Looks like this kid is at it again.

So, as I was taking a shit in some newpaper I came across an article about Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. These fuckers just don't know when to quit. Don't fuck with uncle sam kids!!11

Where in the world is Julian Assange?

Yesterday the Daily Beast's Phil Shenon reported that Pentagon investigators are frantically searching for Assange, the white-haired and willfully inscrutable founder of WikiLeaks, in the hopes of stopping him from exposing more than 200,000 classified diplomatic cables: "Pentagon investigators are trying to determine the whereabouts of the Australian-born founder of the secretive website WikiLeaks for fear that he may be about to publish a huge cache of classified State Department cables that, if made public, could do serious damage to national security, government officials tell The Daily Beast."

Manhunt! It has all the makings of a thriller: An elusive renegade, government agents, and thousands of poor State Department bureaucrats nervously awaiting the disclosure of their darkest secrets. But it would be a pretty short movie — if the crack Pentagon investigators charged with protecting our national security had done a simple Web search before contacting Shenon, they would have quickly found that Assange is scheduled to appear on a panel in Las Vegas this afternoon at the annual conference of the group Investigative Reporters and Editors. (The Daily Beast has since reported Assange has cancelled that appearance; see update below.)

WikiLeaks posted a link to the conference website on its Twitter feed today — presumably to tweak investigators and seeming to confirm that Assange will indeed show up. His participation on the panel has been public since at least May 17. WikiLeaks also helpfully posted notice of another appearance — this time by WikiLeaks' Daniel Schmitt — at a free-speech seminar in Brussels in two weeks.

It's not clear what, if any, measures Pentagon officials could take if they showed up at the conference — or intercepted Assange on his way there. But finding a legal pretext to take him into custody likely wouldn't prevent the release of any documents — WikiLeaks' servers are housed in Sweden — and the optics of American officials taking the unprecedented step of bagging a journalist at a conference of journalists would be less than optimal. They could simply ask him nicely not to publish them — perhaps they could slip a question to former Washington Post editor Len Downie, who's moderating Assange's panel?

The State Department cables Assange is said to be on the verge of leaking were allegedly handed to WikiLeaks by Bradley Manning. Manning, an Army intelligence analyst, was outed this week by reformed hacker Adrian Lamo as a security risk after he contacted Lamo via instant messager to confess his role in leaking video of two Reuters staffers being killed by U.S. soldiers in Baghdad. Wired's Threat Level blog, which initially broke the story of Manning's arrest and the circumstances by which Lamo turned him in, posted large portions of their chat conversations today, and they show Manning to be a conscientious and anxious man who became disillusioned after watching Iraqi police officers detain political dissidents while his superiors stood by:

was watching 15 detainees taken by the Iraqi Federal Police... for printing "anti-Iraqi literature"... the iraqi federal police wouldn't cooperate with US forces, so i was instructed to investigate the matter, find out who the "bad guys" were, and how significant this was for the FPs... it turned out, they had printed a scholarly critique against PM Maliki... i had an interpreter read it for me... and when i found out that it was a benign political critique titled "Where did the money go?" and following the corruption trail within the PM's cabinet... i immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on... he didn't want to hear any of it... he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees...

At other moments in the chats, Manning describes himself as "isolated" and "self-medicating like crazy." He provided few details about the content of the cables he claims to have leaked. One, he said, involved "the Holy See and its position on the Vatican sex scandals."

The portions of the chat transcripts released show Lamo as an almost disinterested interlocutor, posing a few questions here and there while Manning unburdened himself. They do not include an exchange, previously described by Lamo to Yahoo! News, in which Lamo allegedly offered Manning an opportunity to speak as a source to a reporter — which would have obligated Lamo to protect his identity if Manning requested it — and Manning declined.

They show a keen interest on Lamo's part in WikiLeaks' security procedures, and how it protects the anonymity of its leakers: "Does Assange use AIM or other messaging services? I'd like to chat with him one of these days about opsec [operational security]," Lamo asked at one point. At some point during their chats, Lamo alerted federal authorities to Manning's role in the leaks but kept chatting with him. It's unclear whether Lamo's questions about "opsec" at WikiLeaks occurred before or after he went to the authorities, but if they occurred after, they could have been part of an attempt to gather intelligence to help U.S. officials penetrate the site's security.

UPDATE: The Daily Beast is now reporting that Assange canceled his appearance in Las Vegas "within the last several days," according to Investigative Reporters and Editors executive director Mark Horvik. That means the group has been using its Twitter feed to engage in a little disinformation. We imagine there's a disappointed Army Criminal Investigations Division agent lurking outside the Paris Las Vegas hotel right about now.

Want to know what that exchange was between Brad Manning and Adrian Lamo?? Of course you do.

The whole thing is available at http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/wikileaks-chat/