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A top Pentagon official has confirmed a previously classified incident that he describes as “the most significant breach of U.S. military computers ever,” a 2008 episode in which a foreign intelligence agent used a flash drive to infect computers, including those used by the Central Command in overseeing combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Plugging the cigarette-lighter-sized flash drive into an American military laptop at a base in the Middle East amounted to “a digital beachhead, from which data could be transferred to servers under foreign control,” according to William J. Lynn 3d, deputy secretary of defense, writing in the latest issue of the journal Foreign Affairs.

“It was a network administrator’s worst fear: a rogue program operating silently, poised to deliver operational plans into the hands of an unknown adversary,” Mr. Lynn wrote.

The incident was first reported in November 2008 by the Danger Room blog of Wired magazine, and then in greater detail by The Los Angeles Times, which said that the matter was sufficiently grave that President George W. Bush was briefed on it. The newspaper mentioned suspicions of Russian involvement.

But Mr. Lynn’s article was the first official confirmation. He also put a name — Operation Buckshot Yankee — to the Pentagon operation to counter the attack, and said that the episode “marked a turning point in U.S. cyber-defense strategy.” In an early step, the Defense Department banned the use of portable flash drives with its computers, though it later modified the ban.

Mr. Lynn described the extraordinary difficulty of protecting military digital communications over a web of 15,000 networks and 7 million computing devices in dozens of countries against farflung adversaries who, with modest means and a reasonable degree of ingenuity, can inflict outsized damage. Traditional notions of deterrence do not apply.

“A dozen determined computer programmers can, if they find a vulnerability to exploit, threaten the United States’s global logistics network, steal its operational plans, blind its intelligence capabilities or hinder its ability to deliver weapons on target,” he wrote.

Security officials also face the problem of counterfeit hardware that may have remotely operated “kill switches” or “back doors” built in to allow manipulation from afar, as well as the problem of software with rogue code meant to cause sudden malfunctions.

Against the array of threats, Mr. Lynn said, the National Security Agency had pioneered systems — “part sensor, part sentry, part sharpshooter” — that are meant to automatically counter intrusions in real time.

His article appeared intended partly to raise awareness of the threat to United States cybersecurity — “the frequency and sophistication of intrusions into U.S. military networks have increased exponentially,” he wrote — and partly to make the case for a larger Pentagon role in cyberdefense.

Various efforts at cyberdefense by the military have been drawn under a single organization, the U.S. Cyber Command, which began operations in late May at Fort Meade, Maryland, under a four-star general, Keith B. Alexander.

But under proposed legislation, the Department of Homeland Security would take the leading role in the defense of civilian systems.

Though the Cyber Command has greater capabilities, the military operates within the United States only if ordered to do so by the president.

Another concern is whether the Pentagon, or government in general, has the nimbleness for such work. Mr. Lynn acknowledged that “it takes the Pentagon 81 months to make a new computer system operational after it is first funded.” By contrast, he noted, “the iPhone was developed in 24 months.”

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Wednesday the Pentagon has expressed willingness to discuss the online whistleblower's request for help in reviewing classified documents from the Afghan war and removing information that could harm civilians.

"This week we received contact through our lawyers that the General Counsel of the U.S. Army says now that they want to discuss the issue," Assange told The Associated Press by telephone. He later corrected himself to say he meant the general counsel of the Pentagon.

Assange added that the contacts have been brokered by the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, or CID.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman denied any direct contacts between the Pentagon and WikiLeaks. He also said the Pentagon is not interested in cooperating with WikiLeaks, which has asked for help in reviewing the documents to purge the names of Afghan informants from the files.

"We are not interested in negotiating some sort of minimized or sanitized version of classified documents," he said.

"These documents are property of the United States government. The unauthorized release of them threatens the lives of coalition forces as well as Afghan nationals."

Asked if CID had brokered contact between defense lawyers and Wikileaks lawyers, Whitman said: "CID is conducting an investigation and I am not going to comment on their investigation."

Assange said Wednesday that "contact has been established" but added it was not clear whether and how the U.S. military would assist WikiLeaks.

"It is always positive for parties to talk to each other," Assange said. "We welcome their engagement."

