WikiLeaks and Credit Card Companies

The Pentagon should monitor access to battlefield reports and classified documents the same way banks track credit card use, a top brass official said a week after WikiLeaks published its largest batch yet of leaked military documents on the Iraq War.

Defense needs to track how sensitive information travels because halting the flow of intelligence to soldiers is not a solution to preventing leakages, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn said on Oct. 29 during a visit to Iraq.

"If someone is doing something that doesn't seem appropriate for where they are, downloading 100,000 documents when they are out in some obscure corner of the country, why are they doing that?" said Lynn, "Could we do things like credit card companies do, which is to look for anomalous behavior?"

In the meantime, an August directive banning military personnel from accessing Wikileaks on government-owned systems could make tracking more tricky. The memo instructed defense employees not to "access the WikiLeaks website on government owned systems, in order to avoid a proliferation of potential electronic spillages."

A defense contractor said his office viewed the directive less as a preventive measure and more a means to avoid scrutiny from the powers-that-be. "The issue was that we didn't want people, if they were going to do it, to do it from here," he told me, "so our IP addresses wouldn't end up being part of an investigation about the spillage."