US initiates post-WikiLeaks security crackdown

White House sets up committee to assess damage, organize efforts to tighten security measures in govt agencies.

WASHINGTON: The White House set up a special committee to assess the damage from the flood of classified cables leaked by WikiLeaks and organize efforts to tighten security measures in government agencies.

White House officials said President Barack Obama's national security staff had created an interagency panel to coordinate the response to the leaks and come up with new ways to keep the classified documents secret.

The State Department cables, which follow similar document leaks by the WikiLeaks on the Iraq and Afghan wars, cast a glaring, and sometimes embarrassing light on the inner workings of US diplomacy when they were leaked in the last few days. This prompted concern that, under procedures developed after the September 11 attacks to share intelligence more widely, too much sensitive data was being made available, even to relatively low-level US military analysts.

Bradley Manning, an Army private who worked as an intelligence analyst in Iraq, has been charged by military authorities with unauthorized downloading of more than 150,000 State Department cables, though US officials declined to say whether they were the same ones released by WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks is under US criminal investigation for the release.

In another move to counter WikiLeaks, Amazon.com Inc has stopped hosting the website, the US Senate Homeland Security Committee chairman Joe Lieberman said. Lieberman's staff had earlier approached Amazon after news reports that WikiLeaks had hired the Internet giant to host the website loaded with the secret documents on the Amazon servers because hackers had targeted the WikiLeaks site.

"I call on any other company or organization that is hosting WikiLeaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them," Lieberman, said in a statement.

WikiLeaks stated on Sunday that when media outlets began publishing its documents, its site was the target of a "distributed denial of service" attack, a computer attack meant to overwhelm a website and render it unavailable.

The White House said individual government agencies would set up their own security teams and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the most senior US intelligence official, would provide advice.

An earlier draft of the document had said the National Counterintelligence Executive, part of the ODNI, would set up teams of inspectors to "identify existing security policy within each agency" and assess its effectiveness. That idea appeared to have been dropped, apparently reflecting concern on the part of non-intelligence agencies about excessive interference by intelligence agents.

Michael Leiter, head of the US National Counterterrorism Center, said the WikiLeaks publication had exposed the risk of providing "excess information to people who really don't need it" and added "we certainly will re-evaluate where the information is going. In an appearance at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank, he said that he was confident that security-related intelligence was being protected. "I am actually relatively comfortable with the way in which information is being shared and adequately protected within the counter-terrorism community today," he said.