What truly infuriates me about Wikileak's actions is how this seriously hurts the FOI community. Wikileaks is pretty much daring DoD to find a way to exercise prior restraint on them. Our speech freedoms come with responsibility. They are betraying us all by their irresponsible actions.

There is a possibility that this is the whole point. Someone is paying a lot of money for wikileaks. Is everything about this situation exactly what it appears to be on the surface? I'm sure JYA would say that it is almost certainly not...

Never should have had the access he did.

All that being said, DoD really screwed the pooch here too... Total IA fail.

None of the media is focused on this as a part of the issue. If the NYT profile is accurate this person should not have had Top Secret clearance.

I'm not convinced that the focus should be on Wikileaks.

Is this information available to the Taliban and to other intelligence orgs because of Wikileaks, or is it available because the security sucked? If Wikileaks got it, can we really assume there have been no other breaches and that the information is otherwise unavailable to foreign intel? Are Julian Assange and his hacker friends really better at turning sources than professional intelligence organizations who specialize at this and have been at it for generations?

I don't like blaming the victim but this is the DOD we're talking about - this is battlefield intelligence! These people ought to be prepared to handle hard core adversaries and they got pwned by a bunch of post adolescent anarchists. There are a lot of people in the hacker scene who think they know their shit but at the end of the day they are not professionals. There ought to be some hard questions asked about how this was even possible, and a certain amount of assumption of responsibility, as opposed to finger pointing and saber rattling, would be a more mature response from the DOD.

RE: WikiLeaks disclosures are a 'tragedy' - CNN.com