Bradley Manning appeared in court at Fort Meade in Maryland this morning for the start of a pretrial hearing, to determine whether he will face a court-martial. Manning, whose 24th birthday is tomorrow, faces up to a lifetime in military prison for allegedly releasing hundreds of thousands of secret US state documents and national security secrets to WikiLeaks.

As the WikiLeaks saga marches on, federal investigations creep closer to home. And while the courts still have yet to determine how much whistle blowing is and isn't legal, Boston activists are speaking out -- and coming to the defense of Bradley Manning.

Manning, the US Army private accused of downloading and transferring classified government information to WikiLeaks, attended a party in Boston University's "hacker space" just three months before WikiLeaks published the now-infamous "Collateral Murder" video footage evidencing the US military in killings of Reuters journalists and Iraqi civilians.

This afternoon WIKILEAKS released the first batch of an estimated 250,000 State Department cables -- an event that has had official Washington, and the diplomatic missions of half the civilized world, shaking in its boots.

If this were Mean Girls, this would be the scene where pages from the Burn Book start showing up all over school.

Cambridge's elite academic institutions enjoy a friendly rivalry, but this is getting ridiculous, no?

Sure, that deported Russian spy had a degree from Harvard's Kenedy School of Government -- what self-respecting Ruskie doesn't bleed Crimson? But MIT, not to be outdone, is now (allegedly) implicated in the (potentially) treasonous release of thousands of classified documents relating to the U.