via Belmont Club
A few weeks ago I wrote a couple paragraphs about the new "Intellipedia" that the US government was rolling out.
Today's New York Times has a more in depth article on the difficulties involved in the process of creating and using the system:
[...]high-tech dreams collapsed. “The reality,” he later wrote ruefully, “was a colossal letdown.”
The spy agencies were saddled with technology that might have seemed cutting edge in 1995. When he went onto Intelink — the spy agencies’ secure internal computer network — the search engines were a pale shadow of Google, flooding him with thousands of useless results. If Burton wanted to find an expert to answer a question, the personnel directories were of no help. Worse, instant messaging with colleagues, his favorite way to hack out a problem, was impossible: every three-letter agency — from the Central Intelligence Agency to the National Security Agency to army commands — used different discussion groups and chat applications that couldn’t connect to one another. In a community of secret agents supposedly devoted to quickly amassing information, nobody had even a simple blog — that ubiquitous tool for broadly distributing your thoughts.
Something had gone horribly awry, Burton realized. Theoretically, the intelligence world ought to revolve around information sharing. If F.B.I. agents discover that Al Qaeda fund-raising is going on in Brooklyn, C.I.A. agents in Europe ought to be able to know that instantly. The Internet flourished under the credo that information wants to be free; the agencies, however, had created their online networks specifically to keep secrets safe, locked away so only a few could see them. This control over the flow of information, as the 9/11 Commission noted in its final report, was a crucial reason American intelligence agencies failed to prevent those attacks. All the clues were there — Al Qaeda associates studying aviation in Arizona, the flight student Zacarias Moussaoui arrested in Minnesota, surveillance of a Qaeda plotting session in Malaysia — but none of the agents knew about the existence of the other evidence. The report concluded that the agencies failed to “connect the dots.”
By way of contrast, every night when Burton went home, he was reminded of how good the everyday Internet had become at connecting dots. “Web 2.0” technologies that encourage people to share information — blogs, photo-posting sites like Flickr or the reader-generated encyclopedia Wikipedia — often made it easier to collaborate with others.[...]
The entire article is 10 pages long but well worth the read. The major lesson that can be taken from it is the difficulty in changing entrenched bureaucracies, such as the CIA or Department of Defense; but another is just how much information technology has changed the world.
When I was in school if I was researching something and needed current information I had to search through stacks of current magazines and go thru the "Readers Guide to Periodic Literature" to reference the older ones. It was in a word - painful. It's different now.
One paper I had to write in the 8th grade had to do with why Scientology was under investigation by the federal government. Just finding anything on Scientology itself was difficult. Now I go to Google type in Scientology and I get 7,940,00 results. Narrowing the scope takes about another 10 seconds as I think of key words. The number of results drops to 352,000 and number 5 on the first page is the information I was looking for.
As the New York Times article points out this is possible because of the linking nature of the Internet and the page ranking system Google (and I think most modern search engines) use. This is a sea change from systems that have been in place in the 16 separate American intelligence agencies.
If I want to attack the issue from another direction I can go to Wikipedia and simply type in Scientology. This serves me about 15 pages of information about Scientology with 79 citations, a number of external links, a history of the edits to the page and about 20 pages of discussion. Think how useful that would have been in the first week of September 2001.
While I think this is a good start there are some other technologies, such as social network mapping tools, that I think would probably be very interesting to apply in this field also.
Update At the time I wrote this I hadn't sen the pictures accompanying the article. It appears that they are already doing some network mapping.
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