Legacy of WikiLeaks scandal might be agency mistrust

The most disturbing implication of the WikiLeaks scandal is perhaps not the frayed diplomatic relationships but the broken trust among U.S. agencies that had been sharing information to help stop terrorists, some former national security officials said on Wednesday.

Last year, Pfc. Bradley Manning allegedly extracted -- for publication on the anti-secrets website WikiLeaks -- sensitive and embarrassing files on foreign allies from a classified federal network shared by the State and Defense departments, among other agencies. But some security experts expect the episode to soon fade from memory, because the breach has spawned an entire culture of eavesdropping. The new worry among federal officials is that this era of total disclosure will deter intelligence officers, diplomats and law enforcement authorities from telling each other about findings that, when pieced together, could nab terrorists.

"My real concern about WikiLeaks is that it is going to dry up that cooperation," said Frederick Hitz, the former and first inspector general of the CIA, who led an investigation into the Aldrich Ames spy case in the 1990s. He spoke at a Wednesday breakfast that Nextgov's sister publication Government Executive co-hosted with the SANS Institute, a computer security training center. Federal officials could refuse to reveal sensitive information about their agents to other departments, said Hitz, now a senior fellow at the University of Virginia Law School's Center for National Security Law.

The intelligence community was not surprised so much by the revelations that came out of the data dump, as by the source of the leak. "My gloss on a lot of the cables that I read is that it didn't take WikiLeaks to tell us that Berlusconi was having an affair in Italy," Hitz said. He was referring to compromised notes that said Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, now accused of inappropriate relationships with young women, "had a penchant for partying." If Manning was the leaker, Hitz said, the real shock is "how was he able to get all this information and get it into WikiLeaks?"

SANS Research Director Alan Paller said: "Isn't the cost not the knowledge but the trust that was broken? It's the outing of shared information that nations need in order to operate."

Aspiring leakers now are forming copycat sites aimed at publishing scandalous information to further their causes, some security experts say. For example, OpenLeaks.org intends to become a venue for anonymous tipsters to share stories with specific third parties, such as media outlets or public interest groups. The GreenLeaks.com site says it accepts information "of public interest" to hold governments and companies accountable for protecting the environment.

Meanwhile, House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., has launched a whistleblower site for federal employees to use to report fraud and abuse at their agencies.

At Wednesday's event, Jim Lewis, a former Foreign Service senior official assigned to national security and information technology projects, said Americans might not even remember the WikiLeaks affair in five years. "This is the business model," said Lewis, now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "This is going to be how people operate for a while."