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Classified Wiki For U.S. Intelligence Community
CortoMaltese noted that the U.S. intelligence community has unveiled their own classified wiki, the Intellipedia. Reuters says "The office of U.S. intelligence czar John Negroponte announced Intellipedia, which allows intelligence analysts and other officials to collaboratively add and edit content on the government's classified Intelink Web much like its more famous namesake on the World Wide Web.
A 'top secret' Intellipedia system, currently available to the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, has grown to more than 28,000 pages and 3,600 registered users since its introduction on April 17. Less restrictive versions exist for 'secret' and 'sensitive but unclassified' material."
For kicks, you can also read about Intellipedia on Wikipedia."
SIPRnet contains a wide variety of resources that people with an access to do not necessarily have "need to know." If you do not have "need to know," it is expected that you will not look for it.
Its a compromise between keeping the information locked in a safe and having humans judge it, then shipping it by federal carrier after judging whether you specifically have "need to know" and expediency of access to that information.
If anything is judged "too sensitive," then it is kept behind either a login or a PKI cert in order to further restrict who would roughly need to know, but you would still be on your honor once on that system not to go riffling through information you have no business knowing.
They should have had something like this years ago. The goverment takes far too long to adopt new technology in vital areas.
You act as if it was a simple thing. Well, technically it obviously is, but you forget, this is classified information. One of the major tenants of protecting classified information is the concept of "need to know". Just because you have a top secret security clearance, doesn't mean that you have a need to know and thereby have access to ALL information that is marked as top secret. An example of this is just because one has a TS clearance to write intelligence software, doesn't mean that you should have access to information regarding the control system of a missle. This is actually the lynch-pin behind the entire notion of SCI and compartmentalizing of classified information. So now you have a system that allows people to enter what is obviously classified information, so how do you balance the desire to maintain "need to know" access with the desire to make sure that those who "need to know" actually find out? It's a tough question, and from the article, it's one that they haven't fully figured out, though it looks like they've reached the point where they are just going for it and will try to deal with those issues as they come along.
So bottom line, it's not that simple. While I would be the first person to acknowledge that the govt is pretty behind the times with tech, and that this could have been implemented earlier, this is an issue that isn't nearly as straight forward as you make it to be.
You're an idiot.
You have to take into account that this thing is running on the government's ultra classified private network. It is absolutely NOT accessible from ANY Internet based node or router. The network is totally (read: physically) separate from the Internet that you and I use. Only specific secured computers can log in at all.
"I'm a Laver, not a Phyto[plankton]"