reporting skills sometimes put them in touch with skittish sources holding the keys to serious news. The result was our groundbreaking report in June confirming the arrest of Pfc. Bradley Manning on suspicion of passing classified material to Wikileaks, a central thread in what is arguably one of the most important news stories of the year.
Successfully winning trust from people with little to gain and much to lose, while vigorously verifying the facts at hand and maintaining the highest ethical standards, is a balancing act that few reporters ever master completely.
In the five years I’ve worked with Poulsen, I’ve seen him successfully balance these unpredictable forces not once or twice, but literally dozens of times.
He has revealed the inner workings of criminal hacking operations, uncovered sex predators on MySpace and won numerous awards for his dogged efforts. When I think of the what the word “journalism” embodies, I can find no better example.
It’s odd to find myself in the position of writing a defense of someone who should be held up as a model. But it is unfortunately necessary, thanks to the shameless and unjustified personal attacks he’s faced ever since he and Wired.com senior reporter Kim Zetter broke the news of Manning’s arrest.
Armchair critics, apparently unhappy that Manning was arrested, have eagerly second-guessed our motives, dreamed up imaginary conflicts and pounded the table for more information: Why would Manning open himself up to a complete stranger and discuss alleged crimes that could send him to prison for decades? How is it possible that Wired.com just happened to have a connection with the one random individual Manning picked out to confide in, only to send him down for it?
Not one single fact has been brought to light suggesting Wired.com did anything wrong in pursuit of this story. In lieu of that, our critics — notably Glenn Greenwald of Salon, an outspoken Wikileaks defender — have resorted to shocking personal attacks, based almost entirely on conjecture and riddled with errors. (See Poulsen’s separate rebuttal below.)
Tellingly, Greenwald never misses a chance to mention Poulsen’s history as a hacker, events that transpired nearly two decades ago and have absolutely no bearing on the current case. This is nothing more than a despicable smear campaign based on the oldest misdirection in the book: Shoot the messenger.
The bottom line is that Wired.com did not have anything to do with Manning’s arrest. We discovered it and reported it: faithfully, factually and with nuanced appreciation of the ethical issues involved.
Ironically, those ethics are now being pilloried, presumably because they have proven inconvenient for critics intent on discrediting Lamo.
At stake are the chat logs.
We have already published substantial excerpts from the logs, but critics continue to challenge us to reveal all, ostensibly to fact-check some statements that Lamo has made in the press summarizing portions of the logs from memory (his computer hard drive was confiscated, and he no longer has has a copy).
Our position has been and remains that the logs include sensitive personal information with no bearing on Wikileaks, and it would serve no purpose to publish them at this time.
That doesn’t mean we’ll never publish them, but before taking an irrevocable action that could harm an individual’s privacy, we have to weigh that person’s privacy interest against news value and relevance.
This is a standard journalistic balancing test — not one that we invented for Manning. Every experienced reporter of serious purpose recognizes this, and the principal is also embodied in the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics:
Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance…. Only an overriding public need can justify intrusion into anyones privacy. Show good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.
Even Greenwald believes this sometimes. When The New York Times ran an entirely appropriate and well reported profile of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange — discussing his personality and his contentious leadership style — Greenwald railed against the newspaper, terming the reporters “Nixonian henchmen.”
Similarly, when Assange complained that journalists were violating his privacy by reporting the details of rape and molestation allegations against him in Sweden, Greenwald agreed, writing: “Simultaneously advocating government transparency and individual privacy isn’t hypocritical or inconsistent; it’s a key for basic liberty.”
With Manning, Greenwald adopts the polar opposite opinions. “Journalists should be about disclosing facts, not protecting anyone.” This dissonance in his views has only grown in the wake of reports that Manning might be offered a plea deal in exchange for testimony against Assange.
To be sure, there’s a legitimate argument to be made for publishing Manning’s chats. The key question (to us): At what point does everything Manning disclosed in confidence become fair game for reporting, no matter how unconnected to his leaking or the court-martial proceeding against him, and regardless of the harm he will suffer? That’s a debate we have had internally at Wired with every major development in the case.
It is not a question, however, that we’re inclined to put to popular referendum. And while we welcome the honest views of other journalists acting in good faith, we now doubt this describes Glenn Greenwald.
At his most reasonable, Greenwald impugns our motives, attacks the character of our staff and carefully selects his facts and sources to misrepresent the truth and generate outrage in his readership.
In his latest screed, “The Worsening Journalistic Disgrace at Wired,” he devotes 12 paragraphs to a misinformed argument centering on a Dec. 15 New York Times story about the possibility that the Justice Department might seek to charge Assange under federal conspiracy law.
The Times story quotes Lamo as saying that Manning described uploading his leaks to Assange via a dedicated file server, and that he communicated with Assange over encrypted chat. The story says those portions of the conversations aren’t included in the excerpts we published.
Based on that, Greenwald claims that Wired’s “concealment” of the chat logs “is actively blinding journalists and others who have been attempting to learn what Manning did and did not do.” (That’s one sentence. He goes on in that vein for quite a while.) But the Times story is incorrect, as we noted on Wired.com the day after it ran. The excerpts we published included passages referencing both the file server and the encrypted chat room.
