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CIA Details Its Wikipedia-Like Tools For Analysts
hhavensteincw writes "If you think selling Web 2.0 in your organization is hard, some early backers of a Wikipedia-like project at the Central Intelligence Agency were called traitors and told they 'would get someone killed' by their efforts. But Intellipedia — the CIA's version of Wikipedia — now is so heavily used by analysts that the agency is using it in its security briefings, according to two of the CIA employees who work on the project. Intellipedia has been expanded since it was first launched so that now it boasts its own YouTube-like channel for video and Flickr-like photo sharing as well as a wiki where workers can debate different intel information."
I don't see how this will improve the accuracy of the information. It will just help poor intel get passed more efficiently.
How long before a troll causes an international incident or snafu?
A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking
Having a collaborative tool that makes it easier to keep profiles up to date is better.
The CIA also doesn't have to worry about vandalism- no one is going to blank a page and replace it to the word "penis" when every edit is tied to their name... plus, being in the CIA is serious work, so I'd imagine the maturity level is higher anyways.
The fake one set up for the benefit of enemy agents, and the real one.
and a lot more detail. The screenshot is the only place where the URL is listed (https://www.intelink.gov/wiki), and you'll need a username and password to get in. I'll leave that part up to you =)
I suppose double agents are more mature than that. For me, the whole wiki concept clashes with the need to know concept. It makes no sense for an organization like the CIA to make every information they have available to anyone inside the organization.
If I were doing something like that, I would make sure to at least have every submission vetted by someone above the submitter in the hierarchy.
Don't edit my Intellipedia article, college boy. I can kill a man with my thumb and I know where you work.
steampunk web design
Deleted: Doesn't indicate importance/significance
And make each other insane in an orgy of ever perpetuating intel paranoia.
Their paranoia is, "If we cane make up these insane monstrous plots then others will too".
If nobody knows the intelligence information, and nobody can put together a full picture, well then it is useless. For example while hindsight is always 20/20, it still looks as though the government had all the information to put together what was going to happen on 9/11. The problem was, there wasn't a good way of accessing and analyzing it. It wasn't like there was a report saying "Terrorists will hit the towers on this day," it was little fragments all over. Well, all those little fragments ended up doing no good. Nobody was ever able to put it together, and thus there was no warning that would have allowed prevention.
Had there been efficient dissemination of the information, it is possible some analyst would have put it all together and then been able to generate a report that would be acted on.
This is bloody hilarious!
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
The CIA wants you to believe that wiki is safe and secure. Sure it is. The CIA does "wiki", so it must be secure. Other organizations -- FSB, PLA,
DGSE, Mossad, and the entire Fortune 500 -- should all adopt wikis. It'll be great. Everyone will be really productive and secure.
But what if wiki isn't secure? What if MediaWiki has security holes? What if wikis make it is easier to spy? What if the CIA wants a backdoor into FSB, PLA, DGSE, Mossad, and the entire Fortune 500? Then what? HUH?!
IT'S CIA SUBTERFUGE! WATCH OUT! OMG! PSYCH! OMG! WATCH OUT! IT'S CIA SUBTERFUGE!
I'M POSTING ANONYMOUSLY FOR OBVIOUS REASONS!!!
afraid it would get someone killed? Since when does the CIA care if they get someone killed. The CIA is probably directly responsible for several thousand deaths. let's not split any hairs here.
One's run by a shadowy cabal not obviously accountable to any authority... ... do I have to spell this one out?
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
in this thread gets its very own link in intellipedia
go for it!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Block him. He broke the Three-revert rule.
should a 'terrorist' gain access, they could change stuff to what they want... and if there really is a 'public' login page with no other restrictions than a uid/pwd, that's pretty damn weak already. and the government is notorious for having security problems, there's usually a story a month here on /. and i've seen more than a few on various militaries.
of course, the CIA would expect this and maybe it's just a honeypot.
i really don't know how people do this line of work without becoming obsessive-compulsive-paranoid.
Excellent, there's finally a page about me on a wiki!
The article makes it seem like Intellipedia is a CIA only thing. It's actually under the umbrella of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It was designed so that all the intelligence agencies would know what the hell is going on, and coordinate to keep shit like 9/11 from happening.