He reiterated that WikiLeaks plans to release its second batch of secret Afghan war documents within "two weeks to a month."

The first files in its "Afghan War Diary" laid bare classified military documents covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The release angered U.S. officials, energized critics of the NATO-led campaign, and drew the attention of the Taliban, which has promised to use the material to track down people it considers traitors.

Non-governmental organizations, including the Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, have criticized WikiLeaks as being irresponsible.

WikiLeaks describes itself as a public service organization for whistleblowers, journalists and activists.

"We encourage other media and human rights groups who have a genuine concern about reviewing the material to assist us with the difficult and very expensive task of getting a large historical archive into the public's record," Assange said.

The Australian was in Sweden in part to prepare an application for a publishing certificate that would allow WikiLeaks to take full advantage of the Scandinavian nation's press freedom laws.

That also means WikiLeaks would have to appoint a publisher that could be held legally responsible for the material. Assange said that person would be "either me or one of our Swedish people."

WikiLeaks routes its material through Sweden and Belgium because of the whistleblower protection offered by laws in those countries. But it also has backup servers in other countries to make sure the site is not shut down, Assange said.The Australian was in Sweden in part to prepare an application for a publishing certificate that would allow WikiLeaks to take full advantage of the Scandinavian nation's press freedom laws.

That also means WikiLeaks would have to appoint a publisher that could be held legally responsible for the material. Assange said that person would be "either me or one of our Swedish people."

WikiLeaks routes its material through Sweden and Belgium because of the whistleblower protection offered by laws in those countries. But it also has backup servers in other countries to make sure the site is not shut down, Assange said.

(This version CORRECTS Updates with Assange correcting earlier statement to say contact was with Pentagon, not U.S. Army; comment from Washington. This story is part of AP's general news and financial services.)

A U.S. border-patrol agent on duty near Campo, 60 miles east of San Diego, Calif.

When U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton ruled on Wednesday that key provisions of Arizona's new anti-immigration law were unconstitutional, she could have also declared them unnecessary. That is, if the main impetus behind the controversial legislation was, as Arizona Governor Jan Brewer said when she signed it in April, "border-related violence and crime due to illegal immigration." The fact is, despite the murderous mayhem raging across the border in Mexico, the U.S. side, from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, is one of the nation's safest corridors.

According to the FBI, the four large U.S. cities (with populations of at least 500,000) with the lowest violent crime rates — San Diego, Phoenix and the Texas cities of El Paso and Austin — are all in border states. "The border is safer now than it's ever been," U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Lloyd Easterling told the Associated Press last month. Even Larry Dever, the sheriff of Arizona's Cochise County, where the murder last March of a local rancher, believed to have been committed by an illegal immigrant, sparked calls for the law, conceded to the Arizona Republic recently that "we're not seeing the [violent crime] that's going on on the other side."  

Consider Arizona itself — whose illegal-immigrant population is believed to be second only to California's. The state's overall crime rate dropped 12% last year; between 2004 and 2008 it plunged 23%. In the metro area of its largest city, Phoenix, violent crime — encompassing murder, rape, assault and robbery — fell by a third during the past decade and by 17% last year. The border city of Nogales, an area rife with illegal immigration and drug trafficking, hasn't logged a single murder in the past two years. 

It is true that Phoenix has in recent years seen a spate of kidnappings. But in almost every case they've involved drug traffickers targeting other narcos for payment shakedowns, and the 318 abductions reported last year were actually down 11% from 2008. Either way, the figure hardly makes Phoenix, as Arizona Senator John McCain claimed last month, "the No. 2 kidnapping capital of the world" behind Mexico City. A number of Latin American capitals can claim that dubious distinction.

An even more telling example is El Paso. Its cross-border Mexican sister city, Ciudad Juárez, suffered almost 2,700 murders last year, most of them drug-related, making it possibly the world's most violent town. But El Paso, a stone's throw across the Rio Grande, had just one murder. A big reason, say U.S. law-enforcement officials, is that the Mexican drug cartels' bloody turf wars generally end at the border and don't follow the drugs into the U.S. Another, says El Paso County Sheriff Richard Wiles, is that "the Mexican cartels know that if they try to commit that kind of violence here, they'll get shut down." 

