A long feature article in this week’s New York Times Magazine, Open-Source Spying, discusses how Web 2.0 technologies like wikis and blogs might be useful in the intelligence community and asks “Could blogs and wikis prevent the next 9/11?”. The article brings out a number of themes.

One is that young people working in the intelligence community grew up with the Internet and Web. They understand and rely on tools and systems like IM, forums, Google, blogs, wikis, photo sharing sites, etc. When they find these lacking in their workplace, they are frustrated and feel unproductive.

Another is the idea that we are moving from the need to know concept from traditional access control and security toward a need to share culture that privileges cooperation, collaboration and distributing information.

A third is that the current information infrastructure of the intelligence community is not well organized for sharing and collaboration and is slow to take advantage of technology improvements and new ideas like social media.

“So the C.I.A. set up a competition … called the Galileo Awards: any employee at any intelligence agency could submit an essay describing a new idea to improve information sharing, and the best ones would win a prize. The first essay selected was by Calvin Andrus, chief technology officer of the Center for Mission Innovation at the C.I.A. In his essay, “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community,” Andrus posed a deceptively simple question: How did the Internet become so useful in helping people find information?”

A year ago, the US intelligence community began constructing Intellipedia, a set of wikis that intelligence employee with classified clearance can read and contribute to.

“By this fall, more than 3,600 members of the intelligence services had contributed a total of 28,000 pages. Chris Rasmussen, a 31-year-old “knowledge management” engineer at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, spends part of every day writing or editing pages. Rasmussen is part of the younger generation in the intelligence establishment that is completely comfortable online; he regularly logs into a sprawling, 50-person chat room with other Intellipedians, and he also blogs about his daily work for all other spies to read.”

There is a lot more in this long article, it’s a good read.

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