http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/ptech/09/05/facebook.spies/index.html
A recent article on CNN mentions that the CIA will soon use a face-book like application for sharing up to date super-secret spy information. This new technology, entitle “A-Space” (aka ‘Facebook for Spies) is supposed to serve as a social networking site for analysts working at one of 16 different Intelligence Agencies across the
On another note, for this type of tool to be successful, US agencies are going to have to share highly sensitive data with a large community – which seems counter to the existing culture. The website is only as good as the information it contains, and will only be effective if people are truly collaborating and posting information to the central clearinghouse. I believe that one reason Facebook is so successful is because people are willing to post personal information in an easy to read format, which is updated on a frequent basis. If security gets in the way of usability, users may decide that they would rather spend their time on MySpace than A-space.
It will be interesting to see if the application is adopted by a majority of people within the US Intelligence Community, and if it can be effective in solving difficult problems across various units and agencies (i.e. crowdsourcing). Given its super-secret status, we may never know…
1 comment:
Extremely novel concept, and your comment on how the security requirements of such a system could hamper it's adoption is spot-on. I worked a project a few years ago for the US Strategic Command to aggregate several agencies mapping information into one database, so that any user could go to a single collection point and be able to obtain the most up-to-date image anyone had available. (May have kept the Chinese embassy from being bombed in Belgrade...maybe) The hardware and database were the easy part, bought and installed on time, but the requirements of several of the US Intel agencies made accessing the database from the field (ie. by the folks who probably need the most accurate info in a timely manner) overly cumbersome in that the crypto equipment to transmit and receive images securely was not man-portable, had to be on a vehicle. A year after my part of the project was done, problem of end-user access was still unsolved, to my knowledge at any rate.
This could also be a nifty way to get around another program that was shut down a few years ago, the "Total Information Awareness" program.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office
Instead of having all the information assets fall under one big umbrella, the A Space instead allows users who have access to their separate pools of information to be the method by which the info is able to be shared around. Put humans into the process and that makes it OK, apparently. We'll have to see how long this lasts.
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