Nonetheless, once the Times story — and our explanation — was over a week old, Greenwald sent Poulsen an e-mail inquiring about it, and giving him one day to respond to his questions. He sent that e-mail on Christmas Day.
When we didn’t meet the urgent Yuletide deadline he’d imposed on himself to publish a piece about a 10-day-old newspaper article, he wrote in his column that we “ignored the inquiries,” adding: “This is not the behavior of a journalist seeking to inform the public, but of someone eager, for whatever reasons, to hide the truth.”
Separately, the Times story repeated Lamo’s personal theory that Manning passed some information to WikiLeaks by physically handing off disks to friends at MIT. The paper does not claim that Lamo drew that conclusion from his chats with Manning. (Lamo says he got it from “a USG [U.S. government] source close to the case.”) We’ve heard and read that theory before, but have not reported it, for lack of evidence.
Though we didn’t report it ourselves, Greenwald argues that we have a duty to publicly refute the theory. In his world, our consideration, thus far, of Manning’s privacy leaves us with an obligation to chase down every story on Manning, correct any errors, and refute any reporting that we disagree with.
He is, again, wrong. Our obligation is to report the news accurately and fairly. We’re responsible only for what appears on Wired.com. And our record on WikiLeaks and Manning is unblemished.
–Evan Hansen, Editor-in-Chief
A Litany of Errors
On Monday, Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald unleashed a stunning attack on this publication, and me in particular, over our groundbreaking coverage of WikiLeaks and the ongoing prosecution of the man suspected of being the organization’s most important source. Greenwald’s piece is a breathtaking mix of sophistry, hypocrisy and journalistic laziness.
We took the high ground and ignored Greenwald and Salon the first time they pulled this nonsense. Now it’s time to set the record straight.
If you’re just tuning in, Wired.com was the first to report, last June, on the then-secret arrest of Pfc. Bradley Manning. I learned of the arrest from Adrian Lamo, a well-known former hacker on whom I reported extensively from 2000 to 2002. It was Lamo who turned Manning in to the Army and the FBI, after Manning — isolated and despondent — contacted him online and began confiding the most intimate details of his life, including, but by no means limited to, his relationship with WikiLeaks, and the vast databases he claimed to have provided them.
Co-writer Kim Zetter and I followed up the story four days later with a piece examining Manning’s motives. The Washington Post had just run a fine story about Manning’s state-of-mind: At the time of his discussions with Lamo, he’d been through a bad breakup and had other personal conflicts. But I felt — and still do feel — that it’s a mistake to automatically ascribe Manning’s actions to his feeling depressed. (For one thing, his breakup occurred after the leaking.) There’s an implicit political judgment in that conclusion: that leaking is an aberrant act, a symptom of a psychological disorder. Manning expressed clear and rational reasons for doing what he did, whether one agrees with those reasons or not.
So we went into the logs of the chats Manning held with Lamo — which Lamo had provided Wired and The Washington Post — and pieced together a picture of why Manning took his historic actions, based on his own words (“Suspected Wikileaks Source Described Crisis of Conscience Leading to Leaks). As a sidebar to the article, we published excerpts from those chat logs.
We’ve had several more scoops since then, reporting new information on Manning’s history in the Army, and revealing the internal conflict his alleged disclosures triggered within WikiLeaks.
But those first stories in June either excerpted, quoted or reported on everything of consequence Manning had to say about his leaking. We’ve led the coverage on this story, and we would gain nothing by letting another scoop simmer unreported on our hard drives.
The debate, if it can be described as that, centers on the remainder of Manning’s conversations with Lamo. Greenwald argues that Wired.com has a journalistic obligation to publish the entirety of Manning’s communications. As with other things that Greenwald writes, the truth is the opposite. (See the statement above by Wired’s editor-in-chief.)
Greenwald’s incomplete understanding of basic journalistic standards was first displayed in his earlier piece on this subject, last June, titled “The Strange and Consequential Case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks.” This is where he first claimed that Lamo and I have “long and strange history together.”
That “history” began in 2000, when, while reporting for the computer security news site SecurityFocus.com, I contacted Lamo to use him as an expert on security issues at AOL. I sought him out because he’d been quoted in a similar capacity in a Salon.com article the year before.
Later, Lamo began sharing with me the details of some of his hacking. Lamo was nearly unique among hackers of that period, in that he had no evident fear of discussing his unlawful access, regardless of the inevitable legal consequences. He cracked everyone from Microsoft to Yahoo, and from MCI to Excite@Home. And he freely discussed how he did it, and sometimes helped the victim companies close their security holes afterward.
This came at a time, prior to the passage of California’s SB1386, when companies had no legal obligation to reveal security breaches, and hackers, facing tough criminal sanctions, had a strong disincentive to reveal it themselves. Lamo’s transparency provided an invaluable window on the poor state of computer security.
Using little more than a web browser, he was able to gain sensitive information on critical infrastructure, and private data like Social Security numbers.He changed a news story on Yahoo — at the time the most-trafficked news source on the web — undetected. In the intrusion that finally resulted in his arrest, he cracked The New York Times intranet and added himself to the paper’s internal database of op-ed contributors.
