Did you see Friday’s story on CNN about A-Space, a social networking tool that the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) can use to share sensitive information across its 16 agencies?
Launched by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Financial Times first reported on the project in August 2007, terming A-Space a “MySpace for spies.”
But it’s so much more than that.
“A-Space will provide an interactive work space for intelligence analysts to solve problems,” ODNI’s chief information officer, Dale Meyerrose stated in a May 2008 press release. “We’re working closely with our [Department of Defense] partners to ensure that A-Space offers agile access to the department and IC resources across the top secret network.”
Welcome to the Intelink
If A-Space is new terminology to you, don’t fret. It was news to me until I saw it on CNN.
Then, I remembered reading Mark Drapeau’s insider perspective on Government 2.0, the buzzword given to government’s adoption of social media.
Drapeau, a government think tank PhD scientist at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy, wrote of Intelink as providing “sophisticated online collaboration and increased communication at different levels of security.”
A Pentagon pet project, Intelink is essentially a firewall-protected intranet built in 1994 that enables the IC to privately, securely, and safely collaborate in real-time on sensitive issues beyond my comprehension.
And that’s a good thing; if I knew about the issues, there’d be no need for the network.
Like the Internet, Intelink includes numerous analytic transformation applications that the IC and their allies as appropriate and according to security protocols can tap into, including:
- Intellipedia, a wiki that allows collaborative adding, editing, rating, and sharing of content from cross-agency government and military classified and unclassified websites, the internet, and pretty much every other data source you can imagine.
- Library of National Intelligence, to echo the structure of any other library but serving as an electronic Dewey Decimal System that archives data contributed by all agencies and available by searching technology to any agency.
- the Executive Intelligence Summary, a daily web briefing by ODNI to senior IC officials that streamlines the previous day’s reports, blog and Intellipedia entries, and other data into a single report, effectively and efficiently eliminating the need to visit 16 agency websites.
A vision for tomorrow
If you laugh at the notion of the IC requiring a social networking tool like A-Space or a wikipedia called Intellipedia (which I’ve seen reflected in various comments across the blogosphere), I point you to an extract from ODNI’s 2015 Vision:
Currently, each intelligence agency operates and maintains its own network and information infrastructure: power, cooling, circuits, switches, routers, databases, information management systems, data centers, security and enterprise systems management tools.By 2015, we will migrate to a common “cloud” based on a single backbone network and clusters of computers in scalable, distributed centers where data is stored, processed, and managed. The shared data centers will be unique facilities designed and located for access to communication and power supplies.
The Intelligence Enterprise will benefit greatly from a more robust, secure, and effective means to organize, update and retrieve all of the information it collects. The centers will also allow experience and technologies employed across the Community to be leveraged, focusing scarce technical resources and reducing costs.
In order to get to that 2015 goal (which is only about six years away), redundancy needs to be eliminated and standards must be enforced. One way to get there is by listening and learning, and social networking can help.
If someone dials 911 reporting a motor vehicle accident steps away from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, do you want to guess the number of law enforcement officials who respond, not to mention the number of vehicles they bring to the scene?
Chalk up a motor vehicle accident to an act of terrorism or cyberwarfare, and you’re dealing not so much with D.C. cops but the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geospatial-Interstitial Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and the military — and NATO, the World Health Organization, and the International Red Cross.
With the plethora of responding agencies, can you better comprehend the necessity for shared knowledge and accountability throughout the network? Why should each agency be responsible for its own data retrieval when the community can work together?
What do you think?
If Uncle Sam “gets” the wonderful power of social media, Web 2.0, Government 2.0, call it what you will, shouldn’t you, too?
It’s OK to resist, and I’ve read numerous reports that feds are resisting the paradigm shift from “need to know” to “share to know” but I’m confused why many organizations under the sun, who have similar capital and resources as the feds, aren’t opting to reduce overhead and redundancy and achieve productive bliss.
Thoughts? Is the resistance due to a fear of change? I’ve already written about the importance for organizations to embrace change or become irrelevant, so why the slow down?
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Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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