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Showing posts with label issue. Show all posts
Showing posts with label issue. Show all posts
Thursday, 22 August 2013
Manning attorney vows to fight on, urges Obama to issue pardon
Former Army Pfc. Bradley Manning may have been handed a 35-year prison sentence on Wednesday for leaking classified documents, but “his fight is not over” and he could be free much sooner, according to Manning attorney David Coombs.
Manning’s sentence could be reduced through a clemency process, and he also plans to file an appeal of the conviction, Coombs said during a press conference on Wednesday a few hours after the sentence was rendered by a military court judge.
There’s another potential avenue for Manning as well, Coombs said: “Hopefully, the president does the right thing and those options are ruled out because he pardons him or releases him with time served.”
Manning, who has also been dishonorably discharged from the Army, had faced a maximum of 90 years in prison on charges related to his leaking of a massive store of classified documents to Wikileaks in 2009 and 2010.
The documents Manning gave to Wikileaks included details of detainee abuse in Iraq as well as an airstrike in Baghdad that resulted in the deaths of civilians.
He was acquitted of the most serious charge against him, aiding the enemy, but was found guilty on a series of lesser ones, including some he pleaded guilty to earlier this year.
Barring a pardon or successful appeal, Manning could be out of prison in as little as seven years, according to Coombs. Military legal guidelines would allow Manning a parole hearing after 10 years, a period which would further be reduced by the more than three years Manning has already spent in detention, he said.
However, Coombs portrayed Manning as someone comfortable with what he had done and prepared to serve his sentence.
After the sentence was handed down, Coombs was in tears, whereas Manning tried to comfort him.
“He said, ‘Don’t worry about it, I know you did your best. I’m going to be OK,’” Coombs said. “That shouldn’t happen. I, as the attorney should be cheering him up.”
In a pretrial statement, Manning said he believed releasing the information “could spark a domestic debate on the role of our military and foreign policy in general, as well as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan.”
But Manning reportedly expressed some regrets during a sentencing hearing held last week, saying he was “sorry that my actions hurt people,” and “sorry that they hurt the United States.” However, he also said he believed at the time that leaking the documents would help people.
Coombs spoke to the broader themes surrounding Manning’s conviction.
“What’s at stake here is, how do we as a public want to be informed about what our government does,” he said. “The National Security apparatus has exploded since 9/11. You don’t even understand how much money is put into national security because that’s secret too.”
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange called Manning’s sentence “a significant tactical victory” for his defense team, family and supporters in a statement released Wednesday. “At the start of these proceedings, the United States government had charged Bradley Manning with a capital offence and other charges carrying over 135 years of incarceration.”
However, “Manning’s trial and conviction is an affront to basic concepts of Western justice,” he added.
Assange’s organization is also supporting former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked information about NSA surveillance programs and is now in Russia, having been granted asylum.
Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for the IDG News Service.
More by Chris Kanaracus
Bitcoin wallet service to issue refunds after users' funds stolen
A widely used Bitcoin wallet service plans to issue refunds to people who saw their bitcoins stolen as a result of a weakness in its application.
Blockchain.info, which has a Web-based service called My Wallet, has also upgraded its application after finding a vulnerability similar to one discovered earlier this month in some Bitcoin wallet programs running on the Android mobile OS.
“Likely if you have been affected by this problem your coins will have been taken already,” a Blockchain.info official wrote on the Bitcointalk.org forum. “All affected users will be refunded in full.”
The number of affected users is small, said Roger Ver, who is an investor in Blockchain.info, via email. Blockchain.info expects to refund around 50 BTC or $5000, he said.
Interest in Bitcoin has surged since its debut just four years ago. The system offers a low-cost way to transmit virtual currency over the Internet, and many companies and entrepreneurs are working to solve concerns around how to safeguard bitcoins from hackers.
Blockchain.info’s My Wallet uses a browser extension that encrypts a person’s Bitcoin wallet on their computer before it is sent and stored on its servers.
On Tuesday, Blockchain.info upgraded its browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox and its Mac OSX client after it was found a random number generator wasn’t working securely in some cases, potentially exposing people’s bitcoin stashes to theft.
Random numbers are used to sign transactions performed over Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer network as part of its public key cryptography system. If duplicate random number values are used to sign more than one transaction, it may be possible for an attacker to figure out a person’s private signing key and sweep their bitcoins away.
The issue came to light after one user reported on Bitcointalk.org that 1.8 bitcoins—worth around $218 as of Wednesday morning according to Mt. Gox’s market price—were stolen.
The user speculated that Blockchain.info or Firefox had a weakness in code that generates random numbers, similar to the problem found in Android Bitcoin clients earlier this month.
Several Bitcoin clients that used a random number generator component within Android were patched after it was found it occasionally repeated random numbers. Google also issued a patch.
A Blockchain.info official wrote on the forum that My Wallet users on Firefox could be particularly vulnerable. Users should upgrade their My Wallet browser extension to the latest versions, which for Chrome is v2.85, for Firefox is version 1.97 and for Mac clients is version 0.11.
The official also advised that people who only use Blockchain.info’s web interface “should clear their browsers cache before next login.”
Bitcoin addresses—which are used by people to send and receive bitcoins—that may be affected have been listed on Bitcointalk.org.
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