Some people regarded him as a hacker hero — Kevin Spacey narrated a documentary about him. Others argued he was a villain. At his sentencing, Lamo’s prosecutors argued he was responsible for “a great deal of psychological injury” to his victims.
To Greenwald, all this makes Lamo “a low-level, inconsequential hacker.” This conclusion is critical to his thesis that Lamo and I have something more than a source-journalist relationship. Greenwald’s theory is that Lamo’s hacks were not newsworthy. But, this line of thought goes, in exchange for the chance to break the non-news of his intrusions, I reported them — getting Lamo attention among the readers of SecurityFocus.com.
What he fails to report is that those same breaches were also covered by the Associated Press, Reuters, Wired magazine (well before my tenure at Wired.com), cable news networks, every tech news outlet and several national newspapers, and that Lamo spoke freely to all of them.
So when he writes that I had “exclusive, inside information from Lamo,” he is wrong. And when he writes that Lamo had an “insatiable need for self-promotion and media attention, and for the past decade, it has been Poulsen who satisfies that need,” he’s ignoring the fact that my reporting for an obscure computer security news site constituted an almost inconceivably tiny portion of the coverage generated by Lamo’s hacks.
From that bit of sophistry, Greenwald descends into antics that shouldn’t pass muster at any serious news outlet. He bolsters his argument by quoting Jacob Appelbaum as an expert on Lamo. Appelbaum has “known Lamo for years,” he writes, and “Lamo’s ‘only concern’ has always been ‘getting publicity for Adrian.’”
Nowhere in the article does he disclose that Appelbaum — the only third-party source in the piece — is a key WikiLeaks activist: a man who’d shared hotel rooms with Julian Assange, and had already spoken publicly on behalf of the organization. Appelbaum’s key role in the organization has been a published fact since April.
After that glaring omission, Greenwald mischaracterizes my contacts with the companies Lamo hacked. In writing about Lamo’s New York Times hack, Greenwald claims: “When Lamo hacked into the NYT, it was Poulsen who notified the newspaper’s executives on Lamo’s behalf, and then wrote about it afterward.” In truth, I contacted a spokeswoman for the Times, notified her of the intrusion, gave her time to confirm it, and then quoted her in the article.
All of this — embellishment, failing to disclose his prime source’s true affiliation, selective reporting — would be enough to make Greenwald’s opinions on a matter of journalist ethics of little interest to Wired.com. In his new piece, he goes even further.
Nearly half of his article is devoted to a characteristically murky conspiracy theory involving a well-known cybercrime attorney and former Justice Department lawyer named Mark Rasch. Rasch is one of three people that Lamo sought for advice while looking to turn in Bradley Manning.
The blockbuster, stop-the-presses, “incontrovertibly true” disclosure with which Greenwald caps his piece? That Rasch once prosecuted me for hacking the phone company.
Based, apparently, on something he read on a website called GovSecInfo.com, Greenwald announces that “Rasch is also the person who prosecuted Kevin Poulsen back in the mid-1990s and put him in prison for more than three years.” (I served five, actually, and all but two months of it was in pretrial custody, held without bail.) He then attacks me for failing to report on this supposed link. “Just on journalistic grounds, this nondisclosure is extraordinary,” he claims.
“As Poulsen was writing about this Manning story all while working closely with Lamo as he served as FBI informant — and as Poulsen actively conceals the chat logs — wouldn’t you want to know that the person who played such a key role in Manning’s arrest was the same person who prosecuted Poulsen and regularly contributes to his magazine?”
The “regularly contributes to his magazine” part is apparently a reference to this single 2004 opinion piece in Wired magazine. As for the rest? Rasch, who worked for the Justice Department in Washington D.C., left government service in 1991. I had two prosecutors in my phone-hacking case: David Schindler in Los Angeles and Robert Crowe in San Jose, California.
Greenwald, a former law professor, could have learned this in a few seconds on Pacer, the federal court’s public records system. It would have set him back 16 cents, and his article would have been half as long.
There’s more to the conspiracy theory. Greenwald is troubled that, as he put it in his first article, “Despite being convicted of serious hacking felonies, Poulsen was allowed by the U.S. government to become a journalist covering the hacking world for Security Focus News.” He doesn’t cite what authority he believes the government should wield to strip convicted hackers of their First Amendment rights, but I suspect he wouldn’t want it used against Julian “Mendax” Assange, who pleaded guilty to 24 charges of hacking a year after my 1991 arrest.
I could go on — the daily, off-the-record conversations Greenwald had with Assange while penning at least one of his anti-Wired screeds; or the fact that he failed to disclose in the body of his first article that he was personally trying to secure a new attorney for Manning while writing the piece.
But by now it should be clear why we don’t seek Greenwald’s advice on a serious matter of journalistic ethics.
In any event, if you can’t make an argument without resorting to misstatements, attacking the motives of an experienced and dedicated team of reporters, name-calling, bizarre conspiracy theories and ad hominem attacks, then perhaps you don’t have an argument.
–Kevin Poulsen, Senior Editor
