Information sharing among agencies has not suffered in the wake of Wikileaks releases of State and Defense department data, said a State department official during a March 10 hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The Director of National Intelligence was concerned that Wikileaks would have a "chilling effect" on information sharing, said Corin Stone, information sharing executive in the office of DNI. But, Patrick Kennedy, State undersecretary for management said his department continues "to share at the same rate we did before, because we know that our information is essentially the gold standard."

Kennedy added that the department leans in favor of information sharing rather than guarding among agencies and warned against overzealous password protections and role-based permissions for SIPRNet.

"It would be a grave mistake and danger to the national security for the State Department to try to define each of every one of the 65 agencies that we share our diplomatic reporting analysis to say that, 'Pvt. Smith should get this cable, Lt. Jones should get that cable, Cmdr. X should get that cable,'" said Kennedy.

The DoD will rely on technological solutions and comprehensive policies to improve information sharing capabilities while protecting intelligence information "without reverting back to pre-9/11 stovepipes," said Defense Department Chief Information Officer Teri Takai in her testimony to the committee.

Several authentication efforts are underway at the DoD to protect against the removal or classified data from SIPRNet. Eighty-eight percent of SIPRNet-accessible computers and devices have disabled write capabilities to external media. The 12 percent of machines and devices that are write-enabled are located at kiosks and require the oversight of two people for copying, said Takai.

The department is issuing smartcards for SIPRNet access and installing card readers and software on SIPRNet-accessible machines and devices, said Takai. She estimated 500,000 cards would need to be issued and both cards and readers will be deployed and configured by mid-2013. DoD is also testing a National Security Agency security and auditing system for monitoring DoD networks.

Such DoD efforts are largely a continuation of work begun following a November 2010 DoD announcement that information sharing reviews conducted that August called on the department to disable all "write" capabilities for removable media on classified computers and to limit the number of systems authorized to move data from classified to unclassified systems.

In November of last year, Wikileaks obtained 251,287 State Department cables and sent them to several newspapers, as the organization slowly posted the cables online. The leaks were marked the fourth major disclosure of U.S. sensitive and classified information likely originating from former Army intelligence Private First Class Bradley Manning.

For more:
- see the hearing page, "Information Sharing in the Era of Wikileaks: Balancing Security and Collaboration," for video and prepared testimonies 

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