Like always, the mother of all wiki's provides plenty of information on the subject. (and even a screenshot!)
Bin Laden ON WHEELS!!!
Heh-- back in the day when I did some security work, I used to tell my friends in the skiff that something like this would be a great way to gather together information. It was early on then, and it wasn't CIA, so I guess I missed out.
I do know that it's a great tool for an intranet-- especially when there are disparate sources from separated teams. The only common conduit they have is the common information. The best thing about a wiki as we all know-- and thank God the CIA gets this: is that file structures or directory trees or some sort of knowledge branching CANNOT be imposed from above-- it can be suggested, but the community must sort that out for themselves.
With security and foreign threat information evolving and devolving so rapdily, such knowledge organization must be very fluid and not dogmatic. A wiki is a great medium to provide this.
davejenkins.com |
"We are not typically dealing with facts," he noted. "We are dealing with puzzles and mysteries. Everyone in the community is working on something of vital national security importance. We want to get to the point in the intelligence community where everyone is contributing their knowledge to Intellipedia." In other words, they're using the wiki as a collaboration tool, not as a information aggregator. That's actually what Ward Cunningham had in mind when he invented the Wiki, and it's still the one thing Wikis really excell at. Sure, wikis are used for a lot of other stuff (like building reference books, a task at which they positively suck), but only because using them saves a lot of money.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Ashes-History-Tim-Weiner/dp/038551445X
Legacy of Ashes, listening to this in the car right now. Holy shit, the way the CIA operates, it reminds me of my time at a dot.com. Seriously. You have these unwarranted and outsized egos combined with dick-all knowledge of espionage and intelligence-gathering. The same pitiful fuck story that we've read about with Iraq is pretty much the way the CIA operated throughout its entire existence.
Just reading about the idiots in charge is enough to make my teeth hurt. I worked for exactly the same sort of people at dot.coms but hey, ignorance and hubris don't get people killed in the dot.com world. In the spy world, having Soviet agents throughout your organization feeding secrets back home will get people killed. We sent in thousands of agents to infiltrate Soviet-occupied Europe, Korea, China, all of them killed because our organization was compromised. We parachute people in, the secret police are waiting for them on the ground. We get top-level moles in the USSR? Fucking American turncoats sell them out and they get the firing squad. And the CIA directors continue to lie to the President, not that presidents throughout the Cold War were going to disagree when they were told exactly what they asked to hear instead of what they needed to hear, etc etc.
Our government is so fucking incompetent, it's almost like the Russians deserved to win. Our only saving grace was that the Soviet system was more hatefully backward and ignorant than the one we were running. Since the fall of the USSR, our government seems to be desperately seeking to close the stupidity gap.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Iran has in the past contacted people who have also been monitored to have visited a nuclear facility in Pakistan. Recommend making diplomatic contact to get some more intel. (fieldofficerfred 8/23/99, imported from file)
Anyone? Need some direction on this. (fieldofficerfred 9/8/00, imported from file)
Hello? (fieldofficerfred 2/23/01, imported from file)
We're listening. How can we make this suit our needs? (pwolfawitz, rrumsfeld, dcheney 9/10/01, imported from file)
Saddam's a softer target. Hang on. (dcheney 10/25/02, imported from file)
Saddam? Iran is refining uranium! With all due repsect, what the fuck are you guys thinking? (fieldofficerfred 11/26/02, imported from file)
Don't question my authority to not know what I may or may not know that I know. You're fired. (rrumsfeld 1/8/03, imported from file)
Hey, did you guys know Iran was refining uranium? (rrumsfeld (deprecated) 11/16/07)
Iran has offered to accept the delivery of peaceful fissile material and a shutdown of their own refineries in exchange for guarantees from Europe that they won't allow the US to attack them. (gathered from the AP 5/2/08)
Disregard that. We will not allow Europe to negotiate with extremists on the other side. Iran is the greatest threat to America and the known universe, second only to waxy buildup and auto erotic asphyxiation. (dcheney 5/4/08)
Iran continues to refine uranium as they see it as their only diplomatic leverage and hope to prevent the United States from invading. (gathered from the AP 5/29/08)
IRAN HAS NUKES. [citation needed] JESUS TOLD ME TO ATTACK AT DAWN!!!!!!!!1111 [citation needed] (gwbush 8/5/08)
Mer mer mer attack at dawn, mer mer mer. (dcheney 8/5/08)
Saddam has WMD [citation needed]
i wish i could stop
on the note of using wiki for intelligence, there should be a wiki to track computer security issues. maybe you can make some money putting one together.
Those guys should totally use a slashdot style feedback scheme so they can know if the posts are informative, insightful, or better yet, funny!
Anonymous coward name redacted
CIAleakie - to post 'lost' secrets.
Wikillyou - where assassins can discuss tricks of the trade.
It is a well-known fact that Wikipedia is communism, and we freedom-loving Americans can't have such filth infiltrating our government.
No doubt, those higher in this organization, like any other, were upset at such a tool because it potentially decreases the amount of control they have and therefore threatens their (probably inflated) value. So, with the success of the system one can only surmise that they figured out how to re-insert themselves back into the power control framework, and now take credit for being such "leaders".
While the following phrase doesn't apply 100% to the situation at such a government agency, it likely has some close parallel:
The captains of industry love to be portrayed as freedom loving risk takers, when in fact they are risk averse control freaks.
You can inject HTML or JavaScript or CSS into any page without having to trick the remote server into doing it for you.
I think most people here are confused by bright, shiny, new things, and don't understand how the intelligence process works.
A wiki, as they exist commonly on the Internet, has no sense of compartmentalization. This does not mean either you have access or you don't, it means you only has access to the information you need to. Separating this information with some silly authentication scheme on the same hardware would probably not fly very well. No wonder early attempts within the CIA were met with great resistance.
There's also the matter of formally processing and validating incoming information. You can't just have EVERYBODY add information to this system willy-nilly.
Hopefully, the actual "wiki" they have implemented is severely compartmentalized, and writable only by the proper analysts. - Not very wiki like... and that's my point.
Parts of a wiki system could be very beneficial to an intelligence process, but the typical wiki on the Internet is NOT an example of what we need.
Locations of WMD in Iraq
This article is a stub. You can help Intellipedia by expanding it.
If Wikipedians can enforce the contribute or ban, so can Intellipedians:
http://digg.com/educational/Wikipedia_enslaving_users_These_admins_want_to_enforce_it
When I worked at a TLA company in the '80s, there was a project to implement something like this. They spent a lot of money but the nut they couldn't crack wasn't technical. It was deciding who could see what information. That is, even within the CIA not everyone has access to all information. Just knowing that we know something is enough for someone to infer that we must have insider access. That sort of thing.
I wonder if they have layers of data such that only people with certain clearances can see certain levels of information. Likewise, intel is usually compartmentalized such that people working on, say, information about Iran can't see equivalent data about, say, China. The theory is that they don't have a need to know.
Still an interesting problem.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
From TFA:
"We still call spies collaborators," he noted. "We're trying to encourage collaboration, but there is still a negative connotation with that word."
This quote floored me. My god, does it explain a lot about 9/11 intelligence failures.
Now it just needs to be open to everyone so Hiro Protagonist can start submitting intel.
Read The Friggin Article's Links
The link you posted was for Digg, and I did some more snooping and it turns out that this issue in question was taken out of context and was simply a debate about how to handle a potential abusive account through an edit quota as a condition of his probation.
This was NOT intended for general users that have clean records at wikipedia.
The Digg link in question points to their Admin Noticeboard, which is where they discuss troublemakers.
This is fascinating. Someone -- either "Bear" Steele or Steve Rambam, I think, but I could be wrong -- asked for something on the order of this a few years back at the Hackers On Planet Earth/2600 conference a few years back, though he wanted it more public. Interesting to hear this thread being picked up from within. I think he even made the request before Wikipedia was a big deal.
The last HOPE conference is this summer, by the way -- www.thelasthope.org . Promises to be tons of fun.
Are you ever going to answer this?
Political torture and murder is not funny http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=581079&cid=23757591
Revert with extreme prejudice.