Which points to perhaps the most important factor: the U.S. has real cops — not criminals posing as cops, as is so often the case in Mexico — policing the border's cities and states. Americans and Mexicans may call their border region "seamless" when it comes to commerce and culture, but that brotherly ideal doesn't apply to law enforcement. That's especially true since state and local police are backed along the border by the thousands of federal agents deployed there. Thus the tough Arizona law — which seeks to allow local and state police to check a person's immigration status, a provision that Judge Bolton agreed opened the door to racial profiling by officers, and requires immigrants to carry their documents at all times — was sparked by largely unfounded fears.

Arizona law-enforcement officials say they believe the Cochise County rancher, Robert Krentz, was killed by an illegal immigrant — perhaps a coyote, or migrant smuggler — or a drug trafficker. His last radio transmission home as he inspected his property indicated he was helping a struggling person he believed to be one of the migrants who regularly trespass private land while crossing into the U.S. But while such assaults are hardly unheard of along the border — and while it's hardly irrational to worry about Mexico's violence eventually spilling into the U.S. — they have hardly risen to a level that justified the draconian Arizona bill. (In fact, if an illegal immigrant did murder Krentz, it would be the first time in more than a decade that a migrant has killed an American along the border's Tucson, Ariz., sector.)

"There's a real disconnect between emotions and facts when it comes to the border," says El Paso city councilman Beto O'Rourke. "You've got a lot of politicians exploiting this fear that the Mexicans are coming over to kill us."

The Arizona law, which Judge Bolton also said infringed on federal jurisdiction, may be a product of border bluster. But it has more than succeeded in getting Washington's attention. Even though the Obama Administration was one of the plaintiffs in the suit against the law, the President is sending 1,200 more National Guard troops to the region this weekend. What's more, our broken immigration system — and the federal government's feckless failure to address it — is a front-burner issue again.

The nation's border is actually a safe place. The nation's debate about it, at least politically, is anything but.

Adrian Lamo, the former computer hacker who tipped off federal authorities to WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning, says two men in the Boston area have told Lamo in phone conversations that they assisted Manning.

Lamo said both men attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but he refused to identify them because, he said, at least one of them has threatened him. One of these men allegedly told Lamo they gave encryption software to Manning and taught the Army private how to use it, Lamo said.

Manning, an Army intelligence analyst, is being held in solitary confinement at a Virginia detention facility. He is charged with leaking an airstrike video that the whistleblower website WikiLeaks published in April, and Pentagon officials say he is the prime suspect in last week's disclosure of thousands of field reports from the war in Afghanistan to the site.

Lamo claimed both men are working for WikiLeaks. Also, both men are Facebook friends with Lamo and Manning, and at least one continues to post Facebook messages on Lamo's wall, the former hacker said.

Asked for comment about Lamo's allegation that men working for WikiLeaks assisted Manning, WikiLeaks responded in an e-mail: "As a matter of policy, we do not discuss any matters to do with allegations relating to the identity of sources."

The New York Times reported Saturday that Army investigators looking into the document leak have expanded their inquiry to include friends and associates who may have helped Manning. Specifically, the Times spoke to two civilians interviewed in recent weeks by the Army's criminal division, who said that investigators apparently believed that the friends, who include students from MIT and Boston University, might have connections to WikiLeaks. The civilians, who the Times did not name, told the newspaper they had no connection to WikiLeaks.

The Boston Globe interviewed a recent MIT graduate who it said acknowledged Saturday that he met Manning in January and exchanged as many as 10 e-mails with him about security issues. But the individual "adamantly" denied any role in the document leak, the Globe reported. The Globe also reported that this MIT graduate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he was interviewed several months ago by Army investigators to find out whether he or "others in the local computer hacker community" helped Manning.

A spokeswoman for MIT, Patti Richards, told CNN: "We are monitoring the situation closely, but are not commenting at this time."

CNN has previously reported that the FBI is assisting the Defense Department in the WikiLeaks investigation of Manning. One FBI official told CNN the bureau is involved in the investigation of potential civilian co-conspirators who may have played a role in the leaking of the classified material.

Attempts to reach an attorney for Manning have so far been unsuccessful.

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.

It’s not the very first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth.

