Slashdot Mirror
CIA Officers Are Warming To Intellipedia
Hugh Pickens writes "The CIA is adopting Web 2.0 tools like collaborative wikis but not without a struggle in an agency with an ingrained culture of secrecy. 'We're still kind of in this early adoptive stage,' says Sean Dennehy, a CIA analyst and self-described 'evangelist' for Intellipedia, the US intelligence community's version of the popular user-curated online encyclopedia Wikipedia adding that 'trying to implement these tools in the intelligence community is basically like telling people that their parents raised them wrong. It is a huge cultural change.' Dennehy says Intellipedia, which runs on secure government intranets and is used by 16 US intelligence agencies, was started as a pilot project in 2005 and now has approximately 100,000 user accounts and gets about 4,000 edits a day. 'Some people have (supported it) but there's still a lot of other folks kind of sitting on the fence.' Dennehy says wikis are 'a challenge to our culture because we grew up in this kind of "need to know" culture and now we need a balance between "need to know" and "need to share."' A desire to compartamentalize information is another problem. 'Inevitably, every person, the first question we were asked is "How do I lock down a page?" or "How do I lock down a page so that just my five colleagues can access that?"' The growth of Intellipedia has so far largely been fueled by early adopters and enthusiasts says Chris Rasmussen, a social-software knowledge manager and trainer at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. 'We are struggling to take it to the next level.'"
Posting to undo accidental mod
Huh, seems I've lost my Intellipedia credentials, anyone feel like sharing their account?
I know, lets put all our information on 10's of thousands of people, in a single database for easy access, nothing can go wrong... No one has USB's or anything, and everyone of our many employees is trustworthy...
Laughter is the best medicine, except if you have a broken rib.
The reason you compartmentalize information is so that it can't all be lost in one well swoop. Now, with intellipedia, someone makes a copy of it, loses it, and boom, all the work product of the CIA would wind up on the internet. I would predict that this is inevitable.
This is my sig.
CIA is about the last agency I'd suspect of trying this. I use Intellipedia at work, and have been trying to advocate its use more, but like TFS said, most people in the IC talk about "need to know", not "need to share." There's a lot of products that really should just be pages on Intellipedia, like biographies on important people, but instead are powerpoint slides on someone's hard drive. Meanwhile, multiple commands are tracking the same people but aren't sharing info on those bios. I think we'll see more progress on this as senior leadership move out and people who grew up on Web 2.0 move up.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
It's actually kinda simple, you just modify wiki software in such a way that the page creator can specify default behavior of the page and add user accounts to the ACL of that page. It requires 1 custom column on the page data table for default behavior and 1 table to store the ACL info. The ACL table should have a composite key of page id, user name, access level.
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
Well cited, very informative. I love it. Hey, what is with the helicopter over the hou0u8409ulksfd['OQ#([No Carrier]
In God we trust, all others require data.
Wait a minute... They're describing wikis as Web 2.0? There was a video, an old black and white clip of a talk some guy was doing regarding some new fangled invention called the network. In it he described a bunch of people collaborating on creating a document, including linking to other documents.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
You can't store information on American citizens in that kind of network. It's not a "database on 10's of thousands" of people. Think of it more as short useless summary articles on topics like Iraq, Afganistan, insurgent groups, etc. No domestic info at all, by design.
Additionally, Intellipedia is TS (well, there's a TS version that is used primarily, and a SECRET version that is not used nearly as much), but not SCI (meaning, none of the really high level intelligence. TOP SECRET is _fairly common_ access). If somebody is able to read Intellipedia as a spy, you've got much bigger problems that any information they would get from Intellipedia. A later post whined about compartmented information--there is NO compartmented information on Intellipedia.
Also, Chris Rasmussen is the genius who is trying to introduce twitter to the intelligence analysis community. Apparently he wants to reduce the productivity of intel even further!
I could make plenty of Kongbucks uploading to the CIC datab-- err, Intellipedia.
