UK Ministry of Defence moves to block Wikileaks

The UK government's Ministry of Defence (MoD) is rushing to block access from its computers to Wikileaks, a notorious document leak site.

According to The Guardian, the MoD was forced to act after it discovered that individuals and dissident groups were using the site to publish sensitive information, including manuals used by troops currently serving in Iraq.

The scale of the problem has shocked MoD managers.

One internal email uncovered by The Guardian reads, "There are thousands of things on here, I literally mean thousands. Not just UK MoD but other places as well. Everything I clicked on to do with MoD was 'restricted' ... It is huge."

V3.co.uk searched Wikileaks and found a number of documents from the MoD, with most being introduced with this warning: "This document is issued for the information of such persons who need to know its contents in the course of their official duties. Any person finding this document should hand it into a British Forces unit or to a British police station for its safe return to the Ministry of Defence."

In all, we found some 20 articles by performing a search for MoD documents. These ranged from the 1947 Penny Report on atomic weapons to a desert operations field manual from 2003.