Intel Community Responds to WikiLeaks With WTF

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange gestures as he gets back into a car at Beccles Police Station in Suffolk, England, on Dec. 17. (AP)

The U.S. intelligence community has an official response to the massive WikiLeaks document dump -- WTF.

It's not what you think.

WTF is the acronym for the newly formed WikiLeaks Task Force, a project launched by the CIA to determine how the leak of hundreds of thousands of cables and files will affect intelligence operations.

Though the title might encapsulate a widely shared government attitude toward the diplomatic debacle, the CIA is actually fairly confident about its standing in the wake of the security breach as it continues to investigate the impact.

"The CIA has had strong, longstanding measures in place to protect classified information," CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood said.

CIA communications generally were not a part of the document cache made public by WikiLeaks. The agency has experienced a touch of vindication, after having resisted post-Sept. 11 efforts to increase information-sharing on a Pentagon communications system known as SIPRNet.

"No agency or department is immune from possible leaks, but one thing's for sure -- the CIA is known to have among the highest information security standards in the U.S. government," a U.S. official told Fox News. "The recent WikiLeaks episode points to the serious need for our government to look closely at whether it might be time for need-to-know to make a comeback."

CIA Director Leon Panetta assigned dozens of CIA members to the task force to ensure the classified information now in the public domain will not hinder the agency's ability to operate.

Though WikiLeaks had previously released military files on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the task force was set up following the latest release of State Department cables because those revelations were thought to have more impact on the kind of work the CIA does.