Monday, December 04, 2006

How blogs and wikis help the CIA

I've just the read an article in the New York Times, and felt compelled to post about it. It outlines how blogs and wikis are now seen as a vital tool in intelligence gathering agencies in the US. It outlines how until recently the different agencies in the USA, CIA, NSA, FBI etc had closed information networks. They had no easy means of interaction between the agencies. Each even had its own chat systems that could not interconnect, and its own search engines.

However, since then there has been an embrace of the power of blogs and wiki to provide quick and instant information on unfolding events and also for interdepartmental information sharing. The self-publishing revolution has in effect changed the way intelligence works. For example, one analysts commented about how on the day of the London bombings he visited Wikipedia and within minutes the bombings had an entry. Over the next few hours the article was updated as news changed, the analyst pointed out that “you could just sit there and hit refresh, refresh, refresh, and get a sort of ticker-tape experience,”

The full article is available here

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Funny you should publish this, they recently visited my site!

Benedict White said...

I find wikipedea very good Dizzy. I also get interesting visits but not from the CIA.