Forensic Expert: Manning's Computer Had 10K Cables, Downloading Scripts
A government digital forensic expert linked accused Army leaker Bradley Manning to documents published by WikiLeaks with damning evidence Sunday, testifying that he found thousands of U.S. State Department cables on one of Manning’s work computers, ranging from unclassified to SECRET cables, among other incriminating documents.
Special agent David Shaver, who works for the Army’s Computer Crime Investigative Unit, said that on one of two laptops that Manning used he found a folder called “blue,” in which he found a zip file containing 10,000 diplomatic cables in HTML format, and an Excel spreadsheet with three tabs.
The first tab listed scripts for Wget, a program used to crawl a network and download large numbers of files, that would allow someone to go directly to the Net Centric Diplomacy database where the State Department documents were located and download them easily; the second tab listed message record identification numbers of State Department cables from March and April 2010; the third tab listed message record numbers for cables from May 2010. The spreadsheet included information about which U.S. embassy originated the cable. There were indications on Manning’s computer that he had begun using the Wget tool in March 2010.
