The most baffling thing about the Wikileaks Cablegate kerfuffle is the massive foot-shooting overreaction across the entire American political spectrum. Here in the rest of the world (okay, in Canada), we’ve already moved on, because (to date) the cables are more shrug-inducing than explosive—but US senators are still in the throes of a bizarre frenzy of rabid chest-beating and tooth-gnashing.

Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, has called for Julian Assange’s prosecution, despite the general consensus that he hasn’t actually committed any American crime. Mitch McConnell, a Republican, has a slightly clearer-eyed view; he wants the law changed so that Assange can be prosecuted as a terrorist. Joe Lieberman wants a criminal investigation of not just Assange but also the New York Times.

What exactly do they hope to accomplish? Do they think that if they do somehow manage to convict Assange—who, remember, was only the publisher, not the leaker—they will have eliminated the threat of Internet information dissemination forever? Don’t they realize that with every boneheaded speech and op-ed, they ratchet up the free publicity and do Wikileaks a huge favor, when a dignified silence plus a few veiled threats would have been far more effective? Can they really be so stupid?

Well, yes. The US government is like Wall Street: behind their veneer of all-powerful control, most of the people who run things are not particularly bright. I just read Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, which depicts the financial collapse of 2008 as a catastrophe caused not because Wall Street was corrupt—which would have been almost okay—but because it was lethally stupid.  His next book should be about Washington.

The American diplomatic corps actually comes across as smart and competent in the Wikileaked cables. Unfortunately, the politicians they report to seem anything but. The scariest truth that Wikileaks has confirmed is that most of the world’s decisionmakers, like most Wall Street ‘wizards’, are petty, bureaucratic, dogmatic, myopic, and hostile to any innovation, largely because they’re not very intelligent. Not that smarts are everything, but it’s hard to tackle complex problems when you don’t fully understand them. It’s easy to forget this in the tech world, which is (relatively speaking) a results-oriented meritocracy … until you step into most governments or megacorporations, and find that suddenly the ambient IQ has dropped 20 points.

The tech sector is the only thing America has going for it these days. (Unless you count crumbling infrastructure, runaway debt, paralyzed government, or a trillion-dollar military bogged down in pointless faraway non-wars.) Unfortunately, the American government seems too dumb to realize this: so they maintain stupid visa laws, while ignoring smart alternatives; keep playing fast and loose, at best, with net neutrality; and, oh yes, plan to wiretap (and—thanks to Wikileaks—censor) the entire Internet, at great cost, apparently in the hope that bad guys will never discover the magic of public-key encryption.

Wanted by the law across multiple countries, threatened with military action by US hawks, shut out by internet vendors from Amazon to PayPal, Wikileaks leader Julian Assange may still be named TIME Magazine's Person of the Year for 2010. He's currently leading in the magazine's online poll, ahead of the Prime Minister of Turkey, Recep Erdogan, in influence score if not in votes.

Erdogan is hardly uncontroversial, either, having challenged Israel vehemently and collaborating with Turkish nationalists TIME says still deny the history of the Armenian genocide. The Person of the Year award this year is basically a media statement for or against the legitimacy of Wikileaks and what it represents. The third candidate on the list might represent the perfect abdication of responsibility for answering this or any serious questions: it's Lady Gaga.

What Wikileaks Represents

Depending on your perspective, Assange and Wikileaks probably represent one of two things. As GigaOm's Mathew Ingram wrote this weekend, "Some argue that there is nothing journalistic about the organization whatsoever, and that it is simply a lawless group of misfits spreading information around that it doesn't have the right to distribute, without caring for the effects of its actions."

Journalism thought leader Jay Rosen, however, calls Wikileaks "the world's first stateless news organization."

The organization, which isn't at all a wiki like Wikipedia is anymore, does represent something very interesting about contemporary technology and media. This much is hard to argue with, I think, no matter your perspective: Written about by websites everywhere, spread across millions of Twitter and Facebook conversations, mirrored by hundreds of independent servers, Wikileaks represents mass accessibility of information that simply cannot be shut down, despite the best efforts of authorities.

Unlike Amazon, Paypal and others, Twitter and Facebook have allowed the organization to continue using their services. Were that to change, we'd be talking about a different ball game. Neither company has responded to inquiries about their official positions on their Wikileaks accounts, but neither has shut down the accounts, either.