This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA. But the investments are bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government, and worry that the company is starting to forget its “don’t be evil” mantra.

America’s spy services have become increasingly interested in mining “open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the daily avalanche of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports.

“Secret information isn’t always the brass ring in our profession,” then CIA-director General Michael Hayden told a conference in 2008. “In fact, there’s a real satisfaction in solving a problem or answering a tough question with information that someone was dumb enough to leave out in the open.”

U.S. spy agencies, through In-Q-Tel, have invested in a number of firms to help them better find that information. Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Attensity applies the rules of grammar to the so-called “unstructured text” of the web to make it more easily digestible by government databases. Keyhole (now Google Earth) is a staple of the targeting cells in military-intelligence units.

Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (“spatial and temporal analysis”) and the tone of the document (“sentiment analysis”). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web.

“We’re right there as it happens,” Ahlberg told Danger Room as he clicked through a demonstration. “We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”

Recorded Future certainly has the potential to spot events and trends early. Take the case of Hezbollah’s long-range missiles. On March 21, Israeli President Shimon Peres leveled the allegation that the terror group had Scud-like weapons. Scouring Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s past statements, Recorded Future found corroborating evidence from a month prior that appeared to back up Peres’ accusations.

That’s one of several hypothetical cases Recorded Future runs in its blog devoted to intelligence analysis. But it’s safe to assume that the company already has at least one spy agency’s attention. In-Q-Tel doesn’t make investments in firms without an “end customer” ready to test out that company’s products.

Both Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel made their investments in 2009, shortly after the company was founded. The exact amounts weren’t disclosed, but were under $10 million each. Google’s investment came to light earlier this year online. In-Q-Tel, which often announces its new holdings in press releases, quietly uploaded a brief mention of its investment a few weeks ago.

Both In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures have seats on Recorded Future’s board. Ahlberg says those board members have been “very helpful,” providing business and technology advice, as well as introducing him to potential customers. Both organizations, it’s safe to say, will profit handsomely if Recorded Future is ever sold or taken public. Ahlberg’s last company, the corporate intelligence firm Spotfire, was acquired in 2007 for $195 million in cash.

Google Ventures did not return requests to comment for this article. In-Q-Tel Chief of Staff Lisbeth Poulos e-mailed a one-line statement: “We are pleased that Recorded Future is now part of IQT’s portfolio of innovative startup companies who support the mission of the U.S. Intelligence Community.”

Just because Google and In-Q-Tel have both invested in Recorded Future doesn’t mean Google is suddenly in bed with the government. Of course, to Google’s critics — including conservative legal groups, and Republican congressmen — the Obama Administration and the Mountain View, California, company slipped between the sheets a long time ago.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt hosted a town hall at company headquarters in the early days of Obama’s presidential campaign. Senior White House officials like economic chief Larry Summers give speeches at the New America Foundation, the left-of-center think tank chaired by Schmidt. Former Google public policy chief Andrew McLaughlin is now the White House’s deputy CTO, and was publicly (if mildly) reprimanded by the administration for continuing to hash out issues with his former colleagues.

In some corners, the scrutiny of the company’s political ties have dovetailed with concerns about how Google collects and uses its enormous storehouse of search data, e-mail, maps and online documents. Google, as we all know, keeps a titanic amount of information about every aspect of our online lives. Customers largely have trusted the company so far, because of the quality of their products, and because of Google’s pledges not to misuse the information still ring true to many.

But unease has been growing. Thirty seven state Attorneys General are demanding answers from the company after Google hoovered up 600 gigabytes of data from open Wi-Fi networks as it snapped pictures for its Street View project. (The company swears the incident was an accident.)

“Assurances from the likes of Google that the company can be trusted to respect consumers’ privacy because its corporate motto is ‘don’t be evil’ have been shown by recent events such as the ‘Wi-Spy’ debacle to be unwarranted,” long-time corporate gadfly John M. Simpson told a Congressional hearing in a prepared statement. Any business dealings with the CIA’s investment arm are unlikely to make critics like him more comfortable.

But Steven Aftergood, a critical observer of the intelligence community from his perch at the Federation of American Scientists, isn’t worried about the Recorded Future deal. Yet.

