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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.
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!
It's classified information on classified networks. We've been doing this for ages, so it's not like we don't know how to handle it. USB ports are closed off on classified machines, distribution is limited, and the only people how have access are those who go through rigorous background checks. The checks in place to prevent unauthorized disclosure have worked in the past and there's really nothing different about this. What's the problem?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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.
Thank you (and many others on these boards) for distributing the FUD.
As I hope we all have learned by now, information that is "compartmentalized" is far less valuable. Little bits of data from disparate sources can reveal patterns that those gathering the intelligence would miss.
And IMHO, paranoia about employees "stealing" information should not stand in the way of increasing the efficiency of intelligence gathering and analysis.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
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.
Btw, I hate to be a nazi, but it's fell swoop and not well swoop. Fell as in deadly.
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.
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It's classified information on classified networks. We've been doing this for ages,
Sounds like it is classified information from many different programs on a single classified network, in a single database. We definitely have not been doing THAT for years.
Even if you want to sneaker-net information from one program's classified network to another program's classified network it requires a bunch of "security logistics." You might get lucky and after a year or two get all the security officers involved to come up with a plan to connect the networks of a handful of programs, as long as there was still significant access control (like no cross-program accounts without need to know vetting and specific inter-connect points with limited functionality - like file-drops but no end-to-end tcp/ip).
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.
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...
Sounds like it is classified information from many different programs on a single classified network, in a single database.
No, it's two different wiki pages in two different classified networks that are not connected. Moving info from one to the other is no different than moving it in the past. Just like Wikipedia, it's a website on a network.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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No, it's two different wiki pages in two different classified networks ... it's a website on a network.
Which is it? Different websites on different networks or a website on a network?
If its the former, then what's the improvement and why the reported worry that the first question from "everyone" is how do they control access?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Its not simply FUD. Increased efficiency for data retrieval rubs both ways. If its easier to get data out of the system for the good guy, its easy to get data out of the system for the turn coat.
Yes, its probably a great idea to make a lot of intelligence data easier to access in general, and I'll assume the system fully logs all dat accesses and makes note of unnecessary information retrievals.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
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?
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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.
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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.