Twitter is passing around a press statement this morning stating that it is not censoring Wikileaks from its "trending topics" section, but asked point blank about whether it will permit the Wikileaks account to remain online or whether it will be shut down, Twitter's Matt Graves told ReadWriteWeb, "We've got no additional comment beyond the statement."

Genie, Meet the World Outside a Bottle

It's also notable that most of the "state secrets" being distributed by Wikileaks are allegedly from troves of information that thousands, if not millions, of people had security clearance to see already. There are 3 million people in the U.S. with some level of security clearance to access classified government documents. It's hard to believe that malevolent actors who wanted to see what Wikileaks exposes didn't have the opportunity to, though now the documents have been analyzed by hundreds of outside analysts, indexed by search engines and pointed to by countless websites. That scale of eyeballs, minds, machines and social connections is the biggest game changer, not the mere availability of the information.

The U.S. government made the Internet fault tolerant through redundant connections. Now unflattering information about its own activities has flooded that network it helped create. The Internet is a genie that cannot be put back in the bottle.

No one has forced discussion of these questions before as much as Julian Assange and Wikileaks. I expect that TIME will award Assange the Person of the Year Award, not for any of the revelations that Wikileaks exposed, but for the way it forced the issue of a radically transparent global communications network. The magazine may reference its choice of Joseph Stalin in 1939 to emphasize that the award is not a sign of approval or support, but such an award would doubtlessly confer a new sense of legitimacy to Wikileaks and the issues the organization represents.

You can't change your Facebook profile from dating to single these days without all your friends finding out - and neither can international diplomats put digital pen to paper without some concern that their words will be made available for universal access and analysis. How will that change the world of international relations? I suspect we're about to find out.

Perhaps Lady Gaga will be the Person of the Year instead, though.

Via:Gawker

For-profit universities have come under some pretty intense heat lately, with Strayer University and others being accused by the feds of selling worthless educations to desperate people. So how come the National Security Agency pays them to educate its workers?

The merciless takedown of Kaplan University in the New York Times—"Kaplan is a cold-hearted scam to make money by taking student loans from the government, and leaving students with debt that they'll never be able to pay off," one former dean told the paper—is just the latest in a series of strikes against the industry, which churns out degrees in human resources management or health services administration in exchange for $24 billion in federal education loans and grants each year. (And yes, Kaplan is owned by Times competitor the Washington Post Company, for those keeping score at home.) The Obama Administration wants to change its loan guidelines to prevent for-profits like Strayer or the University of Phoenix from taking advantage federal loans; the GAO recently released a scathing report revealing their hard-sell and misleading recruitment tactics; and they're being hit with a flurry of lawsuits from students and former employees.

Sounds shady! Which raises the question: How come the National Security Agency, the supersecretive spy agency that's supposed to be staffed with hypercompetent übergeeks who are basically the only thing standing between us and terrorist havoc, pays tax dollars to educate its staffers at sketchy for-profit universities?

According to records we obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, NSA staffers have attended Strayer, the University of Phoenix, and Capella University—all of which have been caught up in one or another of the scandals facing for-profit education recently—in the last decade as part of its graduate fellowship program, under which NSA staffers get paid time off and a full ride to pursue "mission-related" graduate or undergraduate coursework.

Strayer and University of Phoenix have both essentially been accused by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan of lying to applicants about the value they'll get from their degrees, and Capella is the target of a fraud lawsuit alleging that it hid "abusive and fraudulent recruiting and financial aid lending practices" from investors. Other schools that NSA staffers have attended under the program include Harvard University, Georgetown University, and all sorts of other real schools of varying quality.

Another Department of Defense operation, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which is the U.S. military's "official combat support agency for countering weapons of mass destruction," has sent staffers to Kaplan University, Strayer, and University of Phoenix as well, according to records.

We asked an NSA spokeswoman what courses NSA staffers took at the schools and how they advanced the NSA's mission. She responded, "Please submit a Freedom of Information Act request for any public records regarding your research topic." The DTRA did not respond to a telephone inquiry.

There is a war currently being fought in China's cyberspace. No, it does not involve the Great Firewall of China, nor does it involve Google's next attempt at market expansion in the Middle Kingdom. On the contrary, this war is being fought between two domestic Internet players: Tencent and Qihoo 360.

