While it may be new to the NYTimes and apparently it’s just getting notice, but the use of a Lady Gaga disk and the lip-synching was actually mentioned in the very first Wired (6/4) story.

Arrest this publicity-seeking, celebutard skank-ho!

Somehow, I just knew that something important would be revealed in the pages here today.

Man, was I wrong, or what?!

“Since November 2008, computers operated by the Pentagon or the armed services have had their external hard drive portals disabled to prevent occurrences like this.”

I’ve got to assume that means a USB. Other than that he apparently knew about the surveillance and recorded the data on an internal CD burner? If it’s a recordable CD burner he gets 650-700 MB. If it was a recordable DVD burner and he used dual sided DVDs he could get 8 Gbs.

Seriously, why did he have a CD/DVD burner?

Logistically, how did Manning use Gaga to pull of his data heist?

It would seem that the Pentagon has some holes in their security. Depending on the admins in the Pentagon, he could also have uploaded data via proxy to a cloud and then downloaded at a later time the data.

Then just burn the data to media after the fact.

I hope that scenario is wrong.

@lazzzlo: While I can understand that he may need a burner for his official duties, like you, I’m somewhat surprised that its use wasn’t monitored or otherwise policed.

Of course if you really want to get into the idea of security leaks… We’ve all heard about ECHELON and other monitoring systems used to sniff keyword chatter from phone, the internet and other data systems, but apparently it didn’t “hear” words like “leak”, “classified documents”, “Wikileaks” or other red flags from a soldier in a war zone communicating with at least one childhood friend and a famewhore hacker over Instant Messenger.

@Magister…exactly.

How did this happen? It stuns me.

The only thing I can think is maybe they let him think he was getting away with it so they could backtrack his movements. But he still took “secured” raw data and posted it.

He did post it to a known “reformed” hacker who turned him in…I have the feeling there is more to this.

@Magister

Another thing I just thought about for security policies is: was he using a laptop? If so, his own or a Pentagon issued laptop. You can have all the security policies in place but if you don’t follow up on them; things like this happen.

It seems to me that he had a Pentagon issued machine. And you still have to log in to access anything.

Just Tex said:
Somehow, I just knew that something important would be revealed in the pages here today.

Man, was I wrong, or what?!

Actually, I think this is a pretty big deal!

@lazzzlo: Clipped from the initial Wired story that I linked above…

—
As described by Manning in his chats with Lamo, his purported leaking was made possible by lax security online and off.

Manning had access to two classified networks from two separate secured laptops: SIPRNET, the Secret-level network used by the Department of Defense and the State Department, and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System which serves both agencies at the Top Secret/SCI level.

The networks, he said, were both “air gapped” from unclassified networks, but the environment at the base made it easy to smuggle data out.

“I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga,’ erase the music then write a compressed split file,” he wrote. “No one suspected a thing and, odds are, they never will.”

“[I] listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history,” he added later. ”Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis … a perfect storm.”

Manning told Lamo that the Garani video was left accessible in a directory on a U.S. Central Command server, centcom.smil.mil, by officers who investigated the incident. The video, he said, was an encrypted AES-256 ZIP file.

—

PS) In addition to the Wired story, the Glenn Greenwald attempted takedown of Lamo includes several references to the chatlogs provided to Mr. Greenwald by Wired and though he never gets to the ECHELON question, so it goes unasked, he did raise the following;

Why would he contact a total stranger, whom he randomly found from a Twitter search, in order to “quickly” confess to acts that he knew could send him to prison for a very long time, perhaps his whole life? And why would he choose to confess over the Internet, in an unsecured, international AOL IM chat, given the obvious ease with which that could be preserved, intercepted or otherwise surveilled? These are the actions of someone either unbelievably reckless or actually eager to be caught.

”Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis … a perfect storm.”

There’s a lesson to be learned.

Magister and though he never gets to the ECHELON question, so it goes unasked, he did raise the following;

Why would he contact a total stranger, whom he randomly found from a Twitter search, in order to “quickly” confess to acts that he knew could send him to prison for a very long time, perhaps his whole life? And why would he choose to confess over the Internet, in an unsecured, international AOL IM chat, given the obvious ease with which that could be preserved, intercepted or otherwise surveilled? These are the actions of someone either unbelievably reckless or actually eager to be caught.

There’s more to the story…nobody is that dumb and brazen; especially after being originally vetted by the Feds.

As i type this I recognize that the dude did send specific data from the Pentagon that may have gone undetected for a long period of time.

Certainly puts my job in perspective.