WikiLeaks fallout: Tighter access to US secrets?

They are blaming changes since the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks against the United States, which promoted information sharing, as the cause of the government's losing control of the nation's secrets.

"Frankly, we all knew this was going to happen," says former CIA Director Michael Hayden. In a post-WikiLeaks world, he said many he has spoken to feel burned by the disclosures, and want to return to guarding their data.

The intelligence failures that led to the attacks of 9/11 were blamed on government agencies hoarding information instead of sharing it, missing crucial clues that could have headed off al-Qaida's strikes. Those changes, which reduced this kind of "stovepiping" of information, have produced the opposite problem: amassing so much data that officials complain it is hard to make sense of it, and as the WikiLeaks incident shows, keep it secret.

Both intelligence officials and outside experts suggested that agency chiefs may push to limit access to electronic "portals" that have provided growing data access to intelligence officers, diplomats and troops around the world. And others predicted tighter scrutiny by an administration that has already pushed aggressively to investigate and prosecute leakers.

On the other hand, some lawmakers worry that the leaking incident will give the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies an excuse to go back to old ways of holding back information as "too sensitive" to be shared.

"The intelligence community has a long way to go in information sharing," says Sen. Kit Bond, top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee. "If these leaks lead to even more stovepipes," as in limiting access to data to only certain analysts or agencies, "it would be yet another devastating result of this betrayal," he said.

Rep. Anna Eshoo, a Democratic member of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee who shares those worries, conducted a closed hearing Tuesday on information sharing.

Eshoo would not detail what went on at the hearing, but she said,"It's the nature of the intelligence community to hoard information." Despite the WikiLeaks episode, she said she would still push for "more information sharing in the intelligence community, not less."

Suspicion for the WikiLeaks document dump centers on Specialist Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old soldier who is being detained in Kuwait, charged with "mishandling and leaking classified data."

Manning was blamed for leaking a classified helicopter cockpit video of a 2007 firefight in Baghdad. Detained after he bragged of providing classified material to WikiLeaks, Manning was later charged with accessing what were described as more than 150,000 classified State Department cables, which have yet to surface.

So far, no U.S. official has linked Manning directly to the WikiLeaks documents.

One U.S. official who has examined some of the WikiLeaks documents said everything he had seen could have been obtained by Manning by surfing a Defense Department intranet system known as the "SIPRNet," or Secret Internet Protocol Router Network. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence.

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