While things like this may work, small scale wikis for businesses and government entities won't be as successful as some of their proponents hope. The essential advantage of projects like Wikipedia is that most of the people spending time on them are using time they'd otherwise spend procrastinating (playing Solitaire, Minesweeper, WoW etc.) Thus, the resources going in would be otherwise wasted. In that regard, Wikipedia is sort of like a distributed computing system for the human brain. However, Intellipedia and similar projects don't share that advantage. They are explicitly work related so people won't use them to procrastinate. In the case of Intellipedia, the situation is even worse, since security restrictions prevent anyone from editing anywhere other than work. Thus, the only time spent on it will be time otherwise spent doing other work. There are still major advantages to Wikis but these issues take away one of the largest. Intellipedia will thus likely grow and become a useful tool for the intelligence community. But I doubt it will ever become as commonly used in the intelligence community as Wikipedia is used in the normal world.
Technically precise and totally misses the point. It's not that they can't lock down the information, but rather they want it easily available to everyone on the classified network.
IAAIU - I Am An Intellipedia User.
It's not connected to the Internet, and it handles compartmentalized information quite well, thanks. It's actually been quite incredible watching it "grow up" over the past few years. It's also not plagued by the problems that most people associate with Wikis - astroturfing, self-made experts, anonymous contributions - and sure, you will have people with special "pet" pages, it is because they are, in fact, the acknowledged expert and have a vested interest in making sure that the information on the page is as correct as possible.
Imagine Wikipedia made entirely of subject matter experts who have verified credentials and identities. Yeah. It's rad.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Throughout history there have been people who have come up with things that were ahead of their time and were ignored until later when other foundation work had been laid.
Anyone who is too far ahead of the zeitgeist gets ignored. This can be because other technological framework is needed to make it practical or people just don't get what the big deal is.
Wise words. I'll be sure tell my GS-15 and SES bosses to start sharing or GTFO. ...It's the leaders and middle management that are on the fence, not the majority of the workforce.
Can anybody post the Intellipedia page for those Chinese Wiggers our Exalted Leader just released into the Bermudian wilderness?
Enquiring minds want to know!
Get off the fence and start sharing.
A lack of sharing is pretty clearly responsible for the success of the attacks on 9/11.
Which lead to ther budget DOUBLING.
Watching thousands of people die was very good for their expense accounts.
You can't take the sky from me...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
How quaint - someone who believes the CIA exists or has *ever* existed to protect American lives.
Don't ever lose that innocence, it's just all so warm and fuzzy to see someone so naive.
Think about how much information an intelligence agency (foreign or domestic) can get about a person by analyzing social sited like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter: friends, activities, affiliations, even political views.
OutputLogic
'Inevitably, every person, the first question we were asked is "How do I lock down a page?" or "How do I lock down a page so that just my five colleagues can access that?"'
Intellipedia: 3 million pages, all blacked out.
BTW, have they been sued by Intel for trademark infringement yet?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And IMHO, paranoia about employees "stealing" information should not stand in the way of increasing the efficiency of intelligence gathering and analysis.
This is the spy business we're talking about... imagine, if you will, if any of the following had access to the total USA "spy-o-pedia":
Harold Nicholson
Robert Philip Hanssen
Aldrich Ames
David Boone
Christopher Boyce
Thomas Cavanaugh
Lona Cohen
George Trofimoff
John Walker
Jerry Whitworth
I mean, there's plenty more...
This is my sig.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Looking at the posts...seems we did "out" a lot of people who work in the intel community on Slashdot...
No, that was Majestic 12. The CIA shot Kennedy.
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
It just seems to me, to be a bad idea about network sensitive intelligence information like that. I mean, yes, it is all contained behind a very [hopefully] secure network, but there have been far too many cases of [mostly] Chinese hackers breaking into military computer networks from halfway around the world.
I don't suppose it could stand up to a billion boxen botnet?
...to me that the marriage counseling hasn't worked. Oh, well...one thing is still true: If you need someone to vent to, you can be sure that the NSA still listens.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
No, but it made a handy excuse for setting up a global network of CIA torture camps.