<nettime> Wikileaks: State Pulls the Plug On SIPRNet (fwd)

Tyler Durden camera_lumina at hotmail.com
Sat Dec 4 18:16:55 PST 2010


This goes back to that old argument: If I make a product with a completely
defective security model, shouldn't I be held complicit in its compromise?

In other words, this was bound to happen. Was the only protection the promise
of some form of punishment? Is that sufficient for state secrets?


> Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2010 05:26:24 -0600
> From: measl at mfn.org
> To: cypherpunks at al-qaeda.net
> Subject: FWD: <nettime> Wikileaks: State Pulls the Plug On SIPRNet (fwd)
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2010 11:08:38 +0100
> From: Felix Stalder <felix at openflows.com>
> To: nettime-l at kein.org
> Subject: <nettime> Wikileaks: State Pulls the Plug On SIPRNet
> Resent-Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2010 11:05:11 +0100
> Resent-From: nettime at kein.org
> Resent-To: Nettime <nettime-l at kein.org>
>
>
>
> Seems like Assange's 'secrecy tax' is making itself felt.
>
> Felix
>
>
> State Pulls the Plug On SIPRNet
> November 29, 2010 at 9:26 pm
>
> http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2010/11/29/state-pulls-the-plug-on-siprnet/
>
>
> Late last week, after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton informed the White
> House of the likely fall-out from the WikiLeaks cable dump, the White House
> came back with a question: What's our corrective action?
>
> Clinton's undersecretary for management, Patrick Kennedy, had a simple
> suggestion: pull the plug on SIPRNet [1], the classified DoD network that
> PFC Bradley Manning reportedly used to download the cables from State's
> inhouse classified database. The White House said do it, says a senior
> administration official.
>
> The publication by WikiLeaks of more than 250,000 diplomatic cables, many
> of them classified, is forcing an administration-wide intelligence
> retrenchment as agencies reconsider how to balance the need to share with
> the need to know. With its third major dump of controversial classified
> information in nine months, WikiLeaks is single-handedly tipping the
> balance back towards inter-agency "stovepiping", or walling off information
> from other departments.
>
> Post 9.11 the imperative from Congress and the White House was to break
> down the stovepipes that prevented sharing across the so-called
> intelligence communitythe sprawling collection of intelligence offices in
> more than a dozen different agencies across the U.S. government and around
> the world.
>
> At State, they created the Net-Centric Diplomacy" database or NCD, where
> State stored classified information up to the top secret level. Agencies
> across government had access to that database through their own secure
> networks. In DoD's case the network, created in 1995, was called the Secure
> Internet Protocol Router Network, or SIPRNet.
>
> Late last week, at Kennedy's recommendation and the White House's approval,
> State disconnected SIPRNet from the NCD, senior administration officials
> tell Time. Obviously there were some gaps within SIPRNet that DoD is
> actively correcting, the senior administration official says, And as a
> temporary precaution we have disconnected SIPRNet from the NCD.
>
> How long is temporary? DoD is investigating how Manning managed to download
> all those cables and get them to WikiLeaks, the senior administration
> officials tell Time. So far they have concluded that the failure came at
> Dod's Central Command, the combatant command responsible for the middle
> east, which employed Manning in Iraq. Prior to Manning's download, users of
> SIPRNet had been blocked from downloading data to removable media.
>
> But at some point that restriction was lifted across all of CentCom. DoD
> has been reimposing restrictions since the July dump of Afghanistan war
> documents by WikiLeaks. DoD has blocked the use of removable media; they
> have required in some cases a dual key system that requires a second
user
> to approve moving data from a higher classification system to a lower
> classification system; and they are installing software programs to monitor
> unusual activity.
>
> DoD is not completely cut off from State's database. A separate system for
> the transmission of top secret information, the Joint Worldwide
> Intelligence Communications System or JWICS [2], is still linked to the
> NCD. And State may reconnect SIPRNet in the future. Once DoD has gone
> through and made its corrections on SIPRNet we'll reevaluate whether to
> reconnect, the senior administration official says.
>
>
>
> [1] http://www.fas.org/irp/program/disseminate/siprnet.htm
> [2] http://www.fas.org/irp/program/disseminate/jwics.htm
>
>
>
>
> --- http://felix.openflows.com ----------------------- books out now:
> *|Deep Search.The Politics of Search Beyond Google.Studienverlag 2009
> *|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions.Scheidegger&Spiess2008
> *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006
> *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005
>
>
>
>
>
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