According to government officials, PFC Bradley Manning, charged with illegally transferring volumes of classified data to Wikileaks, used writable CDs to pull the information from Army computers, getting around a Pentagon prohibition on external storage devices.

But in their story about it this morning, the New York Times buries the lede:

According to Pentagon officials and one former hacker who has communicated with Private Manning, he appears to have taken compact discs that can accept text, video and other data files into an intelligence center in the desert of eastern Iraq to copy and remove the classified information.
He was able to avoid detection not because he kept a poker face, they said, but apparently because he hummed and lip-synched to Lady Gaga songs to make it appear that he was using the classified computer’s CD player to listen to music.
Adrian Lamo, a well-known former hacker, had traded electronic messages in which Private Manning described his unhappiness with the Army — and, Mr. Lamo said, his activities downloading classified data.
Mr. Lamo said Private Manning described how he had used compact discs capable of storing data, but tucked inside recognizable music CD cases, “to bring the data out of the secure room.”
“He indicated he disguised one as a Lady Gaga CD,” Mr. Lamo said Thursday in a telephone interview. “He said he lip-synched to blend in.”

Just wait until her husband, the Third Earl of Gaga, hears about this.

UPDATE: A reader writes in:

I work in a DoD office that is classified to do Secret processing. You cannot walk around here unescorted unless you have at least a Secret clearance -and- a visit request (reason to be here) on file. We escort the cleaning lady when she picks up the trash.
The office bans usb devices, cell phones, and anything that has a wireless capability such as laptops. We keep our blinds drawn so that the bad guys can’t peer in the windows.
Yet we use cds to move data between machines all the time. I could easily walk out of here with a great deal of secret information on cd, but I took an oath not to do so. Geting caught doing so would be the permanent end of my security clearance (unlike Sandy Berger), immediate loss of employment, and possible criminal prosecution.
But short of searching everyone when they leave, it is difficult to prevent this kind of theft. I hope he gets 20 years.