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US launches ‘MySpace
for spies’
Demetri Sevastopulo
FT.com
Wednesday Aug 22, 2007
Spies and teenagers normally have little in common but that
is about to change as America’s intelligence agencies prepare
to launch “A-Space”, an internal communications tool
modelled on the popular social networking sites, Facebook and
MySpace.
The Director of National Intelligence will open the site to the
entire intelligence community in December. The move is the latest
part of an ongoing effort to transform the analytical business
following the failure to detect the 9/11 terrorist attacks or
find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
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.
(Article continues below)
“Burying the same number of analysts in ever higher piles
of hay would no more increase the number of needles,” says
Mr Fingar.
Underscoring the power of social-networking sites, the Central
Intelligence Agency recently used Facebook to help boost applications
for the national clandestine service. The move sparked concerns
that the CIA was monitoring members, which the agency denies.
”Earlier this year, the CIA used Facebook - an excellent
peer-to-peer marketing tool - to advertise employment opportunities
with the agency,” said George Little, a CIA spokesman. “This
effort, part of a much broader campaign leveraging traditional
and new advertising media, was used strictly for informational
purposes.”
The DNI has also built an internal collaborative site called
Intellipedia, modelled on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia.
It has also created a version of http://del.icio.us, the social
book-marking site, for members of the intelligence community.
Another tool that has been developed is a national intelligence
library, which can be accessed from A-Space.
While MySpace and Facebook have spread like wildfire, particularly
among the younger generations of internet users, members of the
intelligence community are divided. Mike Wertheimer, the senior
DNI official for analytic transformation and technology, illustrates
the dilemma with an example from an internal blog thread last
year.
A female employee who had arranged a high-school reunion on MySpace
asked why the community had not created a similar tool. That prompted
a response that she wasn’t thinking big enough. But Mr Wertheimer
says two other people immediately jumped in with concerns about
a “counter-intelligence nightmare” that could cost
US lives.
“That is very typical within the intelligence community
of the approach to social networking tools,” says Mr Wertheimer.
“The positive value is…not easily quantified. The
negative, the risk for people under cover… is drawn out
so starkly, even though it is speculative, that they tend to carry
the day.”
But he says the intelligence community needs to consider that
not sharing information can also cost lives, a lesson learned
from the 9/11 attacks.
“We are willing to experiment in ways that we have never
experimented before,” he adds. “It breaks a lot of
traditional senses that people’s lives are at risk, and
how can you take any step that increases that risk.”
Mr Wertheimer says A-Space will initially be voluntary to assuage
worries of spies concerned about blowing their cover. The DNI
wants some foreign intelligence services to participate in A-Space,
but there has been some resistance.
“I would say in the entire community, the folks most virulently
against sharing the information are the foreign partners,”
says Mr Wertheimer, who says the also want access to the intelligence
library.
“They ask ‘well can we have access?’,”
says Mr Wertheimer. “I ask them back if you want access,
what services are you willing to create for the library, what
data are you willing to put in it, have you thought through your
risk/profit scenario? They kind of stand back because that is
not normally how we talk to them. It is a new day.”
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.
Mr Wertheimer says the new infrastructures should help break
down some of the physical communications problems in the intelligence
community.
“I am unable to send email, and even make secure phone
calls, to a good portion of the Intel community from my desktop
because of firewalls,” he says.
In September, the DNI and the Intelligence and National Security
Alliance, a public-private intelligence group, will hold a conference
to enlist support and ideas from the private sector and academia.
“We have gotten to the stage where we want to open this
up, tap more ideas, stimulate some competition to help us here,”
says Mr Fingar.
Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, invited
the chief executives of Facebook and MySpace to participate, but
so far Mark Zuckerburg, the CEO of Facebook, has declined. A Facebook
spokeswoman said the decision was purely because of scheduling
conflicts.
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