Classified Wiki For U.S. Intelligence Community

CortoMaltese noted that the U.S. intelligence community has unveiled their own classified wiki, the Intellipedia. Reuters says "The office of U.S. intelligence czar John Negroponte announced Intellipedia, which allows intelligence analysts and other officials to collaboratively add and edit content on the government's classified Intelink Web much like its more famous namesake on the World Wide Web. A 'top secret' Intellipedia system, currently available to the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, has grown to more than 28,000 pages and 3,600 registered users since its introduction on April 17. Less restrictive versions exist for 'secret' and 'sensitive but unclassified' material." For kicks, you can also read about Intellipedia on Wikipedia."

Well well well....

So how long until its accuracy is disputed over things like WMD in Iraq and it is forked by a high ranking officer who goes away and starts Intellendium to be run by supposedly more reliable intelligence analysts?

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Do you think some of that would really be an issue. You could probably add a rating system or something for "more trusted" sources to have a higher priority on an update.

You have to admit that this is a good move for the intelligence community as a whole.

about as quickly as wikipedia became unreliable.

Any system can be slanted to suit a paticular view.

aside from the parrot wmd jab, why are our intelligence services so political anymore? When did this start? the late 60s and early 70s perhaps (vietnam etc) or did it become so after the mccarthy era?

the

Re:about as quickly as wikipedia became unreliable

Intelligence influences policy, so intelligence has always been politicized, since well before the founding of the United States. Check out what Sir Francis Walsingham told Elizabeth I four hundred years ago, and I'm sure it goes back much further than tha

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The neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page. You can help Intellipedia by spinning this article or replacing it with the administration's position on the topic.

I can't believe it's taken this long

They should have had something like this years ago. The goverment takes far too long to adopt new technology in vital areas.

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Erm, a lot of companies, even those who who deal primarily with knowledge and who have internal communications issues, haven't embraced wikis. So either wikis aren't effective, or they're a bit out of the mainstream, and it's taking everyone a bit of time

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In my view, these are some areas which can provide a security nightmare.
Think of spies - One spy gets into a high security clearance position, he has a complete list of all information, for which he might had to work for (or ask sub-ordinates) to obtain, i

Did you know...

...that the number of WMDs has tripled in the past six months?

Example WMDs Found

Reference: [bizzyblog.com]

• 1.77 metric tons of uranium -- certainly raw materials for WMDs, but not actual WMDs. How quickly convertible to fuel for A-Bombs dependent on sophistication of secretly constructed at Tuwaitha.

• 1,000 (items of) radioactive materials -- defi

Need to Know

When deciding whether or not to reveal classified information to someone, there are 3 things to examine:

1. Clearance - Has the person been cleared to know this information
2. Access - Has the person been given access to this information by the party responsible for the information (in the US DoD, signed SF 312)
3. Need to Know - Does the person really need to know this information

This seems like they're skipping steps 2 and 3 all together. Now anyone with clearance can find out anything they want? Seems fishy to me...

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SIPRnet contains a wide variety of resources that people with an access to do not necessarily have "need to know." If you do not have "need to know," it is expected that you will not look for it.

Its a compromise between keeping the information locked in a

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Yes and no. Do you need to know everyone with in two degrees of separation from your target? Probably not. But if the vast majority of know intrest groups and persons of intrest are in a wiki like system, a script could generate a listing of all associatio

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They don't seem to be skipping #2 at all. They still require access to get onto the network on which the information is held, which requires a clearance.

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You are assuming you know the classification level of the information in the Intelliwiki, when you do not. All that is known is that the system is classified to the extent that the public is not allowed to see it.

Without evidence to the contrary, there is

Re:Need to Know

More importantly, with the change in our threats has come a change in where the threats come from. When the "big bad guy" was the Soviets, we had to assume that they had paid off at least some strategic people in every agency, or possibly even had plants, that allowed them some access to data that should otherwise be protected by our security clearance and secure data handing procedures. Because of this, it was very necessary to keep everyone as compartmentalized as possible, even though this is far from optimal when trying to organize the efforts of thousands of analysts and field operatives.

Modern day threats are different. Al-Quieda probably doesn't have a vast network of spies gaining access to our intelligence serivices, so it makes sense to open up the internal communication a bit to allow our own intelligence workers to be more efficient. While it does make a compromise that much more painful, the advantages gained through the information sharing probably outweigh the risks.

Link?

...and login details pleass??

I would love to see what they have on this. I wonder if they use it to track individuals, each agecny adding their own knowledge. Could be useful.

On another issue, I wonder if these Agencies have really adopted a mandate to co-

Wow

This makes so much sense, I can hardly believe they're actually doing it. A properly wielded wiki is the perfect tool for this problem.

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Could be, providing a tagging system. For example, any persons names that appear in a page should be tagged as a persons name. Transcriptions of telephone calls could be tagged as such, with the date/time etc. Would make automated cross referencing, buildi

Knowledge Base Software

What we are seeing here is the emerging winner in the knowledge base software category. Wiki's are able to harness the power of being fully distributed in content creation. Anyone can contribute, correct, and read the data. Also they are not shackled with structured meta data requirements so that the content collection/creation is far easier than other systems. They rely on FULL TEXT search to find the knowledge held within, and this suits perfectly well with a user based trained, by Google, in how to construct meaningful keyword based searches.