Over the past few months the two companies have been in a fierce battle to win users and their corresponding data. Qihoo 360's actions have forced Tencent to go to extreme measures and issue an ultimatum to Chinese netizens to choose either their software or that of Qihoo 360.

Before we examine why this battle is being fought, let's take a quick look at who the two players are:

Tencent is best known for it's QQ instant messenger service, and is one of the biggest internet companies in China. In the first half of 2010 alone, the company earned ¥3.7 billion, experiencing 66% growth year-on-year. In addition to IM, Tencent's reach extends into the realms of online media, mobile and telecom, interactive entertainment and value-added services.

Qihoo 360 is, unlike the Internet conglomerate of Tencent, focusing on its core product 360 Safeguard, an anti-virus software program. While Tencent's QQ has nearly 1 billion active users, Qihoo 360 has approximately 300 million users.

Why would two companies with non-competing products engage in such a vicious battle?

The truth is Tencent did release a competing product to Qihoo 360. The key to Tencent's success is in its massive user base acquired through the widespread usage of QQ instant messenger. The moment a business model is proven successful in China's Internet space, Tencent has the capital and capabilities to make a better copy of the original product, and release its own version to nearly one billion Chinese netizens seemingly overnight. After observing Qihoo 360's success, Tencent leveraged this strategy by automatically updating all of QQ users' software with a new tool called QQ Safety Manager, a competing anti-virus tool, this past September.

Needless to say Qihoo 360 was not about to just sit back and watch Tencent's anti-virus software put them out of business. Qihoo 360 retaliated by releasing a new "Privacy Protector" that informed netizens which data Tencent was supposedly stealing from their computer as they used the QQ IM service.

By mid-October, Tencent took formal legal action, but in the meantime Qihoo 360 launched its second attack on Tencent by prompting users to download a new tool called "KouKou Bodyguard."

Upon installing the program, KouKou Bodyguard ran an initial virus scan that classified all of QQ's functionalities as serious threats to the computer system. When users eliminated the "virus threat" KouKou Bodyguard actually deleted all of QQ's functions - except for one. The one exception was when the user clicked on "QQ Safety Manager" instead of QQ's safety check opening, KouKou Bodyguard appeared in its place.

Tencent's Ultimatum

In response, Tencent said they had no choice but to make Chinese netizens decide between their service or Qihoo 360. If Tencent did not act, KouKou Bodyguard would spread rapidly through their user base dismantling the QQ empire. Therefore any computer with Qihoo 360's software would not be allowed to access QQ going forward. In an open letter to QQ users, Tencent proclaimed that rather than fight a battle on the desktops of its users (like Qihoo 360 did), Tencent would simply give the choice of which software to use to the users themselves.

At this point, Qihoo 360 has discontinued the KouKou Bodyguard tool, and it seems as though through the mediation of China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the battle between the two Internet firms is subsiding.

What Does This Mean for China's Internet Industry?

While the dispute between Tencent and Qihoo 360 was not ideal for Chinese Internet users as the event unfolded, they will be better off for it. Just as China's melamine crisis in 2008 forced Chinese consumers to change their buying behaviors, the Tencent-Qihoo 360 saga will potentially have a similar impact on China's Internet industry.

It takes extreme situations to invoke a sense of seriousness around a particular issue. Chinese netizens will likely become more vigilant about what they are downloading, where the software comes from, and what data they may be potentially sharing. This type of change will not happen over night; however, this may very well mark the beginning of a safer Chinese Internet.

Back in September,it was reported that whistleblowing site Wikileaks had hemorrhaged a number of prominent personnel. Now some of those who've left have begun assembling an organization designed to directly compete with its parent.

The alleged high-handedness of the organization's founder, Julian Assange, and the beliefs of some of his co-workers' belief that he has not properly protected lives by carefully redacting the Iraq documents, has created a rift and the rift has created and opportunity.

Wikileaks is probably best known for releasing 91,000 secret documents from the Afghanistan War and 400,000 field reports from the Iraq War.

Assange and his organization have been criticized, by a spectrum of parties ranging from the U.S. government to Reporters Without Borders, for spending less attention on removing names and identifying information attached to civilians who have helped U.S. and coalition troops in Afghanistan. Shortly after that leak, Taliban sources announced they were using the documents to prepare a purge; the same thing happened after the Iraq publication.

