Wikipedia for Spies

[Tab]

There's a quiet revolution underway at the CIA and its sister agencies. A new generation of analysts, determined to drag their Cold War colleagues into the world of Web 2.0 information sharing, has created Intellipedia, a classified version of Wikipedia they say is transforming the way American spy agencies handle top secret information by fostering collaboration across Washington and around the world. Rolled out to skeptical veterans at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., in 2006, Intellipedia has grown to a 900,000-page magnum opus of espionage, handling some 100,000 user accounts and 5,000 page edits a day, according to the CIA and the office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Its advocates claim Intellipedia is not just a sign of change at the agency, but is producing results. The first time chlorine was used in an improvised explosive device in Iraq someone threw up a wiki page asking what intelligence officers and others in the field should do to collect evidence of its use. "Twenty-three people at 18 or 19 locations around the world chimed in on this thing, and we got a perfectly serviceable set of instructions in two days," says Tom Fingar who headed the National Intelligence Council from 2005-2008. "Nobody called a meeting, there was no elaborate 'gotta go back and check with Mom to see if this is the view of my organization.'" Last year traffic on Intellipedia got so heavy that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had to find extra money to upgrade its servers.

Intellipedia's godfather is CIA analyst D. Calvin Andrus, who wrote a paper in 2004 titled "The Wiki and the Blog: Towards a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community.". For decades, the U.S. intelligence system had been structured to answer static Cold War questions, like how many missiles there are in Siberia. What America needed after Sept. 11, Andrus argued, was something that could handle rapidly changing, complicated threats. Intelligence organizations needed to become complex and adaptive, driven to judgments by bottom-up collaboration, like financial markets or ant colonies - or Wikipedia.
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After three years, Intellipedia is humming. It operates in three different spheres: unclassified, secret and top secret, with top secret the most active, boasting 439,387 pages and 57,248 user accounts. The site is largely managed by volunteers and patrolled by 'shepherds' who keep track of individual pages in their areas of expertise. Like Wikipedia, articles are created instantly - a page on the Mumbai terror attack last November was up within minutes of the news breaking - but authorship must be clear; there are no user-names to hide behind.

More: http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20090408/us_time/08599189008400

[Earth_First]

1. FOIA anyone? n/t

[NightWatcher]

2. 100,000 accounts and 5,000 page edits a day??? ever seen what people do to Wiki for shits and gigs?

I dont like. I think that collaberation is good for professionals in nearly all fields but this could be manipulated and is asking for trouble. I'm old skool when it comes to intel. I want the (easilly manipulatable) computers out of it

[Idealism]

3. It isn't as easy to manipulate as you think

There are no user names, just author names- like full government ID names with the department where you work in your profile. There isn't much trash being put up.