“To me, whether this is troublesome or not depends on the degree of transparency involved. If everything is aboveboard — from contracts to deliverables — I don’t see a problem with it,” he told Danger Room by e-mail. “But if there are blank spots in the record, then they will be filled with public skepticism or worse, both here and abroad, and not without reason.”

The Pentagon did not return phone calls Thursday. A spokeswoman for the base confirmed that Manning “received non-judicial punishment for violating rules while an advanced individual training student here,” but would not discuss the details, citing Army privacy policies.

“In a training environment, where we’re dealing with young people who aren’t used to the Army, we deal with a wide variety of folks doing inappropriate things,” says spokeswoman Tanja Linton. “They have issues, and it’s dealt with, and they go on to do great things for the Army and the country.”

Manning, who was 20 years old at the time, was ordered to remove the videos, but did not lose his then-provisional Top Secret security clearance, says the Army official. The official and spokeswoman Linton both say Manning graduated from the class in mid-August 2008.

After his graduation, Manning wound up in the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, New York, where he was stationed until his deployment to Forward Operating Base Hammer in Iraq in November 2009. There, he served as an intelligence analyst with a Top Secret/SCI clearance and access to classified networks, including SIPRnet, the Army’s secret-level wide area network linked to WikiLeaks’ most high-profile releases.

Sometime after Thanksgiving 2009, Manning reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, after WikiLeaks published 500,000 pager messages from the 24-hour period surrounding the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to Manning’s chats with ex-hacker Adrian Lamo, who ultimately turned Manning in to authorities.

”I immediately recognized that they were from an NSA database, and I felt comfortable enough to come forward,” Manning wrote.

In late 2009, by Manning’s account, he discovered the classified video of a deadly 2007 Army helicopter attack in Iraq that claimed the lives of a number of civilians. He leaked the video in February, and WikiLeaks released it under the title “Collateral Murder” in April 2010.

Manning was charged early this month with leaking the Iraq video and improperly downloading more than 150,000 State Department cables from SIPRnet onto his unclassified personal computer. He’s charged with leaking more than 50 of them.

The Army announced Thursday night that Manning had been transported from Kuwait to the Marine Corps Base Quantico Brig in Quantico, Virginia, where he continues to be held in pre-trial custody. His case will now be handled in Washington D.C. The investigation, led by the Army with support from the FBI, is ongoing.

Other leaks Manning claimed credit for in his chats with Lamo include a database of 260,000 State Department diplomatic cables and a classified Army event log from the war in Iraq covering 500,000 events from 2004 through 2009. WikiLeaks hasn’t published those purported leaks, and has denied receiving the diplomatic cables.

On Sunday, WikiLeaks published a different event log of 77,000 reports from the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. Manning did not discuss leaking an Afghan war log in his chats with Lamo. But on Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Pentagon investigators have found evidence on his computer hard drive tying Manning to the leak of that log.

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, speaking at a press conference Thursday, blasted Wikileaks and its founder for releasing the logs, following news reports that some Afghan citizens who assisted U.S troops might now face reprisal from the Taliban because they’re identified in the leaked database.

The Army official who knew Manning at Fort Huachuca during the training says Manning was something of an outsider, who was often needled by fellow soldiers for his slight build: 5-foot-2 and 105 pounds. “He’s kind of a scrappy kid, I guess. He was always on the defense because he was such a small guy…. He didn’t seem to have a lot of friends.”

“I hope you don’t portray this as a failure of the command at Fort Huachuca,” adds the Army official. “They did everything they could, but you can’t really identify that someone’s going to do what he’s accused of at that level. You can never tell what somebody’s going to do.”

As Pentagon leaders go, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen are fairly mild-mannered — prone to quiet, careful assessments, not table-pounding bluster. But they could barely contain their anger on Thursday at WikiLeaks for publishing tens of thousands of secret documents about the Afghanistan war. Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went so far as to say that the transparency activists “might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier” or an Afghan partner during a Pentagon press briefing, his voice elevating slightly.

