More than a year after Pfc. Bradley Manning was arrested on suspicion of passing tens of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, Wired magazine has released the full record of the conversations between Manning and former hacker Adrian Lamo that led to Manning’s imprisonment. Previously, the logs had appeared only in redacted form, a situation that generated criticism in some quarters.

Before this week, Kevin Poulsen and Evan Hansen, the top editors at Wired, permitted publication of only a part of the logs they obtained from Lamo, claiming the rest contained either irrelevant personal matter or sensitive government information and therefore should not be publicly released. Constitutional lawyer and Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald, among others, demanded that Wired publish all of the logs.

The newly disclosed material shows that contrary to what Poulsen and Hansen said, the unredacted conversations are essential to providing a full understanding of what occurred between Manning and Lamo, especially when it comes to Lamo’s promises of privacy and legal protection. –ARK

Glenn Greenwald at Salon:

Now that Wired has released the full chats, I just want to highlight a few passages that they concealed, and dispassionately lay out several key facts, so that everyone can decide for themselves if Wired told the truth about their conduct and assess the journalistic propriety of it. Before I first wrote about Manning’s arrest and the conduct of Wired’s reporting of it, I interviewed Poulsen by email and published the full exchange. Just look at what he told me about the material Wired was withholding:

GG: Last question: you published what were clearly excerpts of the chats between Lamo and Manning — did he provide you with the whole unedited version and if, so, do you intend to publish it? Or is what you published everything he gave you?

KP: He did, but I don’t think we’ll be publishing more any time soon. The remainder is either Manning discussing personal matters that aren’t clearly related to his arrest, or apparently sensitive government information that I’m not throwing up without vetting first.

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