[Sig-bwp] Blogs and Wikis: Not Just for Breakfast Anymore

[Gerry Mckiernan]

****APOLOGIES FOR RECEIPT OF DUPLICATE POSTINGS***

Colleagues/

For you Monday afternoon reading pleasure !

Enjoy!

/Gerry 

Gerry Mckiernan

NYTimes Magazine | 12-03-06 | Open-Source Spying |

[snip]

Billions of dollars’ worth of ultrasecret data networks couldn’t
help spies piece together the clues to the worst terrorist plot ever. So
perhaps, they argue, it’ s time to try something radically different.
Could blogs and wikis prevent the next 9/11?

[snip]

Intelligence hoarding presented one set of problems, but pouring it
into a common ocean, Meyerrose realized soon after moving into his
office, is not the answer either. “Intelligence is about looking for
needles in haystacks, and we can’t just keep putting more hay on the
stack,” he said. What the agencies needed was a way to take the
thousands of disparate, unorganized pieces of intel they generate every
day and somehow divine which are the most important.

Intelligence heads wanted to try to find some new answers to this
problem. So the C.I.A. set up a competition, later taken over by the
D.N.I., 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,”

[
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID907512_code490692.pdf?abstractid=755904&mirid=1
]

 Andrus posed a deceptively simple question: How did the Internet
become so useful in helping people find information?

[snip]

Nonetheless, Andrus’s ideas struck a chord with many very senior
members of the office of the director of national intelligence. This
fall, I met with two of them: Thomas Fingar, the patrician head of
analysis for the D.N.I., and Mike Wertheimer, his chief technology
officer, whose badge clip sports a button that reads “geek.” If it
is Meyerrose’s job to coax spy hardware to cooperate, it is Fingar’s
job to do the same for analysts.

[snip]

Fingar and Wertheimer are now testing whether a wiki could indeed help
analysts do their job. In the fall of 2005, they joined forces with
C.I.A. wiki experts to build a prototype of something called
Intellipedia, a wiki that any intelligence employee with classified
clearance could read and contribute to. 

[snip]

While the C.I.A. and Fingar’s office set up their wiki, Meyerrose’s
office was dabbling in the other half of Andrus’s equation. In July,
his staff decided to create a test blog to collect intelligence. It
would focus on spotting and predicting possible avian-flu outbreaks and
function as part of a larger portal on the subject to collect
information from hundreds of sources around the world, inside and
outside of the intelligence agencies.

[snip]

***MUCH MORE***

[ http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/magazine/03intelligence.html ]