Bradley Manning Admits Providing Files to WikiLeaks

Appearing before a military judge for more than an hour, Private Manning read a statement recounting how he joined the military, became an intelligence analyst in Iraq, decided that certain files should become known to the American public to prompt a wider debate about foreign policy, downloaded them from a secure computer network and then ultimately uploaded them to WikiLeaks.

“No one associated with WLO” — an abbreviation he used to refer to the WikiLeaks organization — “pressured me into sending any more information,” Private Manning said. “I take full responsibility.”

Before reading the statement, Private Manning pleaded guilty to 10 criminal counts in connection with the huge amount of material he leaked, which included videos of airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan in which civilians were killed, logs of military incident reports, assessment files of detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and a quarter-million cables from American diplomats stationed around the world.

The guilty pleas exposed him to up to 20 years in prison. But the case against Private Manning, a slightly built 25-year-old who has become a folk hero among antiwar and whistle-blower advocacy groups, is not over. The military has charged him with a far more serious set of offenses, including aiding the enemy, and multiple counts of violating federal statutes, including the Espionage Act. Prosecutors now have the option of pressing forward with proving the remaining elements of those charges.

That would involve focusing only on questions like whether the information he provided counted as the sort covered by the Espionage Act — that is, whether it was not just confidential but also could be used to injure the United States or aid a foreign nation.

Private Manning described himself as thinking carefully about the kind of information he was releasing, and taking care to make sure that none of it could cause harm if disclosed.

The only material that initially gave him pause, he said, were the diplomatic cables, which he portrayed as documenting “back-room deals and seemingly criminal activity.”

But he decided to go forward after discovering that the most sensitive cables were not in the database. He was also motivated, he said, by a book about “open diplomacy” after World War I and “how the world would be a better place if states would not make secret deals with each other.”

“I believed the public release of these cables would not damage the United States,” he said. “However, I did believe the release of the cables might be embarrassing.”

Private Manning said the first set of documents he decided to release consisted of hundreds of thousands of military incident reports from Afghanistan and Iraq. He had downloaded them onto a disk because the network connection at his base in Iraq kept failing, and he and his colleagues needed regular access to them.

Those reports added up to a history of the “day-to-day reality” in both war zones that he believed showed the flaws in the counterinsurgency policy the United States was then pursuing. The military, he said, was “obsessed with capturing or killing” people on a list, while ignoring the impact of its operations on ordinary people.

Private Manning said he put the files on a digital storage card for his camera and took it home with him on a leave in early 2010. He then decided to give the files to a newspaper.

“I believed if the public — in particular the American public — had access to the information” in the reports, “this could spark a debate about foreign policy in relation to Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said.

Private Manning said he first called The Washington Post and spoke to an unidentified reporter for about five minutes. He decided that the reporter did not seem particularly interested because she said The Post would have to review the material before making any commitment.

He said he then tried to reach out to The New York Times by calling a phone number for the newspaper’s public editor — an ombudsman who is not part of the newsroom — and leaving a voice mail message that was not returned.

Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington.

Providing a Template to Challenge Apple

TAIPEI — In the China smartphone market, Apple has seen better days.

Despite having reported record sales of the iPhone 5, the U.S. technology giant’s presence on the mainland flagged in 2012; it was pushed out of the top five smartphone makers in that market during the third quarter, with just 8 percent of the market, according to the research firm Canalys.

As Coolpad, Huawei, Lenovo, Samsung and ZTE surged ahead of Apple, a major force behind their success was MediaTek, a Taiwanese chip maker whose products have drastically reduced the cost for manufacturers of getting new phones to market.

The company entered the smartphone business late, introducing its first chipset in 2011 inside a Lenovo phone. But within a year and a half, analysts say, MediaTek has taken 50 percent of China’s market for smartphone chips.

That success has come with the adoption of what MediaTek calls a “turnkey solution.” Rather than simply provide a chip, the company also offers instructions on how to build a phone, the software architecture to run it and dedicated consultants to advise phone makers through the production process. MediaTek’s chief financial officer, David Ku, describes this as a franchise model in which all the clients have to do is “turn on the burner.”

Peter Liao, an analyst at Nomura Securities who covers the industry, said MediaTek saved phone makers the often prohibitive cost of research and development.

“It typically takes a lot of money and time to develop a new handset model, but MediaTek comes in and provides a total solution,” Mr. Liao said.

The company has proved wildly popular among Chinese phone makers. Besides supplying Huawei, Lenovo and ZTE, MediaTek also supports lesser-known manufacturers, including those that make so-called bandit phones that imitate premium models from Apple, Samsung and HTC.

TCL Communication Technology Holdings, a Chinese phone maker that sells phones primarily in Europe and Latin America, uses MediaTek’s chips. Its chief operating officer, Wang Jiyang, said that when his company works with MediaTek, its only major design tasks are to make the software more user-friendly and to tailor the look and feel of the phone.

“In general, with MediaTek’s help, we’re able to achieve almost twice as fast time to market, compared to other solutions,” Mr. Wang said.

MediaTek was founded in 1997. It started out making chips for home entertainment electronics like DVD players and televisions before moving into components for CD and DVD-ROM devices. In 2004, it began making chips for small mobile phones.

MediaTek estimates that it will lead the Chinese market by selling 110 million smartphone chips in 2012, up from 10 million chips a year ago.

By comparison, Qualcomm, the global leader in smartphone chips, is expected to finish 2012 in second place in China with 82 million chips shipped, according to the research firm DigiTimes.

MediaTek has been powered by consumers like Zhang Ying, 31, who want to try the latest technology but not pay a premium for it. Mr. Zhang, a Shanghai resident, bought a knockoff HTC phone last year. “Every person has a price point,” he said. “At a time when some of my friends were buying Samsung or iPhone, I wanted to show that I can keep up with them. A lot of domestic phones are cheap and of fairly good quality.”

People who think like Mr. Zhang are dominating sales, especially among first-time smartphone buyers. In a September report, McKinsey, the global consulting firm, estimated that 69 percent of all smartphones sold in China would cost less than 1,500 renminbi, or about $240, by the second half of 2013.

And MediaTek is taking its business model to other emerging markets. The company’s products support features that are popular in developing countries, like noise-reducing speakers and slots for two SIM cards.

In India, local brands like Spice and Micromax are rolling out lower-priced smartphone models using MediaTek parts. In Brazil, phones by Motorola Mobility, as well as local brands like Gradiente and Multilaser, will also have MediaTek chips.