The Wikipedia for SpiesAnd Where It Goes From Here – WIRED
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Major General Dale Meyerrose jokes that he doesnt think much of millennials. But he does largely credit that generation with fundamentally changing the way the US intelligence community collaborates.
In 2005, when Meyerrose worked as the Associate Director of National Intelligence, he was tasked with figuring out how to get 16 different spy agenciesall accustomed to decades of siloed secrecyto talk to each other. In the end, one of his most lasting accomplishments was championing a small grassroots effort led by young analysts that resulted in what would become Intellipedia.
Think of Intellipedia as a Wikipedia for spies. It works the same, except that theres no anonymity for contributors, and nothing can ever be unsourced. Its contents range from Unclassified to Top Secret, though its the lowest rung of Top Secret. Anyone in the executive branchwhich includes the intelligence communityhas enough clearance to access it. According to one intelligence official who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak publicly on behalf of the community, the Intellipedia that exists today is part wiki, part bulletin board, part internal newspaper. Its a great place to come in and see whats happening in the community as a whole, the official says.
Thats helpful, but its not the game-changing collaboration tool National Geospatial Intelligence-Agency analyst Chris Rasmussen, who was one of Intellipedias earliest and most ardent users, had hoped for. Back in 2006, he and his fellow Intellipedians, as they called themselves, imagined full crowd-sourced intelligence reports, those official documents that land on the desks of high-level government officials and shape foreign and domestic policy. Its fallen well short. Intellipedia helped the intelligence community catch up to Web 2.0, but still has far to go before it lives up to its original promise.
In the days after 9/11, intelligence operatives learned that their aversion to sharing information had allowed warnings about the attack to go unheeded. The spy agencies were operating as they had since the Cold War, when their main enemy was the Soviet Union, a monolith they understood and, more importantly, could predict. Now, not only was the enemy more broadly distributed, there was more information than ever, and no single place to organize and share it.
The idea for Intellipedia first caught on after D. Calvin Andrus, an Innovation Officer at the CIA, wrote an essay in 2005 that suggested the same power of Wikipedia and blogs to aggregate and share information could also support the high-stakes world of spying. The essay spread, and before long, Meyerrose gave the all-clear to set up a server to try it out. It was truly a grassroots effort, bottom up in the analyst community, he says.
What wasnt obvious to the powers-that-be back then, before the iPhone or Facebook existed, was that anyone would use it. Nobody thought it would catch on, Meyerrose says. Looking back on it, Im absolutely certain of all the senior officials I told Oh, this is a good idea, most of them thought that it would die of its own weight.
It didnt. Rasmussen and the other young analysts just kept writing articles and submitting them to the growing Intellipedia library. There was cachet in getting your contributions accepted. When people contested facts in the discussion section, things got hairy. This is tribal warfare, Meyerrose says. By 2008, when he retired, he couldnt go into any field office and not see a shortcut to Intellipedia on every computer screen.
Over a decade since its inception, Intellipedia has grown into a standard part of the intelligence communitys workday. It has a homepage with featured and developing articles, help pages, and requests for collaboration. You can find tips on tradecraft in its pages, and primers on conflicts in certain parts of the world. After news broke Tuesday of a leak of CIA hacking data, you can bet theres a page explaining whats known about that. It runs on Intelink, the internal classified intranet network that links all the agencies and is operated by a team overseen by DNI.
Its the spying worlds office water cooler.
The New York Times reported last week that Obama aides had scrambled to get as much information about the investigation into Russias meddling with the 2016 election onto Intellipedia as they could, knowing that would mean a broad range of analysts across multiple agencies would see it. Which makes sense. Intellipedia can help spark conversation. Its the spying worlds office water cooler.
Rasmussen always wanted it to be more, though. His dream was that eventually analysts could use Intellipediaor something like itto streamline the process of creating National Intelligence Estimates. But when Intellipedians tried to write NIEs on Intellipedia in 2006, 2007, bureaucracy got in the way. Every agency has a slightly different process for writing reports, and getting people to deviate from that for something so radically crowd-sourced proved impossible.
Realizing Intellipedia wasnt ever going to be accepted as an official voice of the intel community, Rasmussen tried to create a more official version of it after-the-fact. He called it the Living Intelligence System, and you can watch his YouTube video pitch about the specifics of how it worked here. Though it won accolades from the community, and became a real opt-in program, Living Intelligence never caught on.
Everyone agreed that the tech was better, most people agreed that the process benefits were better, but they just couldnt make the pivot, Rasmussen says.
But Rasmussen is tenacious. He fervently believes that the intelligence community would benefit from streamlined collaboration. To find a place for it, he just needed a part of the process that wasnt already mired in bureaucracy.
He found it by focusing on a specific chunk of most intelligence reports. Any given report will be roughly 20-percent classified infothe spooky stuff, Rasmussen calls itand 80-percent unclassified context and background that someone reading the spooky stuff needs to know to understand why the hell it matters. Its less sensitive. It represents an opportunity.
For the past few years, Rasmussen has led a team working to create an entirely new way to crowdsource that 80 percent. It still wont live up to that original dream of fully crowdsourced reportingbut it could get the community most of the way. Itll even, because this is 2017, have an app.
As Meyerrose would say, the millennials will love that.
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The Wikipedia for SpiesAnd Where It Goes From Here - WIRED