(CNN) -- 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. 
 
 CNN's Ashley Fantz, Ashley Vaughan and Shirley Hung contributed to this report. ||||| Lamo said he doubts Manning had the technical savvy to copy all the data on his own. He thinks Manning received help from hackers in the area who provided him with encryption software to send the classified information to WikiLeaks, and who helped him ensure those leaks were featured prominently on the website. 
 
 Adrian Lamo, a former computer hacker who traded instant messages with Manning and later turned him in to authorities, said he knew of five people whom Army officials have interviewed over the past few months in the Boston area, including other MIT students and a student who recently left Boston University to attend Brandeis. 
 
 “These are people that knew him and might know things about what he may have done,’’ the Pentagon official said. 
 
 Another Pentagon official familiar with the investigation, who was also not authorized to speak publicly about the case, said law enforcement officials do not yet consider the individuals accomplices. 
 
 A senior defense official confirmed yesterday that Army investigators, who are working with the FBI, interviewed several students in the Boston area with apparent ties to Manning. Officials at both the FBI and MIT declined to comment. 
 
 The former student said he knows people who work for WikiLeaks, but he said he has never met or corresponded with Julian Assange, the website’s founder. “It’s impossible to be in this community and not know people in WikiLeaks,’’ he said, refer ring to computer hackers. The former student says his specialty is the study of secure information systems and how to penetrate them. 
 
 “I did not help him or know about it before it happened,’’ he said. 
 
 “I categorically deny that I had any role in helping Manning leak anything,’’ the former student said in a phone interview. He said he met Manning at MIT in January, when the private was on leave, and later exchanged as many as 10 e-mails with him about security issues. 
 
 The Army arrested Manning in May and later charged him with providing a classified video of a US helicopter attack and more than 150,000 classified diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. Military officials have also identified him as the chief suspect in last month’s disclosure of more than 90,000 classified documents from the Afghan war to the website. 
 
 The 23-year-old graduate, who spoke on condition that his name not be published, said investigators from the US Army Criminal Investigations Division interviewed him several months ago to find out whether he or others in the local computer hacker community helped the primary suspect in the leaks, Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning. 
 
 A recent MIT graduate acknowledged yesterday that he met and exchanged multiple e-mails with the Army private accused of providing thousands of classified war records to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, but he adamantly denied any role in the massive intelligence leak. 
 
 “Manning’s a bright, young man, but he didn’t have the technical or political expertise to pull this off,’’ Lamo said in a telephone interview. “He had to depend on people state-side.’’ 
 
 Lamo said those in the area who he says helped Manning all work in the information security area, oppose the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and have ties to WikiLeaks. “For Manning to have almost a half-dozen friends with ties to WikiLeaks is a matter that has not escaped authorities,’’ he said. “There’s a whole lot of evidence pointing to the fact that it would have been very hard for him to act alone.’’ 
 
 Lamo, 29, who is originally from Boston, was arrested in 2003 and later convicted of hacking into the computer system of The New York Times. He said he was acquainted with those the Army investigators interviewed, but he declined to disclose their names publicly. 
 
 “To a man, I think it’s safe to say that they would not be unhappy if the war was cast in a bad light,’’ he said. 
 
 Lamo said he thinks the group in Boston provided Manning with software that allowed him to download thousands of documents without alerting network monitors at the Defense Department. He added that Manning had one of his associates in Boston physically provide WikiLeaks with documents he downloaded on CDs. 
 
 “At least one of those acquaintances misled me and defense investigators as to how well he knew some of the people with ties to WikiLeaks,’’ said Lamo, who was criticized last month by WikiLeaks, along with a Wired News reporter, Kevin Poulsen, who broke the story about Private Manning’s arrest, as “notorious felons, informers, and manipulators.’’ 
 
 Officials at WikiLeaks did not return calls for comment. 
 
 Lamo said he thinks Manning was motivated by ideology and by his access to Assange. “He was opposed to what he saw happening on the ground in Iraq and, and I think WikiLeaks played on his ego. He had access to a special server that allowed his leaks jumped to the top of the queue. I think he was made to feel special.’’ 
 
 For his part, the former MIT student said he thinks Manning was sufficiently intelligent to do it all by himself. 
 
 He said that when they met at MIT last winter, Manning spoke about his work as an intelligence analyst and was “nimble’’ about what he could and could not disclose. 
 
 “He managed to make his points very well, without compromising anything he wasn’t supposed to be talking about,’’ the former student said. “The fact that he ended up leaking this information is really ironic. He seemed quite sharp and quite capable of doing it on his own.’’ 
 
 When asked whether there might be additional secret documents in Boston, the former student said he doubts it. 
 
 “If anyone had anything remotely incriminating,’’ he said, “I think they would be smart enough to take it outside and burn it.’’ 
 
 Bryan Bender, Shelley Murphy, and Tracy Jan of the Globe staff contributed to this report. David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com. 
 
 © Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company. ||||| Private Manning was a misfit as well in the Army, which he joined in the hope of gaining technical skills and an education, and which eventually sent him to Contingency Operating Station Hammer, a remote post east of Baghdad, where he had access to some of the nation’s deepest military and diplomatic secrets. In early 2010, he covertly downloaded gun-camera videos, battle logs and tens of thousands of State Department cables onto flash drives while lip-syncing the words to Lady Gaga songs. 
 
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 He anonymously made contact with WikiLeaks to spill his secrets, hoping, as he told the military court that convicted him on Tuesday, to “spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general.” Whatever his motives or inner conflicts, Private Manning knew he was violating the law and military regulations. 
 
