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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.'"
Huh, seems I've lost my Intellipedia credentials, anyone feel like sharing their account?
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.
No, it's for anything up to the classification of the network, and this resides on Secret and Top Secret networks. It's no more dangerous than the terabytes of classified information that already reside on these intranets.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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!
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!
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.
For starters, USB devices are no longer allowed on any DOD networks, due to a worm appearing on unclassified military networks(separate from the classified networks).
Second, Intellipedia is separated by classification of the given network, and is not on a single network. So the data may be important, but does not necessarily constitute "exceptionally grave damage" if leaked.
Third, it's a lot of data so unless a spy or mole was only taking certain entries it would be difficult to take all of it not only in one drive but at once.
Fourth, since the intelligence community is warming to it(yes, sometimes some of them are bumbling idiots), analysts have muddled the concept of Intellepidia, written reports and debated the subject with leadership. If it was such a terrible idea it would have gotten the axe by now.
Fifth, stealing data from outside a classified DOD network is terribly hard. Having a clearance means that the DOD thinks a given person is trustworthy, so unless a person decides to become a spy there is no way it's getting out.
Also, Intellipedia covers a multitude of subjects, not just people.
Sort of. IMHO it does provide a good deal of service. Although the information is locked down, you still have the link relations, further more, you can find out who has which piece of information. Requesting for that information shouldn't be too hard. That's the whole advantage wiki provides the intelligence community. You can link different pieces of information and find relationships between them. So in the old school way, you don't really know who has what, so you run around and ask until you find out. Using wiki, you can follow a chain of leads via links until you hit a stop, then you send an e-mail, get access, and move on. I think "need to know" is a tried and true method as when ever there are leaks in the intelligence community people tend to end up in prison or disappear. ACL provides the perfect balance between "need to know" and "need to share"
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?