One of the most prominent internal critics was Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who, as Daniel Schmitt, served as Wikileaks's German spokesman. Among his concerns were the level of redaction, as well as Assange's distracting public activities and neglect in releasing other important, but less attention-grabbing, documents unrelated to the conflicts.

Domscheit-Berg is one of the leaders of the new whistleblower undertaking. The group's personnel looks to possibly number between half a dozen and a dozen people so far.

The new organization would not be the only alternative to Wikileaks, as the Wall Street Journal points out. The most prominent rival is probably Cryptome, who have leaked documents concerning Wikileaks.

A top Pentagon official has confirmed a previously classified incident that he describes as “the most significant breach of U.S. military computers ever,” a 2008 episode in which a foreign intelligence agent used a flash drive to infect computers, including those used by the Central Command in overseeing combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Plugging the cigarette-lighter-sized flash drive into an American military laptop at a base in the Middle East amounted to “a digital beachhead, from which data could be transferred to servers under foreign control,” according to William J. Lynn 3d, deputy secretary of defense, writing in the latest issue of the journal Foreign Affairs.

“It was a network administrator’s worst fear: a rogue program operating silently, poised to deliver operational plans into the hands of an unknown adversary,” Mr. Lynn wrote.

The incident was first reported in November 2008 by the Danger Room blog of Wired magazine, and then in greater detail by The Los Angeles Times, which said that the matter was sufficiently grave that President George W. Bush was briefed on it. The newspaper mentioned suspicions of Russian involvement.

But Mr. Lynn’s article was the first official confirmation. He also put a name — Operation Buckshot Yankee — to the Pentagon operation to counter the attack, and said that the episode “marked a turning point in U.S. cyber-defense strategy.” In an early step, the Defense Department banned the use of portable flash drives with its computers, though it later modified the ban.

Mr. Lynn described the extraordinary difficulty of protecting military digital communications over a web of 15,000 networks and 7 million computing devices in dozens of countries against farflung adversaries who, with modest means and a reasonable degree of ingenuity, can inflict outsized damage. Traditional notions of deterrence do not apply.

“A dozen determined computer programmers can, if they find a vulnerability to exploit, threaten the United States’s global logistics network, steal its operational plans, blind its intelligence capabilities or hinder its ability to deliver weapons on target,” he wrote.

Security officials also face the problem of counterfeit hardware that may have remotely operated “kill switches” or “back doors” built in to allow manipulation from afar, as well as the problem of software with rogue code meant to cause sudden malfunctions.

Against the array of threats, Mr. Lynn said, the National Security Agency had pioneered systems — “part sensor, part sentry, part sharpshooter” — that are meant to automatically counter intrusions in real time.

His article appeared intended partly to raise awareness of the threat to United States cybersecurity — “the frequency and sophistication of intrusions into U.S. military networks have increased exponentially,” he wrote — and partly to make the case for a larger Pentagon role in cyberdefense.

Various efforts at cyberdefense by the military have been drawn under a single organization, the U.S. Cyber Command, which began operations in late May at Fort Meade, Maryland, under a four-star general, Keith B. Alexander.

But under proposed legislation, the Department of Homeland Security would take the leading role in the defense of civilian systems.

Though the Cyber Command has greater capabilities, the military operates within the United States only if ordered to do so by the president.

Another concern is whether the Pentagon, or government in general, has the nimbleness for such work. Mr. Lynn acknowledged that “it takes the Pentagon 81 months to make a new computer system operational after it is first funded.” By contrast, he noted, “the iPhone was developed in 24 months.”

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Wednesday the Pentagon has expressed willingness to discuss the online whistleblower's request for help in reviewing classified documents from the Afghan war and removing information that could harm civilians.

"This week we received contact through our lawyers that the General Counsel of the U.S. Army says now that they want to discuss the issue," Assange told The Associated Press by telephone. He later corrected himself to say he meant the general counsel of the Pentagon.

Assange added that the contacts have been brokered by the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, or CID.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman denied any direct contacts between the Pentagon and WikiLeaks. He also said the Pentagon is not interested in cooperating with WikiLeaks, which has asked for help in reviewing the documents to purge the names of Afghan informants from the files.

"We are not interested in negotiating some sort of minimized or sanitized version of classified documents," he said.

"These documents are property of the United States government. The unauthorized release of them threatens the lives of coalition forces as well as Afghan nationals."

