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Analysis: Intel Community Gets a Wiki

Council on Foreign Relations

November 10, 2006
Prepared by: Eben Kaplan

One of the major critiques handed down in the 9/11 Commission Report was that the U.S. intelligence community did a poor job of sharing information. Some of this resulted from restrictions intended to keep intelligence gathering and criminal investigations separate for fear of an erosion of civil liberties. But bureaucratic rivalries and personality conflicts also kept vital intelligence from flowing between agencies, and as a recent New Yorker article explains, in the case of 9/11, that kept at least one FBI agent in the dark (PDF) who might otherwise have moved to prevent the attack.

After 9/11, intelligence sharing greatly improved as political pressure forced various agencies to maintain open lines of communication. In 2004, the White House, responding to persistent complaints about the crazy-quilt organizational structure of America’s sixteen intelligence agencies, created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to coordinate intelligence-gathering efforts (USNews) among all of them. Sadly, says CFR Senior Fellow Steven Simon, a former top intelligence official himself , “All the old problems have just reasserted themselves.”

Faced with a nimble, adaptive adversary and an unwieldy bureaucracy, the intelligence community hopes that adopting a revolutionary new social networking software behind the popular “Wikipedia” network will help improve its ability to gather and disseminate information. Last month, John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, revealed the existence of the intelligence community’s own brand of the “Wiki:” “Intellipedia.” Authorized users from all sixteen intelligence agencies have access not only to read the information posted there, but also to create and edit entries where they see fit.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.