We kicked off this year with a very successful joint DC-area Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP)-World Future Society (WFS) meeting at the Embassy Suites in Friendship Heights on January 28. And a strange thing happened.... men and women, young and old, of grey flannel suites and scraggly beards, of the World Bank and Booz Allen--all furtively mingling over turkey half-subs and mini bottles of Canada Dry. After brief opening remarks by SCIP President, August Jackson, and our own Eric Garland, WFS President, the crowd was drawn into the web 2.0 gospel of CIA "evangelist" Sean Dennehy. Mr. Dennehy is the chief of development for the Agency's Intellipedia project, using a Wiki platform to share intelligence throughout the Agency.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the spooks have their own Wikipedia, and it is wicked cool.
Imagine if you will, an agent at "The Farm" in York County, Virginia, by the name of Austin Powers. He uploads Intellipedia, desperate to find out the latest intelligence on Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's choice of undergarments. Thankfully, secret agent Jack Bauer has just tapped an asset in the upper Amazon jungle, a certain Gap sales associate known only as Kevin. Instantly, agent Bauer uploads the vital secrets he's garnered from asset Kevin via satellite Blackberry to Intellipedia. As Powers scrolls down the "Fidel Castro" article, he finds just what he was looking for: "Castro is known to favor red briefs (he finds them 'revolutionary'), having raided the entire store supply during a super-sweet 50% off sale last Saturday. In other news, Castro totally kicked Hugo Chávez's butt in Wii Tennis yesterday..." Just then, agent Bond intercedes on the edit page from a hotel in downtown Buenos Aires. He's just gotten word that Castro has unexpectedly switched to white skivvies, according to hot info from a Havana laundry worker named Mirta de Jesus. A lively discussion and weighing of evidence occurs in the discussion section. Dozens of agents from all corners of the globe are involved. Later that afternoon, it finally comes to light that Casto was quite tired of Mirta accidentally bleaching all his favored red underpants, turning them an embarrassing shade of pink. Thus, to avoid such faux pas, he has acceded to white briefs. Case closed.
Synergy! Suddenly the entire collective memory of the Agency could be available at the fingertips of any agent anywhere in the world. Instead of having disconnected pieces of information languishing on thousands of different hard drives or allowing actionable intelligence to rot on the vine in the field, there is now the promise of collaborative information woven together on a single, universally accessible platform.
The thing that shocked and intrigued the crowd the most was the fundamental sea-change we had now undergone. The CIA, most secretive of all organs of American governance, most jealous guardian of privileged information, had now embraced a collaborative technology that rewarded sharing rather than hoarding. Furthermore, perhaps uncharacteristically for a government program, the Intellipedia project was not forced on agents from above. It was fed into the system, to be adopted by individuals if and when they found it useful. It's spectacularly successful, reaching high levels of penetration throughout not just the CIA, but the NSA, Army Intelligence, etc. And guess what, the most prolific poster to Intellipedia is 67-years-old.
If the people who depend on information as their major weapon against the enemies of the United States think a Wiki is good enough for them, why not you?
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