Asked if CID had brokered contact between defense lawyers and Wikileaks lawyers, Whitman said: "CID is conducting an investigation and I am not going to comment on their investigation."

Assange said Wednesday that "contact has been established" but added it was not clear whether and how the U.S. military would assist WikiLeaks.

"It is always positive for parties to talk to each other," Assange said. "We welcome their engagement."

He reiterated that WikiLeaks plans to release its second batch of secret Afghan war documents within "two weeks to a month."

The first files in its "Afghan War Diary" laid bare classified military documents covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The release angered U.S. officials, energized critics of the NATO-led campaign, and drew the attention of the Taliban, which has promised to use the material to track down people it considers traitors.

Non-governmental organizations, including the Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, have criticized WikiLeaks as being irresponsible.

WikiLeaks describes itself as a public service organization for whistleblowers, journalists and activists.

"We encourage other media and human rights groups who have a genuine concern about reviewing the material to assist us with the difficult and very expensive task of getting a large historical archive into the public's record," Assange said.

The Australian was in Sweden in part to prepare an application for a publishing certificate that would allow WikiLeaks to take full advantage of the Scandinavian nation's press freedom laws.

That also means WikiLeaks would have to appoint a publisher that could be held legally responsible for the material. Assange said that person would be "either me or one of our Swedish people."

WikiLeaks routes its material through Sweden and Belgium because of the whistleblower protection offered by laws in those countries. But it also has backup servers in other countries to make sure the site is not shut down, Assange said.The Australian was in Sweden in part to prepare an application for a publishing certificate that would allow WikiLeaks to take full advantage of the Scandinavian nation's press freedom laws.

That also means WikiLeaks would have to appoint a publisher that could be held legally responsible for the material. Assange said that person would be "either me or one of our Swedish people."

WikiLeaks routes its material through Sweden and Belgium because of the whistleblower protection offered by laws in those countries. But it also has backup servers in other countries to make sure the site is not shut down, Assange said.

(This version CORRECTS Updates with Assange correcting earlier statement to say contact was with Pentagon, not U.S. Army; comment from Washington. This story is part of AP's general news and financial services.)

A U.S. border-patrol agent on duty near Campo, 60 miles east of San Diego, Calif.

When U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton ruled on Wednesday that key provisions of Arizona's new anti-immigration law were unconstitutional, she could have also declared them unnecessary. That is, if the main impetus behind the controversial legislation was, as Arizona Governor Jan Brewer said when she signed it in April, "border-related violence and crime due to illegal immigration." The fact is, despite the murderous mayhem raging across the border in Mexico, the U.S. side, from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, is one of the nation's safest corridors.

According to the FBI, the four large U.S. cities (with populations of at least 500,000) with the lowest violent crime rates — San Diego, Phoenix and the Texas cities of El Paso and Austin — are all in border states. "The border is safer now than it's ever been," U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Lloyd Easterling told the Associated Press last month. Even Larry Dever, the sheriff of Arizona's Cochise County, where the murder last March of a local rancher, believed to have been committed by an illegal immigrant, sparked calls for the law, conceded to the Arizona Republic recently that "we're not seeing the [violent crime] that's going on on the other side."  

Consider Arizona itself — whose illegal-immigrant population is believed to be second only to California's. The state's overall crime rate dropped 12% last year; between 2004 and 2008 it plunged 23%. In the metro area of its largest city, Phoenix, violent crime — encompassing murder, rape, assault and robbery — fell by a third during the past decade and by 17% last year. The border city of Nogales, an area rife with illegal immigration and drug trafficking, hasn't logged a single murder in the past two years. 

It is true that Phoenix has in recent years seen a spate of kidnappings. But in almost every case they've involved drug traffickers targeting other narcos for payment shakedowns, and the 318 abductions reported last year were actually down 11% from 2008. Either way, the figure hardly makes Phoenix, as Arizona Senator John McCain claimed last month, "the No. 2 kidnapping capital of the world" behind Mexico City. A number of Latin American capitals can claim that dubious distinction.

An even more telling example is El Paso. Its cross-border Mexican sister city, Ciudad Juárez, suffered almost 2,700 murders last year, most of them drug-related, making it possibly the world's most violent town. But El Paso, a stone's throw across the Rio Grande, had just one murder. A big reason, say U.S. law-enforcement officials, is that the Mexican drug cartels' bloody turf wars generally end at the border and don't follow the drugs into the U.S. Another, says El Paso County Sheriff Richard Wiles, is that "the Mexican cartels know that if they try to commit that kind of violence here, they'll get shut down." 

