One of the lessons of 9/11 is the danger of 'stovepiping' in our law enforcement and intelligence agencies. It's not enough for agencies to collect the data they need to piece together and disrupt a plot; the analysts who 'own' those critical nuggets must be able to find others with relevant information and piece it together. Recognizing this problem, the 9/11 commission recommended that new networks be created to facilitate the sharing of data across agencies.
The New York Times described the problem last year:
The spy agencies were saddled with technology that might have seemed cutting edge in 1995. When he 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 answer 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.
The intelligence community now seems eager to catch-up to the private sector. It has created Intellipedia, blogs, and now a 'MySpace'-type system in order to boost the sharing of information:
Thomas Fingar, the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, believes the common workspace - a kind of "MySpace for analysts" - will generate better analysis by breaking down firewalls across the traditionally stove-piped intelligence community. He says the technology can also help process increasing amounts of information where the number of analysts is limited.
"Burying the same number of analysts in ever higher piles of hay would no more increase the number of needles," says Mr Fingar...
A-Space will be equipped with web-based email and software that recommends areas of interest to the user just like Amazon suggests books to its customers. The site will also allow users to create and modify documents, and determine user privileges, in a similar fashion to Google Documents.
Congressman Pete Hoekstra, Ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, spoke with me on a break from his annual August bike tour of his Congressional district (pictures from the 2006 tour are on Mr. Hoekstra's website here).
Hoekstra said that he's encouraged to see the CIA and the intelligence community more broadly experiment with new models for information sharing after showing little interest at the onset. He credits DCI McConnell for 'taking the ball and running with it,' when it comes to improving the ability of his team to share information. Hoekstra says that Admiral McConnell clearly means to do more than just "keep the seat warm" until the end of the Bush administration, but to "build an intelligence community to keep America safe."
Hoekstra didn't express an opinion as to whether one or more of these new applications would prove revolutionary, or even beneficial, in improving the security of America and American interests. But he expressed an eagerness to see how they turn out, and, given the community's past failures, we suspect there's nowhere to go but up.
