Flaws in State Dept info-sharing tool allowed leak: Report

The database of the information-sharing tool called Net -Centric Diplomacy, so obscure that few diplomats had heard of it, contained the 250,000 State Department cables acquired by anti-secrecy activists, 'The Washington Post' reported.

The Net-Centric Diplomacy, launched in 2006, served an important mission: the rapid sharing of information that could help uncover threats against the United States.
"But like many bureaucratic inventions, it expanded beyond what its creators had imagined. It also contained risks that no one foresaw," the Post said.

But only recently have investigators understood the critical role played by Net-Centric Diplomacy, a computer initiative that became the conduit for what was perhaps the biggest heist of sensitive US government documents in modern times, it said.

Partly because of its design but also because of confusion among its users, the database became an inadvertent repository for a vast array of State Department cables, including records of the US government's most sensitive discussions with foreign leaders and diplomats.

Unfortunately for the department, the system lacked features to detect the unauthorised downloading by Pentagon employees and others of massive amounts of data, according to State Department officials and information-security experts.

"This was as bad as it gets," said Patrick F Kennedy, undersecretary of state for management, referring to the diplomatic fallout following the WikiLeaks' publication of the secret cables from hundreds of American missions across the globe.

"We had, over the course of many years, built up a huge amount of faith and trust. That's ruptured now, all over the world," Kennedy said.

In 2005, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI)  and the Defence Department agreed to pay for a new State Department computer database that could allow the agency's cables to flow more easily to other users throughout the federal government.

Net-Centric Diplomacy was tied into a giant Defence Department system known as the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, or SIPRnet, allowing nearly half a million US government employees and contractors with security clearances to tap into the diplomatic cables from computer terminals around the globe.

The new database quickly garnered praise as a model of inter-agency collaboration and it was named a finalist for an Excellence in Government award in 2006, the report said.
A few State Department officials expressed early concerns about unauthorised access to the database, but these worries mostly involved threats to individual privacy, department officials said.

The department was not equipped to assign individual passwords or perform independent scrutiny over the hundreds of thousands of users authorised by the Pentagon to use the database, said Kennedy, the undersecretary of state.

To prevent illegal intrusion, the State Department has long maintained safeguards that make it difficult for an individual to download sensitive information onto a portable device such as a flash drive or compact disc. But Kennedy acknowledged that the department had no means of overseeing practices by other agencies using its data.

US investigators suspect that Bradley Manning, an army private stationed in the Persian Gulf, downloaded the 250,000 State Department cables to compact discs from a computer terminal in Kuwait. He then allegedly provided the files to WikiLeaks, which shared them with newspapers and posted hundreds of them on-line.

In the wake of the leaks, State Department officials cut off outside access to Net-Centric Diplomacy pending a review. Some secret documents are still being made available to other agencies through a different network designed to handle highly classified data, Kennedy said.