Spying 2.0
The New York Times Magazine ran a long piece today by Clive Thompson on Open-Source Spying. It described how the intelligence community has started using open-source and off-the-shelf social software such as blogs and wikis to encourage sharing of information within and among intelligence agencies. Under the traditional, hierarchical mode of operation, and analyst would shift through mountains of data and produce a report. The data could be open source, such as newspaper articles, or classified information from operatives in the field, but getting information from other agencies was cumbersome. Once the report was produced, its dissemination was at the whim of the analyst's supervisor. The shortcomings of this system became apparent after 9/11 when it was revealed that no one had connected the dots among the many pieces of intelligence that would have exposed the plot.
The CIA and later the DNI set up a competition to find answers to the problem. The winning paper “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community,” by Calvin Andrus awakened the community to the potential of social software and led to the creation of the Intellipedia, a classified wiki. It turns out that blogs and wikis are not just useful for disseminating information, but also for identifying what is important - as the number of internal links to an article grows, it rises in page rank and thus becomes more visible to other analysts and decision makers.
The very idea of sharing information in this way runs counter to a long tradition in intelligence circles which holds that intelligence sources and methods need to be protected by compartmentalizing clearances and distributing information only to people with a "need-to-know." On the other hand, intelligence analysis today makes much more use of open source information, and important information about a terrorist or health threat may come from people who are not formally affiliated with any intelligence agency, such as doctors, aid workers, or security guards.
In any case, the Intellipedia already comprises 28,000 pages.
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