[PHOTO AT LEFT - BARACK OBAMA AND THE US PENTAGON]
MANILA, DECEMBER 1, 2010 (STAR) By Pia Lee-Brago – The US embassy in Manila said it is confident of its government's capacity to preserve its good relations with the Philippines and with other countries despite the leak of thousands of diplomatic cables, many of which contained unflattering comments on global allies.
"We are in constant communication with the government of the Philippines on many issues of bilateral importance," US embassy Press Attaché Rebecca Thompson told The STAR yesterday.
"As Secretary (of State Hillary) Clinton said, I am confident that the partnerships that the Obama administration has worked so hard to build will withstand this challenge," Thompson said.
Clinton had strongly condemned the unauthorized disclosure by WikiLeaks of classified information, saying it could put people's lives in danger, threaten US security, and undermine efforts to work with other countries in solving mutually shared problems.
Clinton said the disclosure was not just an attack on America's foreign interests but on the international community's as well.
"Any unauthorized disclosure of classified information by WikiLeaks has harmful implications not only for the lives of identified individuals that are jeopardized, but also for global engagement among and between nations," Thompson said earlier in a text message.
"Given its potential impact, we condemn such unauthorized disclosures and are taking every step to prevent future security breaches," she said.
The US is investigating whether WikiLeaks founder 39-year-old Julian Assange could be charged under its Espionage Act for releasing secret diplomatic documents.
The Department of Foreign Affairs, for its part, said it was still too early to determine the impact of the disclosure on Philippines-US relations or on the Philippines itself.
"To our knowledge, there are yet no Philippine documents uploaded to their (WikiLeaks) website," said DFA spokesperson Eduardo Malaya.
The diplomatic cables extracted by WikiLeaks – an organization devoted to revealing secret documents – covered the period between 1966 and February this year.
Of the more than 250,000 cables sent by 274 embassies, 1,796 were sent from Manila between 1994 and last February.
The US embassy in Manila is the 44th among the embassies and consulates around the world and the fourth in Southeast Asia with the biggest number of cables that had leaked.
The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom earlier said all but two of the leaked cables were sent between January 2005 and February 2010. The two other leaked cables from Manila were dated Nov. 21, 2001 and July 19, 1994.
The US embassy in Indonesia, according to the Jakarta Globe, has the biggest number of cables sent from Southeast Asia at 3,059. The US Consulate in Surabaya sent 167 cables.
The embassies in Bangkok sent 2,941; Rangoon, 1,854; Kuala Lumpur, 994; Phnom Penh, 777; Singapore, 704; Dili, 390; Bandar Seri Begawan, 256.
Aquino's concern
President Aquino said he sees danger in the unauthorized release of the diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks.
"We are championing freedom of information but, at the same time, there is also what you call little knowledge is deadly. It's like you've a read a book on medicine and you already feel like you can already be a surgeon, it isn't like that, is it?" Aquino told reporters.
"When you take things out of context, something totally different comes out. Now, we need to somehow fix operational security. Of course, on our part, the fields covered were not done during our time," he said.
While downplaying the controversy's effect on his administration, Aquino said exchange of information was necessary "as much as possible, so long as it doesn't endanger our national security."
"We want it done in broad daylight, very visible and transparent," he added.
Presidential spokesman Edwin Lacierda also downplayed the controversy's impact on the Aquino administration.
"There's nothing on the Aquino administration on that matter because it's February 2010 and backwards," Lacierda said, pointing out that President Aquino assumed office only on June 30.
He said it's too early to comment on the leaks because they have not been authenticated yet.
"We don't even know if they are authentic. We don't have any information what those leaks are. We have not seen the documents. We have no basis to comment. It's too early to speculate," Lacierda told Palace reporters in a briefing.
"Until such time there is truth to it we cannot comment on that. These are cables pilfered from the US State Department. The cables are with the US," he stressed.
Get details
Parañaque Rep. Roilo Golez and Eastern Samar Rep. Ben Evardone said Malacañang should examine the details of the secret memos from the US embassy in Manila to determine if they had compromised national interest.
Golez, a former national security adviser, noted that it would take some time for the government to sift through the leaked documents.
"I would assume they (secret memos) covered a lot of topics," Golez told The STAR. "Some could be embarrassing for the source and also to those subject of unflattering comments or whoever is alluded to."
He said it would be premature to talk about the implications of the leaks as their contents have yet to be studied.
"I'm sure the diplomatic community or our diplomatic relations can weather this for as long as there is no outright betrayal (on the part of the US government)," Golez said.
"Of course, we will hear some denials, or demands for proof or even questions on the authenticity," he said.
He said the incident should prompt the government and even the private sector to improve their information security.
Evardone also said the government should find out as soon as possible the complete contents of the memos.
"The government should be very concerned about this incident. There could be information or communications that concerns our national interests or even detrimental to our national security," Evardone, chairman of the House committee on public information, said.
"The Aquino administration should review in depth the documents with the end view of protecting our national interest," he said.
Aurora Rep. Juan Edgardo Angara and Ang Kasangga Rep. Teodorico Haresco in separate statements said it was very likely the communications coming from the US embassy in Manila contained sensitive information the government should have been aware of or had wanted to keep secret.
