Follow up to previous postings on WikiLeaks, via WaPo’s Joby Warrick: “Investigations into the attacks concluded that government agencies had failed to share critical information that could have helped uncover the Sept. 11 plot. Because of that lapse, Congress tasked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence with pressuring key government agencies – including the Pentagon, the Homeland Security Department and the State Department – to find ways to rapidly share information that could be relevant to possible terrorist plots and other threats. The State Department, with its hundreds of diplomatic posts worldwide, was already making tens of thousands of classified cables available to intelligence and military officials with secret security clearances. But in 2005, the DNI and the Defense Department agreed to pay for a new State Department computer database that could allow the agency’s cables to flow more easily to other users throughout the federal government. Net-Centric Diplomacy was launched in 2006 and tied into a giant Defense Department system known as the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, or SIPRnet. Soon, nearly half a million government employees and contractors with security clearances could tap into the diplomatic cables from computer terminals around the globe…The State Department’s new database quickly garnered praise as a model of interagency collaboration. The database was named a finalist for an Excellence in Government award in 2006…The flaws did not become apparent until much later. One of biggest problems: Sensitive cables were often dumped willy-nilly into the database regardless of whether they belonged there, according to two department officials familiar with the internal procedures for data storage.”