As it rushed headlong into the brave new world of social media, the United Nations Secretariat for years apparently kept its legal department out of the loop in signing up for services like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Flickr, resulting in potential leaks of delicate internal information, among other things, according to an internal auditors' report.

Among the serious risks produced by the U.N.'s haphazard methods of using web-based media were compromised user privacy, possible copyright infringements and potential legal exposures despite U.N. legal immunities, as well as other undefined security concerns.

Many of those problems apparently still have not been fixed, and powerful portions of the U.N. bureaucracy were apparently opposed to getting the U.N.'s lawyers to help fix them.

In an unusual display of bureaucratic defiance, the U.N.'s 700-member Department of Public Information (DPI) rejected as "unrealistic" a formal recommendation from the auditors that the U.N. lawyers be involved in advance before the world body signed any more such media deals.