Meet the US soldier behind WikiLeaks breach

LONDON - It may not come across as an easy task to steal data and smuggle it out of U.S. army base on CDs and finally download onto a memory stick, but it was for the prime suspect of WikiLeaks breach.

U.S. soldier Bradley Manning, who is under solitary confinement, is awaiting trial over the WikiLeaks disclosures.

And according to the 23-year-old’s own account, it appears to have been staggeringly easy for him to make off with reams of highly classified data.

The downloads were carried out while Manning was working at the U.S. 10th Mountain Division in Iraq.

“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,” the Daily Mail quoted him as saying in an online chat.

“No one suspected a thing. (I) listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while “exfiltrating” possibly the largest data spillage in America history.

“Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public.

He claimed he had “unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day seven days a week for eight plus months.”

Manning apparently downloaded all the information from the vast Siprnet (secret internet protocol router network distribution) database designed to connect U.S. military personnel across the world. (ANI)