<nettime> Wikileaks: State Pulls the Plug On SIPRNet
Felix Stalder
felix at openflows.com
Wed Dec 1 02:08:38 PST 2010
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: bWhat's our corrective action?b
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. bThe White House said do it,b 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 bstovepipesb that prevented sharing across the so-called
intelligence communitybthe 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 bNet-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. bObviously there were some gaps within SIPRNet that DoD is
actively correcting,b the senior administration official says, bAnd as a
temporary precaution we have disconnected SIPRNet from the NCD.b
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 bdual keyb 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. bOnce DoD has gone
through and made its corrections on SIPRNet we'll reevaluate whether to
reconnect,b 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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