Neither Mullen nor Gates considered the documents WikiLeaks obtained to have strategic value or even particular utility to understanding the war. But that didn’t diminish their anger at WikiLeaks’s huge disclosure on Sunday, which they described as having consequences on the battlefield and beyond. The consequences of the leak are “potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and our Afghan partners,” said Gates, a former CIA director with a famous penchant for secrecy. “Tactics, techniques and procedures will become known to our adversaries.” An internal department investigation into who leaked is already underway, aided by the FBI.

Ever since the first Gulf War, there’s been an effort to broaden and flatten access to information within the military in order to foster an ethic of small-unit initiative. Beyond the inquiry’s narrow question of who leaked, Gates said that the “massive breach” will force department leaders to reconsider whether that information needs to be stovepiped again.

“We want those soldiers at a forward operating base to have all the information necessary, not just for their own security, but to accomplish their mission,” Gates said. “Should we change the way we approach that or do we continue to take the risk” of more exposures? (So long, SIPRNET access?) Gates added that he couldn’t confirm whether there have been new leaks waiting to come to light since WikiLeaks obtained its tranche of documents, some thousands of which it has yet to release.

Then there’s the consequence to America’s partners, particularly Afghans who put their lives at risk working with U.S. troops and whose identities are now exposed in the WikiLeaks documents. Gates said there was a “moral obligation” for the United States to “take some responsibility for their security,” but didn’t elaborate what measures the military might take. “Will people whose lives are on the line trust us to keep their identities secret?” Gates asked. “Will other governments trust us to keep their documents secret?”

Reporters challenged Mullen’s comment about WikiLeaks having blood on its hands, but the usually soft-spoken chairman didn’t back away. While he said he didn’t know that anyone has died because of the leaks, Mullen said that people who don’t handle battlefield reports of the sort that WikiLeaks published “can’t appreciate, in my opinion, how this information is networked together…. The potential threat is there to risk the lives of soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines,” as well as U.S. foreign allies in Afghanistan, “as well as Afghan citizens. And there’s no doubt in my mind about that.”

Attribution is one of the biggest problems on the internet when it comes to cyberwarfare. How do you hold a nation responsible for malicious attacks if you can’t determine whether the activity was state-sponsored?

Retired General Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency, said Thursday that one solution being discussed in government is to simply forget about trying to determine if the source of an attack is state-sponsored and hold nations responsible for malicious activity coming from their cyberspace. His words were greeted with applause from the audience of computer security professionals.

“Since the price of entry is so low, and … it’s difficult to prove state sponsorship, one of the thoughts … is to just be uninterested in that distinction and to actually hold states responsible for that activity emanating from their cyberspace,” said Hayden during his keynote address at the Black Hat security conference. “Whether you did [the attack yourself] or not, the consequences for that action [coming from your country] are the same.”

Asked later for examples of what the consequences to a nation might be, he suggested some kind of cyberexile, or a response that would thwart the flow of the internet from the suspect country in a way that would slow their cybercommerce and ability to communicate.

Hayden, who is currently a principal at the Chertoff Group, a security consultant company founded by former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, focused his talk on cyberwarfare and acknowledged that the term is thrown “pretty much at anything unpleasant.”

He said the U.S. military doesn’t consider intelligence attacks acts of war but the kind of “normal espionage thing that routinely happens between states.”

“Without going into great detail, we’re actually pretty good at this, and the Chinese aren’t the only ones doing this,” he said.

Outside of this, the U.S. and international community haven’t made much progress in determining what would actually constitute an act of war in this domain, but he said there have been some initial discussions about the idea of having global agreements to restrict certain kinds of activity. He cited denial-of-service attacks as an example of one type that could be restricted under a kind of Geneva Convention agreement on the rules of cyberwar.

“That is such an easily available weapon that we [might decide we] ought to stigmatize its use so that adult nations don’t do it and they don’t allow it to happen from their sovereign space — that’s one thought,” he said.

He also said ideas have been raised about forming the cyber equivalent of demilitarized zones for sensitive networks, such as the power grid and financial networks, that would be off-limits to attack from nation states. He acknowledged that this contradicts the view in kinetic warfare where attacks on power grids and other infrastructures are considered legitimate targets.

In a press conference following his talk, Hayden was asked about cyberespionage and whether the United States considers collateral damage that could occur as a result of such activity by the United States, such as an incident that reportedly occurred in the early ’80s in Russia.

