How did WikiLeaks get all these cables?

New Delhi: How did WikiLeaks get hold of so many classified diplomatic cables? One of the primary lessons the US learnt after the 9/ 11 attacks was that parts of its intelligence system did actually pick up signs of an impending terrorist attack, but there had been a failure to “connect the dots”.
Therefore, one of the first corrective measures was to remove the statutory barriers between agencies to encourage a greater sharing of information, which optimists called the “globalization” of intelligence.
Therefore, military intelligence analyst Bradley Manning (a private first class who went by the chat ID bradass87) found himself looking at tonnes of classified State Department cables, sitting in a shack outside Baghdad. Manning had been assigned in October 2009 to a support battalion with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, based at Forward Operating Base Hammer, Iraq. He may have been interested only in Iran, but at some stage, mad at the war and armed with his top secret access (by this time the “globalization” drive meant that almost 3 million people had the same top secret access) Manning trawled via the SIPRnet (Secure Internet Protocol Router Network) and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS) and downloaded tonnes of files on a DVD with a Lady Gaga cover on it.
Manning passed it on to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks. This would have remained unnoticed if he hadn’t confided to a friend, Adrian Lamo, who was a reformed hacker. Since his conscience smote him, Lamo, a civilian, went off to tell the FBI about the leak. Manning was arrested in May 2010 for passing on cables to the whistleblower website and is in solitary confinement.
The leaked material is said to have included over 250,000 diplomatic cables, the first of which WikiLeaks published in February 2010 — a video of US soldiers killing Reuters journalists in Iraq, even when it was perfectly clear that they were photographers, called “Collateral Murder”.