Call it MySpy. The Directorate of National Intelligence -- the umbrella agency for the U.S. intelligence community -- is preparing to launch A-Space, an intelligence-sharing tool for analysts modeled on Facebook and MySpace.
The announcement, originally reported in the Financial Times, comes as the CIA reluctantly handed over to Congress a scathing report concluding that CIA officers "did not always work effectively and cooperatively" and that the agency failed "to implement and manage important processes" and "follow through with operations."
That report emphasized the need for the intelligence community to adopt technologies that facilitate information-sharing and collaboration  , said David Stephenson, an independent homeland security and crisis-management strategist at Stephenson Strategies. "It's been well established that when you facilitate collaboration of that sort, at least potentially, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts," he said.
Improving Analysis
American intelligence has been particularly susceptible to "groupthink" -- the tendency of everyone in the organization to come up with the same conclusions -- with the Bay of Pigs being the prime example. The intelligence consensus that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction might serve as another example.
Using tools like A-Space, "a junior analyst may be able to raise insights that wouldn't be heard in more hierarchical systems," Stephenson said. Today's intelligence agencies "need to be able to alter strategies on the fly based on rapidly developing situations," he said.
Conversation-based analysis has the potential for agencies to think outside the box, he noted. "Sometimes the important thing is a different thread that comes out in the conversation. Almost anyone involved in a collaborative process can come up with valuable insights," he said. If a social-networking approach can streamline the analysis process, "it really could result in an acceleration of decision-making where rapid decision-making is necessary."
Safety Concerns
But many inside the intelligence community are extremely concerned about the security implications of using such tools for information-sharing. Mike Wertheimer, the senior DNI official for analytic transformation and technology, told the Financial Times that the positive value of such initiatives is "not easily quantified." The negative, he said, is the risk for people undercover.
A-Space will be voluntary when it launches in December to address those concerns, and Wertheimer said the agency is "willing to experiment" in ways that it has never experimented before.
Stephenson said he feels sure that the system could be designed to provide enough warnings and "interactive hoops" that users would be circumspect about posting information that could actually endanger undercover agents. (continued...)
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