Social Networking For Spies

It’s pretty much the last thing you’d expect – social networking and Wikipedia-like sites for spies. After all, isn’t the businessabout secrecy, not sharing?   But they exist, and the expectation is that they’ll prove popular.   In December the US intelligence community is launching A-Space a classified socialnetworking site for spooks, built on the MySpace and Facebook model. Members will be able to blog, search databases andlibraries of information and reports and there will even be tools allowing for collaboration.   That’s still to come. Intellipedia is already here. Taking its cue from the successfulWikipedia, it already has 30,000 articles online, and is receiving almost 5,000 edits each working day.   But what about security? A-Space will use commercial software, but the intelligenceagencies insist all sensitive information will be safeguarded by technology they’re developing themselves. Only those with the proper clearance will be able to access classified information,and staff will be trained to spot inappropriate use.   The real idea behind all this is to increase communication and collaboration between agencies, something that’s often been criticizedin the past.   "It’s just a better way to build and grow that network so that improved analysis can come out the other end," said Robert Cardillo, deputy director of analysis for theDefense Intelligence Agency. The big hope is that younger intelligence operatives, already familiar with social networking, will embrace the new technology.