MANAMA, Bahrain—U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, asked Friday what foreigners should think about
the extraordinary breach of cybersecurity that led to the WikiLeaks crisis, pointed to the George W. Bush
administration's decision following the 9/11 attacks to vastly expand the
sharing of secret information.
Asked how such a huge leak could have occurred and why no
alarm bells went off when a low-level intelligence analyst allegedly downloaded
250,000 classified diplomatic cables, Clinton replied: "The decision was made
in the Bush administration to add the diplomatic cables to the Defense
Department's special network that was created for that purpose."
While she defended the move as defensible at the time, she
emphasized that these policies were being rolled back in the wake of the
WikiLeaks crisis, perhaps for good.
"The process was undertaken in order to do a better job of
what's called ‘connecting the dots,' because after 9/11, one of the principle
criticisms of the government was that the information was stovepiped, that the
Defense Department knew things that the State Department didn't know, that the
White House didn't know," Clinton explained. "So it was understandable for the
Bush administration to say, ‘We need to end the stovepiping and figure out how
to have greater situational awareness and sharing of information.'"
Without identifying anyone by name, she then said that it
was in the Defense Department, not the State Department, where the leak
occurred.
"The individual... was a fully cleared military intelligence
officer... [The Pentagon is] conducting a very vigorous investigation to
determine why no alarm bells went off," Clinton said. (Media speculation has
swirled around Pfc. Bradley Manning,
an intelligence analyst with the 10th Mountain division in Iraq who
has been charged with transferring classified information to an unauthorized
source.)
Clinton then explained that the State Department had severed
its classified files from the Secret Internet Protocol Routing Network
(SIPRNet), a network that was set up to share information between Foggy Bottom
and the Pentagon. She revealed for the first time that this action had been
taken well before the WikiLeaks cables starting floating out into the open.
"I directed we would cease sharing, for whatever time it may
take, our cables. That stopped as soon as this gentleman was apprehended," she
said. Manning was arrested in May.
Clinton also pledged that the United States would prosecute
anyone connected to the disclosures. She said that any guilty parties would
certainly be prosecuted, and that the prosecutions would go further, reaching
those involved in distributing the cables such as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
"[Manning] is clearly going to be prosecuted along with
anyone who participated or contributed to the crimes that he committed,"
Clinton said.
She continued the administration's two-pronged public
relations strategy of playing up the danger of the leaks, while downplaying the
information in the cables themselves. On the one hand, she warned the assembled
leaders of dozens of countries at the conference that the problem was serious
and was as dangerous to them as to the United States.
"The attack on the United States' information system was
really an attack on the international community," she said. "I believe that
this attack, if left unpunished, will be just the first of many against anyone,
anywhere."
She then told the assembled leaders that the cables
contained nothing really shocking.
"Some of the analysis that has been done with the
information that has been made available through these leaks has basically
concluded there's not much news... There's no big revelation; it's the day-to-day
work of what diplomats all around the world do."
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