"Not only curiosity but also a desire to protect our country (should) be the impetus to look into these memos," Haresco said. With Aurea Calica, Delon Porcalla, and Paolo Romero
Washington says leaks a crime, threatens prosecution By AP (The Philippine Star) Updated December 01, 2010 12:00 AM Comments (0)
WASHINGTON – Striking back, the Obama administration branded the leak of more than a quarter-million sensitive files an attack on the United States Monday and raised the prospect of criminal prosecution against the online site WikiLeaks.
The Pentagon detailed new security safeguards, including restraints on small computer flash drives, to make it harder for any one person to copy and reveal so many secrets.
The young Army private first class suspected of stealing the diplomatic memos, many of them classified, and feeding them to WikiLeaks may have defeated Pentagon security systems using little more than a Lady Gaga CD and a portable computer memory stick.
The soldier, Bradley Manning, has not been charged in the latest release of internal US government documents. But officials said he is the prime suspect partly because of his own description of how he pulled off a staggering heist of classified and restricted material.
"No one suspected a thing," Manning told a confidant afterward, according to a log of his computer chat published by Wired.com. "I didn't even have to hide anything."
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton asserted Monday that WikiLeaks acted illegally in posting the material. She said the administration was taking "aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information."
Attorney General Eric Holder said the government was mounting a criminal investigation, and the Pentagon was tightening access to information, including restricting the use of computer storage devices such as CDs and flash drives.
"This is not saber-rattling," Holder said. Anyone found to have broken American law "will be held responsible."
Holder said the latest disclosure, involving classified and sensitive State Department documents, jeopardized the security of the nation, its diplomats, intelligence assets and relationships with foreign governments.
A weary-looking Clinton agreed.
"I want you to know that we are taking aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information," Clinton said. She spoke in between calls to foreign capitals to make amends for scathing and gossipy memos never meant for foreign eyes.
Manning is charged in military court with taking other classified material later published by the online clearinghouse WikiLeaks. It is not clear whether others such as WikiLeaks executives might be charged separately in civilian courts.
Clinton said the State Department was adding security protections to prevent another breach. The Pentagon, embarrassed by the apparent ease with which secret documents were passed to WikiLeaks, had detailed some of its new precautions Sunday.
Col. Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, said it was possible that many people could be held accountable if they were found to have ignored security protocols or somehow enabled the download without authorization.
A senior Defense Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the criminal case against Manning is pending, said he was unaware of any firings or other discipline over the security conditions at Manning's post in Iraq.
In his Internet chat, Manning described the conditions as lax to the point that he could bring a homemade music CD to work with him, erase the music and replace it with secrets. He told the computer hacker who would turn him in that he lip-synched along with pop singer Lady Gaga's hit "Telephone" while making off with "possibly the largest data spillage in American history."
Wired.com published a partial log of Manning's discussions with hacker R. Adrian Lamo in June.
"Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counterintelligence, inattentive signal analysis," Manning wrote. "A perfect storm."
His motive, according to the chat logs: "I want people to see the truth ... because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public."
By his own admission, Manning was apparently able to pull material from outside the Pentagon, including documents he had little obvious reason to see. He was arrested shortly after those chats last spring. He was moved in July to the Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia to await trial on the earlier charges and could face up to 52 years in a military prison if convicted.
There are no new charges, and none are likely at least until after a panel evaluates Manning's mental fitness early next year, said Lt. Col. Rob Manning, spokesman for the Military District of Washington. He is no relation to Bradley Manning.
Manning's civilian lawyer, David E. Combs, declined comment.
Lapan, the Pentagon spokesman, said the WikiLeaks experience has encouraged discussion within the military about how better to strike a balance between sharing information with those who need it and protecting it from disclosure.
So far, he said, Pentagon officials are not reviewing who has access to data but focusing instead on installing technical safeguards.
Since summer, when WikiLeaks first published stolen war logs from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Defense Department has made it harder for one person acting alone to download material from a classified network and place it on an unclassified one.
Such transfers generally take two people now, what Pentagon officials call a "two-man carry." Users also leave clearer electronic footprints by entering a computer "kiosk," or central hub, en route to downloading the classified material.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the WikiLeaks case revealed vulnerable seams in the information-sharing systems used by multiple government agencies. Some of those joint systems were designed to answer another problem: the failure of government agencies to share what they knew before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
"These efforts to give diplomatic, military, law enforcement and intelligence specialists quicker and easier access to greater amounts of data have had unintended consequences," Whitman said.
Agencies across the US government have installed safeguards around the use of flash drives and computer network operations, said Navy Rear Adm. Michael Brown, the Department of Homeland Security's director for cybersecurity coordination.
Like the Pentagon, Homeland Security has laid out policies to ensure that employees are using the networks correctly, that the classified and unclassified networks are properly identified, and that there are detailed procedures for moving information from one network to another.
Dale Meyerrose, former chief information officer for the US intelligence community, said Monday that it will never be possible to completely stop such breaches.
"This is a personnel security issue, more than it is a technical issue," said Meyerrose, now a vice president at Harris Corp. "How can you prevent a pilot from flying the airplane into the ground? You can't. Anybody you give access to can become a disgruntled employee or an ideologue that goes bad."
One official in contact with US military and diplomatic staff in Iraq said they already were seeing the effect of a tighter collar on information.
The State Department and other agencies are restricting access among the Army and nonmilitary agencies, the official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sharing of classified information.
Former CIA director Michael Hayden warned the latest leak will affect what other governments are willing to share with the US as well as change the way US officials share information among themselves.
"You're going to put a lot less in cables now," he said.
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