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. Officials at both the FBI and MIT declined to comment. 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. Both the FBI and the US military believe that the documents came from the same source as the helicopter video, and they have already charged a 22-year-old intelligence analyst working in Iraq, Bradley Manning, with that leak. 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. The 23-year-old graduate, who spoke on condition that his name not be published, said investigators from the US Army Criminal Investigations Division interviewed him several months ago to find out whether he or others in the local computer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.
– 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.