IDF's information much more secure: No leaks during Gaza op

Not a single Israel Defense Forces officer leaked information to an unauthorized party during Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip earlier this year, the IDF's information security department concluded after examining the mobile phone records of some 550 officers.

The department conducts routine periodic checks to ensure that officers are not leaking military information to outsiders, including politicians, diplomats and journalists, or even to other officers who are not authorized to receive the information. However, it intensified its activity during the 22-day Gaza operation.

This was partly due to orders from IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, who attaches great importance to information security and ordered the department to step up the pace of its checks. He has also warned that any officer caught leaking information would be punished severely. Three months ago, a colonel who was serving as aide to the defense minister's military secretary was sentenced to jail time for leaking military information to the daily Maariv.

The fact that no leaks were discovered during Cast Lead marks a sharp change from the situation a few years ago. When Ashkenazi's predecessor, Dan Halutz, ordered an information security check of comparable scope during the Second Lebanon War in 2006, it emerged that fully 460 officers, including several major generals, had spoken to journalists without permission over the course of a single day.

IDF officers said that Ashkenazi is "far more extreme" on this issue than Halutz, who woke up to it only toward the end of the Second Lebanon War. The lack of any leaks during Cast Lead attests to the success of his efforts to inculcate new norms of behavior - as well as to a degree of lingering trauma among senior officers from the Lebanon war.

A source in the General Staff noted that information security checks are carried out during periods of active fighting first and foremost to prevent hostile forces such as Hamas or Hezbollah from overhearing sensitive operational details while eavesdropping on officers' phone conversations, or from being able to triangulate the location of units or individual officers via these phone calls.