Protecting Secrets

A major new blow to WikiLeaks, though, today. It's been ousted from the I thought server space it rents from Amazon.com. The Senate Homeland Security chairman, Joe Lieberman, says Amazon cut off WikiLeaks after being contacted by his aides. The State Department says its offer to provide protection to human rights activists who may be in jeopardy right now, after their identities were revealed in some of these leaked diplomatic cables.

And Turkey's prime minister is threatening to file a lawsuit, saying he was slandered in one of those leaked diplomatic messages. The U.S. ambassador to Turkey reportedly alleged, back in 2004, that the prime minister had canceled his wealth in some Swiss -- concealed. Excuse me -- concealed his wealth in some Swiss bank accounts.

Let's bring in our senior political analyst, David Gergen, who's trying to digest this. All of us are right now.

They name a guy to be in charge of security, protecting the secrets today -- but, David, this has been going on for months and months and months, and only today they say, you know what, we're going to come to grips with this?

DAVID GERGEN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST, FORMER PRESIDENTIAL ADVISER: Very surprising, Wolf. You know, there may be more to this story inside. They may have a lot of things that they have actually done very privately and we don't know about yet.

But normally, in this kind of situation, if you're in the White House and you've got something bad coming and you know it's coming, you try to prepare for it in advance. So that the day it happens, or even days before it happens, you go to the public and say, we've done the following five things. We've severed the State Department from all of its communications from anybody who's a private first class sitting over in Baghdad to make sure this never happens and nothing like this ever happens again. We've had a point man working on this for the last three months. He's done -- he's recommended the following five things. We've had our intelligence advisory board working on this for three months, knowing this was coming. We -- we have communicated to all the foreign embassies and, by the way, we've done what Joe Lieberman did today, which was to get WikiLeaks off Amazon.

You know, so, there -- there were a series of things you would have think they would have packaged and said, boom, we are on top of this. We're going to get this SOB if we can, but know that your security is in good hands, rather than this sort of sense of scrambling.

BLITZER: Yes. And that's the -- the impression you get. Pete Hoekstra, the Republican ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, he said very bluntly. He said this. He said: "I think there are still other government databases out there, that are out there that have similar types of materials that may be vulnerable to penetration," meaning even right now, some 23-year-old young guy working for the federal government can start downloading thousands of thousands of secret documents, that they haven't necessarily cleaned that up yet.

GERGEN: Well, that is a worry. And I think that the -- the country is due an explanation on that. But, of course, the -- the additional worry is that there are higher level secrecy documents that -- it doesn't take much, in a big organization, to have a couple guys who are really, really alienated or hostile and want to bring the organization down. If they have access to this kind of stuff, especially at a very high level, it can -- it can cause huge problems for this government.

So they -- I -- I'm -- I'm appreciative of the fact of how hard this is, the technology, and how hard they've been working to make State Department documents more available to DOD people and -- and vice versa. They've been doing -- trying to do the right thing. But somehow in the computer side of this thing, they got it really screwed up.

BLITZER: Yes. They've got to really work that -- that part of the story.

I know for a fact that foreign governments, some of them not necessarily friendly governments to the United States, but even some so-called friends of the U.S., they're going through all of these cables that relate to their government and they're trying to find out the individuals who may have had sensitive conversations with U.S. diplomats and other officials in their countries and they may retaliate. And I know this is a source of grave concern to U.S. officials.

GERGEN: Absolutely. And Bill Clinton was here in North Carolina last night. And he said, look, this could cause some -- cost some lives and it will definitely cost a lot of careers.

BLITZER: I'm -- I -- I know a lot of people are really worried about that, the first part...

GERGEN: As they should be.

BLITZER: -- because careers are one thing, but lives, obviously, much more serious than that.

GERGEN: Yes. Yes.

BLITZER: All right, David.

Thanks very much.

GERGEN: Thank you.

Transcript form The Situation Room Aired December 1, 2010