"This is destructive on so many levels," retired Air Force general and former CIA chief Michael Hayden said of the WikiLeaks saga, after an onstage chat on Wednesday at a Black Hat computer security conference in Las Vegas.

"It reinforces the darker angels. Leaders in the intelligence community have to come to grips with this problem and work hard to find an answer."

Black Hat and an overlapping DefCon gathering of hackers have become venues for national security officials to court software wizards as allies to fight cyber wars, online crime syndicates and other mounting Internet threats.

By turning the Internet into a worldwide stage for sensitive government information, WikiLeaks is sowing distrust between the very intelligence agencies castigated for being too secretive prior to the World Trade Center attack on Sept. 11, 2001.

"In the years after 9/11, whenever anything went wrong I got slammed by both parties about failure to share," Hayden said.

"We told senators 'Yes, we'll share.' But, in the back of your mind your conscious was saying there are real dangers in sharing. And that just got displayed."

A massive release of secret Pentagon documents by WikiLeaks highlights security challenges of the digital age, when gigabytes of sensitive data can be exposed with a single click, according to analysts.

"Making it easier to share and then trusting people to do the right thing just doesn't work," said James Lewis, cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"People are beginning to realize that the same way that machines make it easier to share, machines also make it easier to control."

WikiLeaks has not identified the source of the documents it obtained but suspicion has fallen on Bradley Manning, a US Army intelligence analyst who is currently being held in a military jail in Kuwait.

Manning was arrested in May following the release by WikiLeaks of video footage of a US Apache helicopter strike in Iraq in which civilians died and has been charged with delivering defense information to an unauthorized source.

The Pentagon in June said it was probing allegations that Manning supplied classified video and 260,000 secret diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks.

Manning was relatively low in military rank, and if he did release the information it highlights the risks posed by sharing intelligence too widely, according to Hayden.

"It should be a real warning shot across the bow," said Hayden, who also sis a stint as head of the National Security Agency before retiring in early 2009.

"The reaction to this is going to be push-back against sharing."

Hayden argued that what is needed is for intelligence agencies to work even more closely with specialists at private technology firms to find ways to harden the internal tools used to share information.

Technical safeguards could include programming computers to automatically shut down when large amounts of data are being downloaded or having software track key strokes.

WikiLeaks will likely catalyze a much-needed debate about what it means "to be responsible in cyberspace," said Melissa Hathaway, who served as interim national "Cyber Czar" before leaving for the private sector in 2009.

"I'm not so sure there will be blow-back," Hathaway said of whether WikiLeaks will cause intelligence agencies to re-fortify their walls.

"I'm sure there will now be a pause before you click 'send.' You will think twice."

Some hackers in the Black Hat crowd questioned WikiLeak's agenda and why the website wasn't as transparent with its own information as it is with other people's.

By Wednesday, criticism of WikiLeaks had made its way in the website Cryptome.org, a free speech advocacy website that also posts leaked government documents.

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