 According to a new documentary about WikiLeaks and the Manning case, “We Steal Secrets,” by the filmmaker Alex Gibney, Private Manning thought that in Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, he had an ally. 
 
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 “Manning invested more in that relationship,” Mr. Gibney said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. Seeking a more sympathetic ear, Mr. Gibney said, Private Manning confessed his deed, and his multiple personal torments, to Adrian Lamo, an accomplished computer hacker he had met in a chat room online. Mr. Lamo drew him out, and then turned him in to the authorities. 
 
 “He was a naïve idealist. He was not a spy,” said Mr. Gibney, whose film portrays Private Manning sympathetically. “He didn’t get any money for this. He didn’t go to a foreign government. Remember, he did plead guilty to actually leaking to WikiLeaks, but he wouldn’t plead guilty to being a spy, because he didn’t think he was one, and I don’t, either.” 
 
 In his conversations with Mr. Lamo, who shared his computer chats with Wired.com, Private Manning said he had been ignored and isolated at work. “I just wanted to be nice, and live a normal life,” Private Manning wrote. But he said he had seen things that troubled him that he felt helpless to do anything about. 
 
 According to the chat logs, he was first dismayed by the detention of 15 people in Iraq for printing criticism of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. “After that,” he wrote, “I saw things differently.” 
 
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 In a long statement to the military court this year, he said he was also disturbed by footage shot by an Apache helicopter of an attack on a street in Baghdad in July 2007 that killed two Reuters journalists and several other men. He called the footage one in a series of “war porn-type videos” he had seen that sickened him. The video was among the material he provided to WikiLeaks, which distributed it widely without identifying its source. 
 
 While larger questions about government secrecy and the role of the news media in the Internet age swirl around the case, the roots of Private Manning’s behavior may spring as much from his troubled youth as from his political views. 
 
 He spent much of his childhood alone, playing video games or huddled in front of a computer when he was living with his mother in Haverfordwest, Wales. He was teased relentlessly there for his foreign ways and began to act out in school. 
 
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 After several outbursts, his mother sent him back to Oklahoma, where he worked briefly at a computer software store. But several angry clashes with his father — which some friends attributed to his father’s disapproval of his sexual identity — landed him on the streets, living in his car. 
 
 Eventually, he made his way into the Army, which seized on his computer skills and trained him as an intelligence analyst. While stationed at Fort Drum, N.Y., friends said in interviews, Private Manning met a student from Brandeis University named Tyler Watkins, and fell in love. Some of Mr. Watkins’s friends were part of a burgeoning hacker community at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 
 
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 That community, friends said, embraced the young Army private: his geeky fascination with computers, his liberal political opinions and his sexual orientation. 
 
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 While he seemed to thrive in that world, his military career was tarnished by violent outbursts. While serving on a base east of Baghdad, he was reprimanded twice, including once for assaulting an officer, and he complained in e-mails of being “regularly ignored by his superiors” unless they needed him to fetch more coffee. 
 
 Private Manning rebelled quietly, friends said, wearing a dog tag that said “Humanist” and keeping a toy fairy wand on his desk. Then, surreptitiously, beginning in late 2009 or early 2010, he began downloading thousands of government documents. He considered leaking them to The New York Times, The Washington Post or Politico, but decided to contact WikiLeaks in February 2010, several months into his deployment. 
 
 In what proved a fateful mistake, Mr. Manning then turned to Mr. Lamo, who had been convicted of hacking into several large companies, including The Times. 
 
 “I can’t believe what I’m confessing to you,” Mr. Manning wrote to Mr. Lamo, after explaining that he had given WikiLeaks some 260,000 diplomatic cables. He wrote that he had exploited a classified data system ripe for the plucking: “weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counterintelligence, inattentive signal analysis.” 
 
 Mr. Lamo drew Mr. Manning out, asking him what kinds of scandals he thought the leaks might provoke, and for proof that Manning had done what he said. Then, saying he was “backed into a corner ethically,” Mr. Lamo turned him in. 
 
 Mr. Manning has reacted stoically to the conditions of his imprisonment, much of it in solitary confinement, although others, including his legal team and Amnesty International, have loudly protested his treatment. In one of his chats with Mr. Lamo, he contemplated a life behind bars, which could be especially difficult for him because of his struggles with his gender identity. 
 
 “I wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life,” he wrote to Mr. Lamo, “or being executed so much, if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me plastered all over the world press as a boy.”
– Students at MIT and Boston University are being investigated as possible accomplices in the massive leak of military documents posted on the Wikileaks site, according to officials. The FBI was apparently sicced on the schools in part by blogger Adrian Lamo. He did not reveal the students' names because he said at least one of them threatened his life, reports CNN. The students told Lamo they gave encryption software to soldier Bradley Manning and taught the Army private how to use it to obtain the secret documents he's suspected of providing to Wikileaks, Lamo claims. Lamo, who was working with a Wired reporter at the time, turned Manning into the feds after convincing the soldier to give him an interview. A "civilian" in the Boston area contacted by the New York Times said Army investigators quizzed him about his relationship with Manning, and offered him money to spy on Wikileaks. An MIT graduate told the Boston Globe he exchanged emails with Manning, but denied doing anything illegal. In a related development, Wikileaks editor Jacob Applebaum was detained and interrogated by customs officials and FBI agents over the weekend after he returned to the US from Europe, reports the Independent.