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Washington, DC—Congresswoman Virginia Foxx today slammed the WikiLeaks State Department diplomatic cable data dump and called for strong penalties for those responsible for the security breach.  She also urged the Obama administration to make government data sharing efforts more secure and less susceptible to unauthorized users.

“This massive breach of sensitive diplomatic information is nothing less than a blatant attempt to harm the United States’ national security,” Foxx said.  “WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s talk about transparency is just so much hot air.  It is clear that his agenda is decidedly slanted towards tearing apart U.S. foreign relations and eroding our national security.  He is a criminal, nothing more.”

“The federal government must use every means possible to bring Mr. Assange and any other perpetrators of this data breach to justice.  Their irresponsible and possibly treasonous behavior has put the lives of our men and women serving abroad in new danger.  They must be held accountable for their actions.”

“At the same time, the federal government and the Obama administration must learn from this information sharing disaster.  Too many prying eyes have access to too much sensitive information.  The federal government must do a better job of weeding out those with too much information access and improving our data-sharing protocols so that this sort of catastrophic breach doesn’t happen again.”