>> tonight on "nightline" -- ce between american

good evening, i'm terry moran. we begin with today's astounding leak of secret diplomatic cables supposedly private correspondence between american diplomats and washington, overflowing with insider analysis, personal impression, of foreign leaders and other sensitive material. secretary of state hillary clinton said the leak, quote, puts people's lives in danger. experts say thousands of people had access to the cables. but tonight one young intelligence analyst is in the spotlight. how did it happen? how, as investigators allege, did bradley manning, a 22-year-old private at a forward operating base in iraq, get access to the treasure trove of diplomatic secrets of the united states from around the world and leak them? >> it's a culture of trust.

we trust the guy because he's wearing olive. >> reporter: today, as secretary of state hillary clinton made clear, the u.s. government was regretting the trust it placed in those responsible for the leaks. >> this disclosure is not just an attack on america's foreign policy interests, it is an attack on the international community, the alliances and partnerships, the conversations and negotiations that safeguard global security and advance economic prosperity. >> reporter: there's no question the leaked cables are deeply embarrassing to the united states and the obama administration. in them, there were matters of the greatest global urgency. one cable has saudi arabia's king abdullah privately urging the u.s. to stop iran's progress towards a nuclear weapon. cut off the head of the snake, he said. which is not what he's saying in public. and there is plenty of diplomatic cattiness. one cable says russian president

medvedev plays robin to putin's batman. another says french president sarkozy is an emperor with no clothes. another gossips about libyan leader gadhafi's voluptuous blonde ukrainian nurse who travels with him everywhere. >> at least one of my counterparts said to me, well, don't worry about it, you should see what we say about you. so i think that this is well understood in the diplomatic community as part of the give and take. >> reporter: but to experts inside and outside the government, these leaks are no laughing matter. >> what is at issue here are sources and methods. the people, the systems and the way and the manner in which we acquire sensitive information. >> reporter: this is a former federal prosecutor with deep experience in national security cases. >> how can he came to know that the politbureau in china made a decision, there's only one way,

that was from somebody in that meeting and the chinese are now trying to find out who that person was. that person's going to be dead. the chinese do not mince words with people who spy against them. they kill them. >> reporter: investigators say it was private bradley manning who did all that. manning, who grew up in oklahoma and in great britain after his parents divorced, struggled in the army. demoted from specialist after being charged with assault. sent to a chaplain when superiors noted odd behaviors. then, last spring, he reached out online. >> people spy for usually one out of four reasons. either money, ideology, coercion or ego. mr. manning's reasons strike me as being ideology and ego. >> reporter: adrian lomo is a convicted computer hacker who says manning contacted him in may. and who then alerted the fbi to their online chats. >> he struck me as a fairly humble person but one who wanted

approbation for his actions, to wanted to be recognized. >> reporter: in iraq, manning had a window on virtually the whole world of u.s. intelligence from his computer workstation which gave him access to siprnet, the secret internet protocol router network. the private computer network that government uses to transmit classified information around the world. but it's not very private. >> too many people had access. 600,000 people have access to this classification network. that is absurd. >> reporter: if that sounds absurd, remember back a few years. >> your government failed you. >> reporter: the 9/11 attacks led to a frenzy of intelligence reforms and sharing intelligence so analysts could connect the dots was given the highest priority. maybe too high. >> when a government gets as big as the united states government, it cannot be managed. and so when it sets up a system after 9/11 to allow people to

share information so they can use their imaginations to decide where the threats come from, this is the price you pay. you pay the price of access so that people on need the information can analyze it. however, it is also true that people like bradley manning did not need access to this information. >> reporter: in an online chat that adrian lomo says he had with manning last spring, manning described an unsupervised workplace. everyone just sat at their workstations, watching music videos, car chase, buildings exploding and writing more stuff to cd/dvd. the culture fed opportunities. former national security counterterrorism adviser richard clarke says the massive leak could have been prevented. >> lots of private companies and government ministries and agencies have software that will alert when someone is downloading information in a very large volume.

or they have information that will trigger when somebody is looking at something that's out of their responsibility. banks do this all the time. apparently the pentagon doesn't. >> reporter: government officials today claimed new security procedures would likely prevent a similar breech. as for why manning leaked all these secrets if investigators are right that he did, the young soldier seems to have become disillusioned. he wrote lomo in one of their chats, i want people to see the truth, regardless of who they are, because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public. julian assange, who runs the wikileaks site where the secret cables are being published, says today he has more than one source. in an interview in july with abc's jim sciutto, assange claimed not to know precisely who sent him the documents. >> we don't know who the source of material is. if those allegations are true, then of course the man is a hero. >> reporter: but that is not how prosecutors see bradley manning. he has already been charged with

serious crimes for previously leaks. now his life may be on the line. >> so i think it's notwithstanding the joy with which he appears to have disclosed this information and the boyishness and the naivete, notwithstanding all of that, i mean, his crimes are just legion and he'll be in jail probably for the rest of his life. >> reporter: well, needless to say, we'll continue to follow this story as additional documents come to light. when we come back, we're going to shift gears. we're going to take to the streets of oakland, california, to check out a curbside phenomenon, turf dancing. phenomenon, turf dancing. çwçwçwçwçwçwçwçwçwçwçwçwçwçwçwçw

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almost by definition most street art, dancing, painting, making music, never finds a truly broad audience. new modes of expression emerge in a single neighborhood or city. they flourish and die away. but some street culture does break through. especially now with the internet's helping hand. and such is the case with tub of dancing. it started in oakland, california, before it went viral. brian rooney has our report. >> reporter: it starts with a couple guys hanging on an oakland street corner in the rain. one of them has his face covered with a bandanna. a cop car passes. they can't be up to anything

good. and then this. ♪ the video of the rain dance was posted on youtube and became one of those sensations. now pushing toward 2 million views. ♪ there's a story behind this clip titled "rip rich d." the dancer in the white shirt, his brother was killed in a car accident on this same east oakland street corner the night before. he pulled together some of his friends from a groove called the turf feet. ♪ >> we all have just came to the corner and was, like, you know, let's give all we got for my brother. just dance, show your brother respect, show him you love him, show him you can't get far.

