CIA launches ‘task force’ to assess impact of U.S. diplomatic cables’ leak by WikiLeaks

LONDON - The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has reportedly launched a task force to assess the impact of thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables and military files exposed by the whistleblower website ‘Wikileaks’.

According to the Washington Post, the panel is officially called the WikiLeaks Task Force, and is focusing on the immediate impact of the most recently released files.

“The director asked the task force to examine whether the latest release of WikiLeaks documents might affect the agency’s foreign relationships or operations,” the paper quoted CIA spokesman George Little, as saying.

The panel is being reportedly led by CIA’s Counterintelligence Center and has over a dozen members from departments across the agency.

According to some veterans, WikiLeaks has breached the CIA’s long-standing dislike to sharing secrets with other government agencies.

A former high-ranking CIA official who recently retired, said that even while moving to share more information over the past decade, the agency “has not capitulated to this business of making everything available to outsiders. They don’t even make everything available to insiders. And by and large the system has worked”

CIA employs software measures to minimize the chance of a WikiLeaks-like leak, and has been avoiding moving secret information from pieces of paper to digital files that can be distributed online, the paper said. (ANI)