In 1982, the United States reportedly sabotaged the Siberian pipeline through a logic bomb planted in software, causing an explosion. The United States learned from a Russian scientist that the Soviets were stealing data on U.S. technology, so the CIA hatched a plot to insert the logic bomb into software headed to Russia to operate pumps, valves and turbines on the Siberian natural gas pipeline.

At a pre-programmed time, the malware caused excessive gas pressure to build on the valves, resulting in an explosion that was captured by orbiting satellites. Although there were no human casualties, there might have been under different circumstances if the explosion had occurred in a populated area.

Hayden acknowledged during his keynote that there are problems with anticipating consequences of cyberwarfare attacks.

“You can never do anything in this domain without something going pop in [the physical world],” he said. “At the end of the day, it really isn’t a videogame and something’s going to happen in somebody’s physical space.”

He added that in considering the possibilities for collateral damage from a cyberattack, generally the military considers whether the good that is perceived to come out of an action greatly outweighs the possible unintended consequences. But with cyberattacks, the consequences can be much less predictable.

“When you do this, are lights still going to be on on the eastern seaboard?” he said. “When you do something in the cyberdomain, you’re asking a policy maker to accept a risk that’s probably a little less measurable than a parallel operation outside of cyberspace…. The thinking on cyberstuff is so immature that, if we’re not careful, they’ll become the special weapon of the 21st century like nuclear weapons were [in the last century] that you really had to have the president in the room before you could use them.”

Hayden was asked about WikiLeaks and the possible repercussions that will come from the secret-spilling site publishing 77,000 intelligence documents on the Afghanistan war.

“This is an interesting aspect of a cyberwar [that] would not exist in physical space,” he said. “So, how now do we deal with this? Can we sustain espionage? Will it be possible for America to spy if this cultural trend is not modified or muted …? We have less control of our secrets than some other states.”

Hayden said the intelligence community will likely push back against open intelligence-sharing initiatives that evidently made this and other documents published by WikiLeaks vulnerable to leaking. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the government made the sharing of intelligence easier in order to combat criticism that people responsible for defending the country didn’t have the information they needed. As a result, intelligence reports and documents were made available to a much wider group of people in the government and military.

Hayden said “it’s going to take very strong leadership” to ensure that there isn’t a knee-jerk reaction that simply closes access to intelligence going forward.”

“As a result of how Blackberry data is managed and stored, in their current form, certain Blackberry applications allow people to misuse the service, causing serious social, judicial and national security repercussions,” UAE regulator said. Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail

United Arab Emirates, which actively censors websites considered harmful to conservative local values, seeks greater control over smart phone data

The US has condemned as "irresponsible" the leak of 90,000 military records, saying publication could threaten national security.

The documents released by the Wikileaks website include details of killings of Afghan civilians unreported until now.

Three news organisations had advance access to the records, which also show Nato concerns that Pakistan and Iran are helping the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has denied claims its intelligence agency backed the group.

The Pakistani presidential spokeswoman, Farahnaz Ispahani, said the leaks might be an attempt to sabotage the new strategic dialogue between the US and Pakistan.

A spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he was "shocked" at the scale of the leaks, but thought that "most of this is not new".

Mr Karzai's office later said the documents "clearly support and verify Afghanistan's all-time position that success over terrorism does not come with fighting in Afghan villages, but by targeting its sanctuaries and financial and ideological sources across the borders".

The huge cache of classified papers - posted by Wikileaks as the Afghan War Diary - is one of the biggest leaks in US history. It was also given in advance to the New York Times, the Guardian and the German news magazine, Der Spiegel.

The founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, said he had no reason to doubt the reliability of the reports.

"When we publish material, what we say is: the document as we describe it is true," he said at a news conference in London.

"We publish CIA reports all the time. They are legitimate reports, but they don't mean the CIA is telling the truth."

Mr Assange said there was no one overarching revelation to come out of the cache.

"The real story of this material is that it's war - it's one damn thing after another," he said.

"It is the continuous small events, the continuous deaths of children, insurgents, allied forces, the maimed people. Search for the word 'amputation' in this material, or 'amputee', and there are dozens and dozens of references."

He compared the impact of the released material to the opening of the archives of the East German secret police, the Stasi.

