Sue-Point-Oh!

Maybe I’ve just been watching too much “24″ or spending too much time on my wiki research project but I found this article from the NY Time’s Magazine about the CIA’s use of wikis and blogs for intelligence gathering fascinating! How does a wiki help fight terrorism? Blogs and wikis can help intelligence agents “connect the dogs” of information and intelligence…these were the dots that failed to connect post 9/11. The idea is that agents will use blogs to record the intellgence they receive. The entries will be tagged and linked to other agents blogs. Google like search analyatics can be used to see which tags and intelligence pieces are the most popular and possibly the most relevant. This also will help pass information between the CIA, FBI and other agencies instead of each agency duplicating efforts.

One of the wiki projects involves the Intellipedia, a Wikipedia replica with intelligence articles written and edited by agents. There is less of a fear of the data being corrupt or false since the identities or the contributors are known.

Shockingly, this new Intelligence 2.0 tools are being eagerly embraced by the younger agent who are more comfortable with technology. The more seasoned agents are more resistant because it involves learning new technology that they don’t necessarily trust. These are also the agents that will be retiring soon and using blogs and wikis to capture their historical knowledge would be a very good thing.