Written by America’s spy agencies are introducing a top secret social networking site called A-Space, fashioned after MySpace, to encourage agencies and spies to share informal information with each other. There is high-hope that such a network could prevent the type of information failure that allowed the September 11 attack even while various agencies had a variety of clues beforehand (but no one agency was able to put the whole picture together in advance).
MySpace users and other bloggers have figured out that the social networking is a great way to expose and share all pieces to a puzzle, and I’m encouraged that our nation’s security experts realize there is real value in the this type of networking.
Your friends (and maybe even your kids) on MySpace are a lot more in-the-know than you may realize…if you are not familiar with social networking, you probably need a tutorial to fully comprehend the way information spreads through the medium.
I’m sure this information-spread is why Rupert Murdock, arguably America’s shrewdest and most forward-looking news media icon, has purchased MySpace, in addition to the Wall Street Journal, FOX, and hundreds of other major media properties he (and his company News Corp) owns.
Closer to home, I have been enjoying both MySpace and it’s competitor LiveJournal to share information with thousands of Renton citizens over the last couple years. (Right now Renton Myspace is getting ‘happy birthday’ comments from the many readers that are aware that the city’s birthday is September 6; bloggers are sharing candid inputs about the Mayor’s race; and residents are commenting about whether we should pursue a plaque or statue at Kennydale Beach Park to inform people about Clint Eastwood’s Lifeguard service there)
Click here to see the Renton WA MySpace Page
Logged In and Sharing Gossip, er, Intelligence
By SCOTT SHANE
Published: September 2, 2007
AMERICA’S spies, like America’s teenagers, are secretive, talk in code and get in trouble if they’re not watched closely.
It’s hard to imagine spies logging on and exchanging “whuddups” with strangers, though. They’re just not wired that way. If networking is lifeblood to the teenager, it’s viewed with deep suspicion by the spy.
The intelligence agencies have something like networking in mind, though, as they scramble to adopt Web technologies that young people have already mastered in the millions. The idea is to try to solve the information-sharing problems inherent in the spy world — and blamed, most spectacularly, for the failure to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.
In December, officials say, the agencies will introduce A-Space, a top-secret variant of the social networking Web sites MySpace and Facebook. The “A” stands for “analyst,” and where Facebook users swap snapshots, homework tips and gossip, intelligence analysts will be able to compare notes on satellite photos of North Korean nuclear sites, Iraqi insurgents and Chinese missiles.
A-Space will join Intellipedia, the spooks’ Wikipedia, where intelligence officers from all 16 American spy agencies pool their knowledge. Sixteen months after its creation, officials say, the top-secret version of Intellipedia has 29,255 articles, with an average of 114 new articles and more than 4,800 edits to articles added each workday.
A separate online Library of National Intelligence is to include all official intelligence reports sent out by each agency, offering Amazon.com-style suggestions: if you liked that piece on Venezuela’s oil reserves, how about this one on Russia’s? And blogs, accessible only to other spies, are proliferating behind the security fences.
“We see the Internet passing us in the fast lane,” said Mike Wertheimer, of the office of the Director of National Intelligence, who is overseeing the introduction of A-Space. “We’re playing a little catch-up.”
It remains to be seen, however, whether technology alone can bring to secretive bureaucracies the connectedness that comes naturally to cybersurfers in the outside world.
Skeptics say turf — the curse of the spy world — might keep analysts from using the tools. Mr. Wertheimer acknowledges that some managers discourage their people from adding to the Web encyclopedia, fearing that their agencies will lose credit for scoops.
And for the intelligence world, putting the Web tools to work requires a cultural revolution. “Need to know” has long been the agencies’ mantra. The juiciest stuff is still called S.C.I., or Sensitive Compartmented Information, and walling off data offers protection against leaks and moles, or so the theory goes.
But the Sept. 11 attacks revealed how hoarding information could lead to catastrophe. In a report released last month, the Central Intelligence Agency’s inspector general described a dysfunctional spy family, in which the National Security Agency refused to share intercepts from Al Qaeda with the C.I.A., and the C.I.A., in turn, withheld information from the F.B.I. More than 50 C.I.A. officers read cables in early 2000 about two future hijackers but failed to ask the State Department to put them on a watch list, the report said.
To prevent such blunders, Congress created the post of director of national intelligence in late 2004 with orders to rope the 16 spy agencies into a single enterprise. The National Counterterrorism Center serves as a hub for threat information. There are plans to train analysts from different agencies together.
And now there are high hopes that a virtual community, linking all of the 100,000 employees of the intelligence world, could help make information-sharing as automatic for spies as it is for middle school students. Agency officials will discuss the new Web tools with private-sector gurus this week at an open meeting in Chicago.
Intelligence veterans and experts generally applaud the new technology, but some warn that it is no panacea.
Amy Zegart, associate professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of “Spying Blind: The C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the Origins of 9/11,” identified 23 moments when the C.I.A. or F.B.I. might have stopped the plot. But she said she saw “almost zero chance” that the Web would have made a difference, because intelligence officers didn’t recognize the significance of the information they had.
“I think we overemphasize what technology can do,” Ms. Zegart said. “The most important fusion takes place inside people’s brains.”
When Mark M. Lowenthal became the C.I.A.’s assistant director for analysis and production in 2002, he set out to survey the reports the agency was writing — and found that security barriers, clumsy technology and overwhelming volume made the task difficult.
“If A-Space and Intellipedia make it easier for analysts and managers to know what’s being produced across the board, that will be a great thing,” said Mr. Lowenthal, who left the agency in 2005. But he said he had doubts. “My concern about blogs and wikis is the confusion of opinion with expertise,” he said. “Intelligence is expertise.”
Whether A-Space will permit analysts to create personal pages viewable by others remains to be decided; managers are as wary of preening and time-wasting on the Web as parents. But its creators say A-Space will incorporate both secret and unclassified e-mail and chat functions, permit collective editing of documents and allow analysts to type in a name and instantly discover what far-flung agencies have dug up on it.
A Somalia specialist, for instance, will be able to link up with counterparts in other agencies, post to blogs on East Africa and get an alert when the Intellipedia page on Mogadishu is changed.
Aware that such a system could be vulnerable to a mole, officials say computers will flag users who download masses of data or repeatedly seek information outside their work area, just as credit card companies scan transactions for patterns indicating fraud.
But some old-timers still fear that the spy Web could give away the nation’s secrets to hackers and turncoats.
Chris Rasmussen, an analyst turned “knowledge manager” at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and an evangelist for the new tools, has been called a “traitor” and compared to the C.I.A. supermole Aldrich Ames in comments left on his internal blog, he said in a talk in May.
But Mr. Rasmussen, 32, who like half of all intelligence officers was hired within the last five years, is undeterred. To combat turf consciousness, he and about 30 like-minded intelligence officers patrol Intellipedia to remove agency names that are used to label content.
Mr. Wertheimer, who spent 20 years as a code-breaking N.S.A. mathematician, said he was aware of the obstacles but saw encouraging signs. When a crisis breaks, he said, and an article goes up on Intellipedia, “within a few hours we’ve got all 16 agencies contributing.”
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