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And best yet, it probably didn't require hundreds of millions of dollars, multiple revisions over a number of years, and an endless line of bloodsucking leeches (err... consulting firms) to implement.

Obligatory

(cur) (last) 02:09, 27 October 2006 CIALuvR (Talk | contribs) (rm unsourced edit -- no proof CIA did that)
(cur) (last) 01:31, 24 October 2006 DodDude(Talk | contribs) (added pt a/b selling drugs in inner city)

New admin procedures

Block log

From Intellipedia, the classified encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search

Unblock a user, or view the list of active blocks.

This is a log of user-block/unblock actions. Auto-blocked IP addresses are not listed here. Se

As an added security feature ...

In order to log on, you must be situated at a specially designed workstation equipped with a Cone of Silence ...

But really, if it's so top secret, how come the whole world knows about it?

Geez, now, everybody's going to want one. I can see it now, there'll be an Al' Qaedapedia next.

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"But really, if it's so top secret, how come the whole world knows about it?"

I know the pentagon exists, but I don't know what's written on all of the documents within it. I think that's the important bit.

Revert wars!

"This document needs to be cleaned up to conform to wikipedia standards. Please add sources."

-- 3.2003 entry on Iraq weapons of mass distruction.

Intelligence officer with fief to protect: "Lame." ::Revert::

A sample classified doc from Intellopedia

The nice thing about Intellopedia is that it's easy to see a history of all changes. For instance, check out this document from the Intellopedia based upon the UN's mid 1990's estimate of their capabilities. You can see all the changes made by the CIA (d

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Yeah but you know they're gonna try distract everyone by pointing out Clintons revisions to whether he had sexual relations with "that woman".

On a platter?

I'm not sure how the intelligence community usually handles their information sharing between agencies and members, but this seems a rather easy target.

One database with thousands of user accounts, remotely accessible, each account has full viewing acc

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Have you ever set up a wiki before? You can use mediawiki to set who can view what(mostly using namespaces) so if you are smart about not everything is viewable to everyone. Not to mention being open source allows them to modify their code. And who ever

"unveiled"?

classified intelligence mistake #1

Really?

How, exactly, can one "unveil" a classified, secret project?

What we really want to know...

.. is which pages have had to be locked due to vandalism?

Malware

Would only take one infection of some PC to start broadcasting content . Just what we need.

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Machines with clearance to view this are not allowed to be connected to the public internet. Only other machines with similar clearance would receive those broadcasts.

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And the rules are *always* followed, arent they.

Might be a good idea...

With much the same caveats that apply to the regular Wikipedia: that is, insofar as the information is linked to more regularly generated and reviewed source documents (in this case, though, classified ones), and if people in the community use it as a tool

Finally a place...

where Mohammad Reza Aghaei Laghaei [google.com] can dwell.

Yes! I love it!

The authoritative source on US foreign policy that anyone can edit!

Which really explains a lot...

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"The office of U.S. intelligence czar John Negroponte announced Intellipedia"

If anything disolves faith in elected officials and journalists, it's when they're naive or blasé enough to faddishly use a word which means emperor to describe the positions

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While the word might literally mean "emperor," in the US it seems to mean "political appointee whose job is to look busy, so the people will think something is actually being done about a problem, while not actually accomplishing anything." See "drug czar

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No, in the U.S. it literally means "emperor", as in a person who, without any democratically derived legitimate authority, excercises control over the systems of government for their personal gain, regardless of public detriment. See "drug czar".

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Negroponte's involvement in the Iran-Contra affair definitely disolves my faith in this government more than this label.

Your point is still a good one.

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"it's an IT project that apparently didn't require an army of consultants, a $12billion appropriation and seven years to implement!"

How do you know that? I bet there was still a $12Billion dollar appropriation and an army of consultants... seriously... re

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"That might help avoid errors of the kind that led to the widely criticized 2002 national intelligence estimate that said Saddam Hussein possessed large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction."

Of cause it would... because they would give write access to

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What's with this "post 9/11 world"? Surely, it was what you needed PRE 9/11.

"We must find and kill them before they can try to kill us"

Yes, everyone will agree with you once you've killed everyone who doesn't. It's a good job threats from the US don't put

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Well done, you've realised there shouldn't be two different standards for americans vs everybody else. Please spread the word.

I was actually commenting on the idea of stopping people who might try and kill by killing them.

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Hmm I wonder what the article on me says in the Intellipedia. I'd be really interested to make a few changes there.

Next will be insurance, credit, crime and health pedia.

More seriously, I think shared stores of information online have always existed in the

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Well 'er' yeah, you want to gaurantee safety, so that nobody ever commits a crime, they already had a solution for that. It was called MAD, mutually assured destruction, nuke the whole world, kill everybody and problem solved. Law has always been and will

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You're thinking of [[Negrodamus]]... erm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrodamus [wikipedia.org]. John Negroponte [wikipedia.org] is a rather notable figure in American politics. Try to keep up, eh?