Three years after the Army private was thrown in solitary confinement for leaking secret government documents, I spoke with Manning’s friends and acquaintances. They said he’s the type that can’t resist getting involved if he perceives an injustice and he has a tendency to spark confrontation with authority figures.

Julian Assange was constantly uprooted as a child. His parents were in the movie business and on the run from a cult. A computer geek who sharpened his skills at 16 years-old on a Commodore 64, Assange was driven by a need to challenge authority.

A quick-turn story following a source’s tip that WikiLeaks planned to dump 400,000 secret documents related to the Iraq war. The documents turned out to be much bleaker portrait of the conflict than officials in had Washington portrayed.

I got an exclusive first interview with Adrian Lamo, the hacker to whom Bradley Manning confessed. U.S. Army Private Manning stole government documents that revealed secret information about U.S. war strategy and reached out to Lamo, a rockstar in the hacker world, to ask Lamo what he should do with the information. Lamo went to the FBI. "I went to the right authorities, because it seemed incomprehensible that someone could leak that massive amount of data and not have it endanger human life," Lamo said. "If I had acted for my own comfort and convenience and sat on my hands with that information, and I had endangered national security ... I would have been the worst kind of coward."