In his book, The Looming Tower, Middle East expert Lawrence Wright lays out a number of the personal and technological barriers that prevented agents at the CIA and FBI from “connecting the dots” to prevent the 9/11 attacks. In both Tower and the 9/11 Commission’s report, intelligence community culture–which guards information like Google guards its precise algorithm for determining relevance–was faulted for keeping critical pieces of the 9/11 puzzle apart.
Yesterday, the New York Times magazine reported that this culture is reinforced in the computer systems used by the agencies:
The spy agencies were saddled with technology that might have seemed cutting-edge in 1995. When [former Defense Intelligence Agency agent Matthew Burton] went onto Intelink–the spy agencies’ secure internal computer network–the search engines were a pale shadow of Google, flooding him with thousands of useless results. If Burton wanted to find an expert to anwer a question, the personnel directories were of no help. Worse, instant messaging with colleagues, his favorite way to hack out a problem, was impossible: every three letter agency–from the Central Intelligence Agency to the National Security Agency to army commands–used different discussion groups and chat applications that couldn’t connect to one another. In a community of secret agents supposedly devoted to quickly amassing information, nobody had even a simple blog–that ubiquitous tool for broadly distributing your thoughts.
Offline, inter-agency information sharing is similarly impeded by a morass of bureaucracy. This wasn’t a problem when the USSR was the enemy. The communist government moved slowly and deliberately. By contrast, Al-Quaeda and its sister organizations move much more rapidly and covertly than the Soviet Union ever could.
One step in the process was an essay contest sponsored by the office of the Director of National Intelligence. Agents were invited to submit essays about how to improve information sharing. One of the winners was an essay by Calvin Andrus, the CTO of the Center for Mission Innovation at the C.I.A entitled, “The Wiki and the Blog; Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community.”
From the Times article:
When a blogger finds and interesting tidbit of news, he posts a link to it along with a bit of commentary. Then other bloggers find that link and, if they agree, it’s an interesting news item, post their own links pointing to it. This produces a cascade effect. Whatever the first blogger pointed toward can quickly amass so many links pointing in its direction that it rockets to worldwide notoriety in a matter of hours.Spies, Andrus theorized, could take advantage of these rapid, self-organizing effects. If analysts and agents were encouraged to post personal blogs and wikis on Intelink–linking to their favorite analyst reports or the news bulletins they considered important–then mob intelligence would take over.
Who knew that the echo chamber could be used in such a powerful way for the defense of the United States?
Like with any organization, there are very real institutional obstacles to overcome in order to implement these technologies. But even within the intelligence community, some agents have begun experimenting with a wiki system they call Intellipedia. The system has even been used to generate a National Intelligence Estimate, which the Times describes as “an authoritative snapshot of what the intelligence community thinks about a particular state–and a guide for foreign and military policy.” Elsewhere, blogs are being used to collect and disseminate information about the state of the H5N1 Avian Flu virus threat.
This is as innovative a use of blogs and wikis as I’ve seen. It’s also great evidence for the potential of blogs and wikis. If the national intelligence community can use these tools to break down age-old institutional barriers and save American lives, companies can use them to improve efficiency and flexibility. Pretty exciting stuff.
Technorati Tags: FBI, CIA, intelligence community, 9/11, blogs, wikis, national security, new york times, open-source spying
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