Washington: The US State Department has limited the Pentagon’s access to one of its databases as part of efforts to prevent another mass leak of diplomatic cables, officials said.
The move comes just over nine years after the September 11, 2001 attacks prompted a greater sharing of information among government agencies as a defense against future terrorist strikes.
But the State Department said it was temporary.
“We have temporarily severed the connection between this database and one classified network,” State Department spokesman Philip Crowley told reporters.
“We have made these adjustments in the last week,” he said.
Crowley said the database was one with a large array of diplomatic cables but declined to identify the classified network.
However, a senior State Department official told reporters later that the network was the military’s classified SIPRNet, or Secret Internet Protocol Router Network.
The Internet whistle-blower WikiLeaks, which posted on its website more than 250,000 confidential and classified documents on Sunday full of embarrassing details of diplomatic exchanges, has never revealed its source.
But suspicion has focused on a US Army private working in military intelligence, Bradley Manning, who is now in detention.
Given Manning’s low rank, the Pentagon has faced questions over how it handles security clearances and secret information.
Colonel Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, said Monday that the Defense Department had tightened procedures for handling sensitive information but he did not expect changes to rules on who is permitted access to secret documents.
The Defense Department on Sunday announced a series of measures to crack down on potential leaks, which included restricting the ability to write data from classified computers onto removable disks, restricting transfers of information from classified to unclassified systems and better monitoring of suspicious computer activity using similar tactics employed by credit card companies.
