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

I guess

[travelmug]

I don't see how this will improve the accuracy of the information. It will just help poor intel get passed more efficiently.

Re:I guess

[moderatorrater]

You can tell which intel is poor because it's got [citation needed] all over the place.

Re:I guess

[SirLurksAlot]

Efficiency in dissemination is just as important as accuracy. Getting accurate information earlier to more people can save everyone a lot of trouble.

Wikipedia has a screenshot

[Anonymous Coward]

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 =)

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.

Re:Wikipedia has a screenshot

[JeremyBanks]

I decided not to investigate further when I realized what I was doing. :V

Article: No WMDs in Iraq

[Anonymous Coward]

Deleted: Doesn't indicate importance/significance

It is vital, in fact

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Oh Boy....

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Intellipedia also is connected to SIPRnet for military use. You don't actually think that the DoD wouldn't be connected to all available intel links do you?

It's actually a very good collaboration tool, as normally cross-department/cross-agency work is almost non-existant, and when the information does get passed along, it's too old to be useful. Also, things like streaming UAS feeds are often on there as well, as sometimes other agencies are better at imageint than the ones taking the pictures.

  - sF (...somewhere in Iraq.)

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.