Taliban-ISI meetings?

In a statement, US National Security Adviser Gen James Jones said such classified information "could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk".

He said the documents covered the period from January 2004 to December 2009, before President Barack Obama "announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan".

But Mr Assange was sceptical, saying: "A new policy by Obama doesn't mean new practice by the US military."

He also said Wikileaks had "tried hard to make sure that this material does not put innocents at harm".

"All the material is over seven months old so is of no current operational consequence, even though it may be of very significant investigative consequence."

After being asked repeatedly by reporters whether he believed some of the incidents described in the documents constituted war crimes, Mr Assange said: "It is up to a court to decide, clearly, whether something is, in the end, a crime."

"That said, prima facie, there does appear to be evidence of war crimes in this material," he added.

He cited as an example an attack in June 2007 by a secret US special forces unit, Task Force 373, which used a Himars (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) to begin a raid on a compound where a senior al-Qaeda leader, Abu-Laith al-Libi, was thought to be hiding. Seven children died.

The Nato-led International Security Assistance Force acknowledged the deaths of the children at the time, but stated that coalition troops had attacked because of "nefarious activity" there.

The US said the leaks could put the lives of Nato and Afghan service personnel at risk

It did not mention they had targeted al-Libi nor used a Himars before any shots had been fired at them, and has not commented on the details included in the Wikileaks papers.

Pakistan's government, meanwhile, denied claims its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency backed the Taliban in the war in Afghanistan.

One of the leaked documents refers to an alleged meeting in December 2006 between insurgents and the former ISI chief, Lt Gen Hamid Gul, during which he claimed to have dispatched three men to Kabul to carry out attacks.

He dismissed the Wikileaks material as "pure fiction which is being sold as intelligence".

"It's not intelligence," Gen Gul, who ran the agency from 1987 to 1989, told the BBC. "It may have a financial angle to it but more than that it is not hardcore [intelligence]. I'm an old veteran. I know."

"It is all wrong. It's precisely as their intelligence regarding Saddam Hussein keeping weapons of mass destruction in his closet," he added. "This is all based on falsehood. That is why they are not winning, because they have no cause."

Pakistani officials have denied that Gen Gul still works for the ISI.

The reports also suggest:

• The Taliban has had access to portable heat-seeking missiles to shoot at aircraft
• A secret US special forces unit, Task Force 273, has been engaged on missions to "capture or kill" top insurgents listed on a Joint Priority Effects List (JPEL)
• Many civilian casualties - caused by Taliban roadside bombs and Nato missions that went wrong - have gone unreported
• Iran is engaged in an extensive covert campaign to arm, finance and equip the Taliban and Afghan warlords allied to al-Qaeda

'Civilian deaths'

The head of the Foreign Relations Committee in the US Senate said the leak came at a "critical stage" for US policy in the region.

"However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan," Democratic Senator John Kerry said.

UK Foreign Secretary William Hague said he did not think the leaks would damage the international effort in Afghanistan.

Wikileaks says it delayed the release of about 15,000 reports from the archive as part of a "harm minimisation process demanded by our source".

The Guardian and the New York Times say they had no contact with the original source of the leak, but spent weeks cross-checking the information.

Earlier this year, Wikileaks posted a video on its website which it said showed the killings of civilians by a US military helicopter in Baghdad in 2007.

A US army intelligence analyst, Specialist Bradley Manning, is awaiting trial on charges including releasing classified information.

A former hacker, Adrian Lamo, said Spc Manning boasted to him about handing over military videos and 260,000 classified US embassy messages to Wikileaks.

Wikileaks has refused to identify its source for the video or the US military documents.

Calling their release a "criminal act", a Pentagon spokesman said the latest documents appeared to be classified as "secret" but not "top secret", and that a review would take "days if not weeks".

"We will be looking at them to try to determine the potential damage to lives of our service members and our coalition partners, whether they reveal sources and methods and any potential damage to national security," Col Dave Lapan said.

Meanwhile, Nato said it was investigating reports that as many as 45 civilians died in an air strike in Helmand province on Friday. The BBC spoke to villagers in Regey who said they witnessed the incident.

A Nato spokesman said international forces went to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties.