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."

Comments

WIKI is an acronym for "What I Know Is"

[mangu]

no one is going to blank a page and replace it to the word "penis"

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.

Re:WIKI is an acronym for "What I Know Is"

[glittalogik]

My company uses Confluence as an internal wiki for project and technical documentation. It's a piece of cake to create groups and assign fine-tuned privileges with regards to viewing, editing, commenting and destroying. I agree that an organisation with actual classified data is going to make damn sure the system they use can accommodate multiple clearance levels and 'need-to-know' groups.

Re:WIKI is an acronym for "What I Know Is"

[SirLurksAlot]

Interesting. Of course, just because one article is marked as non-classified doesn't mean they all are. I also find it interesting that whoever took the screenshot is using Firefox and del.icio.us ;-) I guess I shouldn't be too surprised though given IE's security track record.

Re:WIKI is an acronym for "What I Know Is"

[Anonymous Coward]

For me, the whole wiki concept clashes with the need to know concept.

It does.

However, the need to know concept tends to clash with the "let's accomplish our mission" concept quite often--it becomes synonymous with "ricebowling." "You don't need to know this because it's my project, not yours," etc.

In reality the vast majority of classified info is not really compartmentalized, nor should it be. There are draconian intentional controls on the really sensitive life-or-death, sources-and-methods stuff, but for everything else, the barrier to cross-pollenation is more that:
1) nobody wants you to exploit their data, find something new, and make them look stupid, and
2) finding stuff if you don't already know about it is a pain in the ass, since intelink is the shittiest search engine EVER.

In the commercial sector, people whose value is based on the data they "own" rather than what they do with it or what they know don't last very long--this is not so in .gov, unfortunately. It's a huge barrier to overcome, and, as the article notes, everyone will start sandbagging you the moment you try to innovate.

Everybody's doing it.

[tripmine]

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!)

Re:It is vital, in fact

[TubeSteak]

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. No, I think this was the problem:

"We've seen 23-year-olds [come into the agency] ... and within several months be indoctrinated to the existing culture. They want to fit in. All that creativity they had before they walked in the door is pushed aside. Decades of pissing contests got ingrained into their organization's culture and the new blood never even had a chance to make any incremental changes.

It took a clusterfuck of epic proportions to change the way the alphabet agencies related to one another.

All that needs said

[jollyreaper]

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.

Re:Wikipedia has a screenshot

[JeremyBanks]

Well, this is interesting. Their login page doesn't escape anything when displaying your entered username back to you if it's invalid, so any HTML/Javascript could be injected. Try for yourself, enter this as the username:

"><script>alert(document.cookie);</script><input type="hidden" "

The requests are blocked if they don't have a valid request ID, so you don't seem to be able send people to the page and have it load a script that will steal their cookies or whatever, but it's still a little disturbing to see that even this much is possible.

CIC

[Anonymous Coward]

Now it just needs to be open to everyone so Hiro Protagonist can start submitting intel.