>> reporter: what they did for his brother didn't come out of nowhere. it's called turf dancing. and it came right out of this neighborhood. ♪ turf dancing is their art. ♪ turfing >> reporter: their expression of life in a troubled city. the stage is the concrete landscape and, often, the only music is the urban background of roaring engines and police sirens. ♪ it's an evolution of several styles of dancing. break dancing. hip-hop. no choreography. just moves. the rain video made it an international sensation. ♪ how did this grow out of living in oakland? >> coming up in oakland, it was, like, it's really nothing for us kids out here to do. we don't really have no mall. we don't have no bowling alleys

like that out here. for me, it's really nothing out here for us to do. we took it upon ours to make up something for us to do. we wanted to dance. we took it to the parties and the functions and going out and dancing. >> reporter: it's kind of an indefinable thing. ♪ dancers have styles as unique as their nicknames. eninja. no noize. lil' loony. they do it in aband donned apartments. the kitchen. on the sidewalk. and in the middle of traffic. this cultural lightning has been captured on video by this person who graduated from uc berkeley just three years ago. >> turf dancing is the very organic form of dance that's from young people hanging out in the neighborhoods.

at parties. and just finding a way to move and react to the music being created by their friends, by their community. >> reporter: his business partner moved here from texas during high school to live with his father. >> people talked about the high school i was going to, that it was going to be a dangerous place. >> reporter: but he was interested in dance and he hook up with the dancing crowd. ♪ >> oakland is a difficult place to live in. people get robbed at night. like, people break into houses. >> reporter: and barely older than kids themselves, some of them have children. they're not angels. they live the life that feeds their street moves. this video is a memorial for a friend, 18-year-old kenneth ross, who was shot and killed a year ago in a confrontation with the oakland police. ♪ a few of their moves are perfected at the neighborhood community center called youth uprising. where some of the things they do on polished wood --

>> whoo! >> reporter: -- defy the laws of physics. ♪ this improvisational street dancing has spread around the world. ♪ the day we visited, two brothers from france were in oakland. they are known as le twins. impressive even in the hometown of turf dancing. they were fresh off an appearance on "the ellen degeneres" show in los angeles, showing the host who's got the real moves. turf dancing has yet to be packaged and commercialized. that may happen. but it wasn't created to make money. just to have something to do in a city with little else. >> people who were elders worry about us selling druss or us, you know, like robbing people as

doing negative things. once they see us start dancing, people's attitudes about us start to change. that's what i hope is going to change oakland. is that everyone, like, can just feel what turf dances are about and that oakland's not just all about, like, violence and, you know, hatred. >> reporter: when the turf kings made their video in the rain it was to mourn a brother but also to show that oakland can do better. that they can do better. ♪ this is brian rooney for "nightline" in oakland, california. >> dance and life in oakland. thanks to brian rooney for that report. up next, he lives for little moments like that. çwçwçwçwçwçwçwçwçwçwçwçwçwçwçwçw

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wanted ♪ ♪ everything i need >> i co-wrote the song "she's everything" with a man named will nance and he wrote it about his wife and i wrote it about mine. somewhere in between, the beauty of it is, they both think it's about them. this that is always the challenge when you're writing something, to capture it to where, for me, we get this song that does say this is for my wife and then other people hear it and say, no, that's obviously for my wife. ♪ ♪ looks like i got a tiger by the tail ♪ >> the first memory of song is buck owens "tiger by the tail." when i was a little kid, they would play that. it had this great thing that kids like, which is that sort of -- whatever it was that buck did, that train beat, that thing which was sort of -- ♪ i've got a tiger by the tail it's plain to see ♪ and they would play that record on the stereo at home.

i would run around in circles until i fell down. ♪ slow dancing john mayer's music is some of the best stuff to -- you know, that sort of mood music. i like "slow dancing" off "continuum." i can tell he wasn't out to do anything other than to paint the perfect sort of picture. and what he did i think was a masterpiece. that's a great bust song for -- after show, starts to go down the road, maybe don't want to watch tv, put that on. through the stereo. just sit there and read a magazine to it or something. ♪ ♪ marry you're covered in roses ♪ ♪ you're covered in ashes patty griffin songs like "mary," that's just one of the greatest songs ever written. not a lot of people are familiar with it if you're not a fan of

that sort of music, you know? because i don't think -- was that ever a chart hit on any -- i doubt it. i don't think it was ever what you would call a number one record on any chart. coming from nashville, my background, i'm always just looking at the chart. meanwhile, i got this influence of my wife that came into my life that had never really done that. she is the type of person that relies on her friends or her sister or her brother. they'll say, you've got to hear this new record. she introduced me to some of that stuff that is more on the artsy side. dire straits. "money for nothing" to me is a masterpiece. it's in every way. first of all, you have the -- ♪ you've got the guitar part that's -- ♪ it's told from the perspective of a guy who moves refrigerators for a living, you know, dreaming about being a rock star.

and, you know, that's a topic that never gets old. ♪ we'll carry on my chemical romance, "black parade." the con kof ni of sound in that record, there's something masterful about that. ♪ >> an eclectic list there from the country master. when we come back, a federal pay freeze. first, here's jimmy. >> thanks, terry. tonight, david sedaris is with us, music from nicki minaj and ben affleck.

time now for ni