US intelligence community’s wiki aids info sharing

Members of the U.S. government’s intelligence community are using a Wikipedia-like community networking Web site to share information across agency boundaries and open dialogue about disagreements over assessments such as those that led to the war in Iraq, project leaders said.

Intellipedia, based on the open-source software that powers Wikipedia, allows free-flowing discussion about intelligence on topics such as terrorism and Al Qaeda, creators of Intellipedia said during a media briefing in Washington, D.C., Tuesday. Intellipedia, launched in April, was officially unveiled during a conference in Denver in August, but members of the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used Tuesday’s briefing to highlight the growth and uses of the new tool.

Employees of the two agencies created Intellipedia following widespread criticism about a lack of intelligence-sharing before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S., and later mistaken intelligence reports saying Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. “One of our principal mandates — this is from Congress, from the president and from the American people — is to really transform the way we do business and increase information sharing and collaboration,” said Michele Weslander, DNI’s deputy chief information officer.

Officers from the 16 intelligence-related agencies, plus other U.S. government workers, are already using Intellipedia to create official documents such as national intelligence estimates on a variety of topics, DNI and CIA officials said.

Since DNI and the CIA launched Intellipedia, the site has had more than 13 million page views, 3,300 registered users, and 28,000 pages created, said Don Burke, with the CIA’s directorate of science and technology. The site, generally restricted to government employees with security clearances, has grown faster than Wikipedia did in its early days, Burke said.

In addition to restrictions on who can access Intellipedia, it has several other differences from its spiritual successor, said Sean Dennehy, with the CIA’s directorate of intelligence. While anyone with access can read the information posted on Intellipedia, only logged-in users can edit articles there, unlike Wikipedia, where anyone can make changes, he said.

Having attributable edits “builds a community, which we’re trying to do,” Dennehy said.

In addition, users can easily track the changes made to information on Intellipedia, allowing them to see discussion and debate about what information ends up in an official document. Creating a space for dissenting views to be voiced and archived is important following recent criticisms of U.S. intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, said Fred Hassani, who has helped build Intellipedia for DNI.

Like Wikipedia, Intellipedia contains encyclopedia-like information, but it’s more than that, Hassani said. It’s become a “storehouse” of information where experienced intelligence analysts can share their knowledge and pass it along to the next generation of intelligence experts, he said. The site, divided by security clearance levels, also has discussion pages where analysts can debate the information provided. There haven’t been heated discussions on Intellipedia yet, but its creators expect those are coming.

Not all U.S. intelligence analysts have embraced the new tool, but many younger analysts have, said Michael Wertheimer, DNI’s deputy director of analysis and chief technology officer. Half of all U.S. intelligence analysts have one to five years of experience, he noted.

“This is how they do their work,” he said. “This is how they like to work.”