All the encryption in the world wouldn't have kept Bradley Manning safe
The smallest actions can have massive repercussions. The US army's decision to enlist Bradley Manning as an intelligence analyst and deploy him to Iraq may, if he is found to have indeed been WikiLeaks' source, have led to the biggest series of military and diplomatic leaks in history.
But the reason Manning is now in military detention, awaiting court martial, perhaps ultimately lies in a smaller action still, an error thousands of email users make daily: choosing "cc" rather than "bcc".
In a plea for donations sent in 2009, that simple error led Julian Assange to inadvertently reveal the identities of WikiLeaks' first 58 supporters to each other. One, ex-hacker Adrian Lamo, decided to use this as an opportunity to test the whistleblowing site's honesty – and "leaked" the email list to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks passed Lamo's test, and published its own donor list in full, attracting coverage on tech and security sites across the internet.