Which points to perhaps the most important factor: the U.S. has real cops — not criminals posing as cops, as is so often the case in Mexico — policing the border's cities and states. Americans and Mexicans may call their border region "seamless" when it comes to commerce and culture, but that brotherly ideal doesn't apply to law enforcement. That's especially true since state and local police are backed along the border by the thousands of federal agents deployed there. Thus the tough Arizona law — which seeks to allow local and state police to check a person's immigration status, a provision that Judge Bolton agreed opened the door to racial profiling by officers, and requires immigrants to carry their documents at all times — was sparked by largely unfounded fears.

Arizona law-enforcement officials say they believe the Cochise County rancher, Robert Krentz, was killed by an illegal immigrant — perhaps a coyote, or migrant smuggler — or a drug trafficker. His last radio transmission home as he inspected his property indicated he was helping a struggling person he believed to be one of the migrants who regularly trespass private land while crossing into the U.S. But while such assaults are hardly unheard of along the border — and while it's hardly irrational to worry about Mexico's violence eventually spilling into the U.S. — they have hardly risen to a level that justified the draconian Arizona bill. (In fact, if an illegal immigrant did murder Krentz, it would be the first time in more than a decade that a migrant has killed an American along the border's Tucson, Ariz., sector.)

"There's a real disconnect between emotions and facts when it comes to the border," says El Paso city councilman Beto O'Rourke. "You've got a lot of politicians exploiting this fear that the Mexicans are coming over to kill us."

The Arizona law, which Judge Bolton also said infringed on federal jurisdiction, may be a product of border bluster. But it has more than succeeded in getting Washington's attention. Even though the Obama Administration was one of the plaintiffs in the suit against the law, the President is sending 1,200 more National Guard troops to the region this weekend. What's more, our broken immigration system — and the federal government's feckless failure to address it — is a front-burner issue again.

The nation's border is actually a safe place. The nation's debate about it, at least politically, is anything but.

Adrian Lamo, the former computer hacker who tipped off federal authorities to WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning, says two men in the Boston area have told Lamo in phone conversations that they assisted Manning.

Lamo said both men attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but he refused to identify them because, he said, at least one of them has threatened him. One of these men allegedly told Lamo they gave encryption software to Manning and taught the Army private how to use it, Lamo said.

Manning, an Army intelligence analyst, is being held in solitary confinement at a Virginia detention facility. He is charged with leaking an airstrike video that the whistleblower website WikiLeaks published in April, and Pentagon officials say he is the prime suspect in last week's disclosure of thousands of field reports from the war in Afghanistan to the site.

Lamo claimed both men are working for WikiLeaks. Also, both men are Facebook friends with Lamo and Manning, and at least one continues to post Facebook messages on Lamo's wall, the former hacker said.

Asked for comment about Lamo's allegation that men working for WikiLeaks assisted Manning, WikiLeaks responded in an e-mail: "As a matter of policy, we do not discuss any matters to do with allegations relating to the identity of sources."

The New York Times reported Saturday that Army investigators looking into the document leak have expanded their inquiry to include friends and associates who may have helped Manning. Specifically, the Times spoke to two civilians interviewed in recent weeks by the Army's criminal division, who said that investigators apparently believed that the friends, who include students from MIT and Boston University, might have connections to WikiLeaks. The civilians, who the Times did not name, told the newspaper they had no connection to WikiLeaks.

The Boston Globe interviewed a recent MIT graduate who it said acknowledged Saturday that he met Manning in January and exchanged as many as 10 e-mails with him about security issues. But the individual "adamantly" denied any role in the document leak, the Globe reported. The Globe also reported that this MIT graduate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he was interviewed several months ago by Army investigators to find out whether he or "others in the local computer hacker community" helped Manning.

A spokeswoman for MIT, Patti Richards, told CNN: "We are monitoring the situation closely, but are not commenting at this time."

CNN has previously reported that the FBI is assisting the Defense Department in the WikiLeaks investigation of Manning. One FBI official told CNN the bureau is involved in the investigation of potential civilian co-conspirators who may have played a role in the leaking of the classified material.

Attempts to reach an attorney for Manning have so far been unsuccessful.