Striking back, the Obama administration branded the WikiLeaks release
of more than a quarter-million sensitive files an attack on the United
States Monday and raised the prospect of criminal prosecutions in
connection with the exposure. The Pentagon detailed new security
safeguards, including restraints on small computer flash drives, to make
it harder for any one person to copy and reveal so many secrets.
The young Army Pfc.
suspected of stealing the diplomatic memos, many of them classified,
and feeding them to WikiLeaks may have defeated Pentagon security
systems using little more than a Lady Gaga CD and a portable computer
memory stick.
The soldier, Bradley Manning
has not been charged in the latest release of internal U.S. government
documents. But officials said he is the prime suspect partly because of
his own description of how he pulled off a staggering heist of
classified and restricted material.
"No one suspected a thing," Manning told a confidant
afterward, according to a log of his computer chat published by
Wired.com. "I didn't even have to hide anything."
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton asserted
Monday that WikiLeaks acted illegally in posting the material. She said
the administration was taking "aggressive steps to hold responsible
those who stole this information."
Attorney General Eric Holder said the government was
mounting a criminal investigation, and the Pentagon was tightening
access to information, including restricting the use of computer storage
devices such as CDs and flash drives.
"This is not saber-rattling," Holder said. Anyone found to have broken American law "will be held responsible."
Holder said the latest disclosure, involving
classified and sensitive State Department documents, jeopardized the
security of the nation, its diplomats, intelligence assets and
relationships with foreign governments.
A weary-looking Clinton agreed.
"I want you to know that we are taking aggressive
steps to hold responsible those who stole this information," Clinton
said. She spoke in between calls to foreign capitals to make amends for
scathing and gossipy memos never meant for foreign eyes.
Manning is charged in military court with taking
other classified material later published by the online clearinghouse
WikiLeaks. It is not clear whether others such as WikiLeaks executives
might be charged separately in civilian courts.
Clinton said the State Department was adding security
protections to prevent another breach. The Pentagon, embarrassed by the
apparent ease with which secret documents were passed to WikiLeaks, had
detailed some of its new precautions Sunday.
Col. Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, said it was
possible that many people could be held accountable if they were found
to have ignored security protocols or somehow enabled the download
without authorization.
A senior Defense Department official, speaking on
condition of anonymity because the criminal case against Manning is
pending, said he was unaware of any firings or other discipline over the
security conditions at Manning's post in Iraq.
In his Internet chat, Manning described the
conditions as lax to the point that he could bring a homemade music CD
to work with him, erase the music and replace it with secrets. He told
the computer hacker who would turn him in that he lip-synched along with
pop singer Lady Gaga's hit "Telephone" while making off with "possibly
the largest data spillage in American history."
Wired.com published a partial log of Manning's discussions with hacker R. Adrian Lamo in June.
"Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security,
weak counterintelligence, inattentive signal analysis," Manning wrote.
"A perfect storm."
His motive, according to the chat logs: "I want
people to see the truth ... because without information, you cannot make
informed decisions as a public."
By his own admission, Manning was apparently able to pull material from
outside the Pentagon, including documents he had little obvious reason
to see. He was arrested shortly after those chats last spring. He was
moved in July to the Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia to await
trial on the earlier charges and could face up to 52 years in a military
prison if convicted.
There are no new charges, and none are likely at least until after a
panel evaluates Manning's mental fitness early next year, said Lt. Col.
Rob Manning, spokesman for the Military District of Washington. He is no
relation to Bradley Manning.
Manning's civilian lawyer, David E. Combs, declined comment.
Lapan, the Pentagon spokesman, said the WikiLeaks experience has
encouraged discussion within the military about how better to strike a
balance between sharing information with those who need it and
protecting it from disclosure.
So far, he said, Pentagon officials are not reviewing who has access to
data but focusing instead on installing technical safeguards.
Since summer, when WikiLeaks first published stolen war logs from the
conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Defense Department has made it
harder for one person acting alone to download material from a
classified network and place it on an unclassified one.
Such transfers generally take two people now, what Pentagon officials
call a "two-man carry." Users also leave clearer electronic footprints
by entering a computer "kiosk," or central hub, en route to downloading
the classified material.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the WikiLeaks case
revealed vulnerable seams in the information-sharing systems used by
multiple government agencies. Some of those joint systems were designed
to answer another problem: the failure of government agencies to share
what they knew before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
"These efforts to give diplomatic, military, law enforcement and
intelligence specialists quicker and easier access to greater amounts of
data have had unintended consequences," Whitman said.
Agencies across the U.S. government have installed safeguards around the
use of flash drives and computer network operations, said Navy Rear
Adm. Michael Brown, the Department of Homeland Security's director for
cybersecurity coordination.
Like the Pentagon, Homeland Security has laid out policies to ensure
that employees are using the networks correctly, that the classified and
unclassified networks are properly identified, and that there are
detailed procedures for moving information from one network to another.
Dale Meyerrose, former chief information officer for the U.S.
intelligence community, said Monday that it will never be possible to
completely stop such breaches.
"This is a personnel security issue, more than it is a technical issue,"
said Meyerrose, now a vice president at Harris Corp. "How can you
prevent a pilot from flying the airplane into the ground? You can't.
Anybody you give access to can become a disgruntled employee or an
ideologue that goes bad."
One official in contact with U.S. military and diplomatic staff in Iraq
said they already were seeing the effect of a tighter collar on
information.
The State Department and other agencies are restricting access among the
Army and nonmilitary agencies, the official said. The official spoke on
condition of anonymity to discuss the sharing of classified
information.
Former CIA director Michael Hayden warned the latest leak will affect
what other governments are willing to share with the U.S. as well as
change the way U.S. officials share information among themselves.
"You're going to put a lot less in cables now," he said.