Open-Source Spying

When I was at the gym a few days ago, I read the New York Times magazine that someone had left in the magazine racks. The cover story was about how wikis and blogs could change how we gather intelligence in the future, and I thought, “I actually have some experience with wikis and blogs-- I might understand this!” and read the whole article on the elliptical trainer. Alas, the article, which is called “Open-Source Spying,” is now archived, so you can only access it if you have TimesSelect. So much for open sources, NYT...

Basically, one of the big problems facing the various U.S. intelligence agencies-- the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, you name it-- is the difficulty of sharing information between agencies. There is a program called Intelink that tries to promote this sort of information sharing, but because no agency requires that its analysts post anything to it, it’s of limited use. Our intelligence agencies, as you may recall, took quite a lot of (probably justified) heat after September 11 when it was discovered that individual analysts had been in the possession of clues that, had they been shared, might have been able to foresee or prevent the terrorist attacks. Information-sharing is also more important today than it used to be during the Cold War because security threats materialize much more quickly and because these threats are global in nature, so one person can’t be an expert in them-- you need many people collaborating to get a full picture.

So the CIA sponsored an essay contest, called the Galileo Contest, that gave a prize to the person with the best new solution to the information-sharing dilemma. A guy named Calvin Andrus won, with an essay entitled, “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community.” Andrus thought that the rapid, self-organizing nature of the wiki and the populist nature of the blog would be well-suited to the spying community.

To make a long story shorter, Andrus’ ideas have been implemented in a limited way so far, and has been successful, so it may be expanded. CIA wiki experts built a prototype of something called Intellipedia, and they used it, successfully, it seems, to create a “national intelligence estimate” for Nigeria. They also built a test blog, and used it to collect information on the avian flu.

There are numerous problems with the idea of intelligence sharing. First, the intelligence community is, by culture and custom, a secretive one, and it’s hard to convince some that the sensitive information that they’re in possession of wouldn’t be accidentally (or even deliberately) leaked if they shared it with a large enough community of analysts. And it’s hard to ensure that the information on a wiki or blog that could only be read by those with a top-secret security clearance would not be leaked out or hacked into. However, it seems that the young analysts and the people in the top leadership positions are both in favor of these kinds of intelligence sharing, so it’s likely that some of the software that has defined “Web 2.0” will help redefine what it means to collect intelligence. And if wikis and blogs could help thwart terrorist attacks, that would really be something. Something very good.