A government digital forensic expert linked told a court how Army leaker Bradley Manning had thousands of U.S. State Department cables on one of Manning's work computers. The files included unclassified and top secret cables, among other incriminating documents.

Special agent David Shaver, who works for the Army's Computer Crime Investigative Unit, said that on one of two laptops that Manning used he found a folder called "blue". In this folder he found a zip file containing 10,000 diplomatic cables in HTML format, and an Excel spreadsheet with three tabs. 

The first tab listed scripts for Wget, a program used to crawl a network and download large numbers of files. It would allow to get into the Net Centric Diplomacy database where the State Department documents were located and download the lot. The second tab listed message record identification numbers of State Department cables from March and April 2010; the third tab listed message record numbers for cables from May 2010.

Manning appeared to be using the Wget tool in March 2010. Shaver told the court that whoever did this was keeping track of where they were in the downloading process.

Shaver is the final government witness on Sunday, the third day of a pre-trial hearing that will determine whether the soldier will face a court martial on more than 20 charges of violating military law. It is claimed that he handed the files on to Wikileaks.