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."

Comments

This Is A Good Thing

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what we need more than any new stealth fighter jet in this post-9/11 world. Better Human intelligence and analysis and collaboration tools is necessary to win this Global War on Terror. We must find and kill them before they can try to kill us.

9/11 happened because we couldn't get different agencies and intelligence communities to work together. This sounds like something useful to prevent the next big suicide attack on the US.

Need to Know

[EnderGT]

When deciding whether or not to reveal classified information to someone, there are 3 things to examine:

1. Clearance - Has the person been cleared to know this information
2. Access - Has the person been given access to this information by the party responsible for the information (in the US DoD, signed SF 312)
3. Need to Know - Does the person really need to know this information

This seems like they're skipping steps 2 and 3 all together. Now anyone with clearance can find out anything they want? Seems fishy to me...

Re:Need to Know

[jandrese]

More importantly, with the change in our threats has come a change in where the threats come from. When the "big bad guy" was the Soviets, we had to assume that they had paid off at least some strategic people in every agency, or possibly even had plants, that allowed them some access to data that should otherwise be protected by our security clearance and secure data handing procedures. Because of this, it was very necessary to keep everyone as compartmentalized as possible, even though this is far from optimal when trying to organize the efforts of thousands of analysts and field operatives.

Modern day threats are different. Al-Quieda probably doesn't have a vast network of spies gaining access to our intelligence serivices, so it makes sense to open up the internal communication a bit to allow our own intelligence workers to be more efficient. While it does make a compromise that much more painful, the advantages gained through the information sharing probably outweigh the risks.

Knowledge Base Software

[jmagar.com]

What we are seeing here is the emerging winner in the knowledge base software category. Wiki's are able to harness the power of being fully distributed in content creation. Anyone can contribute, correct, and read the data. Also they are not shackled with structured meta data requirements so that the content collection/creation is far easier than other systems. They rely on FULL TEXT search to find the knowledge held within, and this suits perfectly well with a user based trained, by Google, in how to construct meaningful keyword based searches.

Re:Well well well....

[Xserv]

Do you think some of that would really be an issue. You could probably add a rating system or something for "more trusted" sources to have a higher priority on an update.

You have to admit that this is a good move for the intelligence community as a whole. ANY way for them to share a COMMON source of information is productive. Wasn't one of the main problems suspected behind the 9/11 committee's findings that there WASN'T enough communication and interoperability between branches of the intelligence sects?

Just a thought...

Xserv

On a platter?

[ParraCida]

I'm not sure how the intelligence community usually handles their information sharing between agencies and members, but this seems a rather easy target.

One database with thousands of user accounts, remotely accessible, each account has full viewing access, the information is displayed in an easy to copy format ready to be picked clean by a single compromised account. One key logger, one leak, one vulnerability and it's all gone, that to me seems rather risky.

Now like I said, I don't know if it would be the same if one single person in the CIA or something would be compromised, ie that they would have unlimited access to a full database, but to me this seems a rather risky business.