Las Vegas: A former head of the CIA
warned that government secrets pouring through WikiLeaks could
sabotage the post 9-11 campaign to break down walls between
rival US intelligence agencies.
"This is destructive on so many levels," retired Air
Force general and former CIA chief Michael Hayden said of the
WikiLeaks saga, after an onstage chat yesterday at a Black Hat
computer security conference in Las Vegas.
"It reinforces the darker angels. Leaders in the
intelligence community have to come to grips with this problem
and work hard to find an answer."
Black Hat and an overlapping DefCon gathering of
hackers have become venues for national security officials to
court software wizards as allies to fight cyber wars, online
crime syndicates and other mounting Internet threats.
By turning the Internet into a worldwide stage for
sensitive government information, WikiLeaks is sowing distrust
between the very intelligence agencies castigated for being
too secretive prior to the World Trade Centre attack on
September 11, 2001.
"In the years after 9/11, whenever anything went
wrong I got slammed by both parties about failure to share,"
Hayden said.
"We told senators `Yes, we`ll share.` But, in the
back of your mind your conscious was saying there are real
dangers in sharing. And that just got displayed."
A massive release of secret Pentagon documents by
WikiLeaks highlights security challenges of the digital age,
when gigabytes of sensitive data can be exposed with a single
click, according to analysts.
PTI
