This is part of an ongoing series about government 2.0 written by Dr. Mark Drapeau. To view previous posts in the series click here.
Future planning is a big part of what the national security apparatus of the United States does, and it is incredibly difficult to do well. As the national security writer William Arkin relates in his 2005 book Code Names: "Our Intelligence Community is constantly being surprised by events in the world and misreads what is happening." Along the same lines, Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his must-read book The Black Swan explains why and how we are often surprised by rare, extraordinary events of huge consequence.
Such events elude the analysis of even the smartest person. Most have heard the term "Renaissance Man" – a person of many diverse talents like athletic prowess, intellectual power, musical ability, street smarts, and a way with the ladies. But we may not need them anymore, with access to "Renaissance Networks," a term recently coined by a new media analyst at CIA's Open Source Center. Why have a genius in a cubicle when a person who's merely "smart" can utilize global crowd wisdom?
Recently, I attended a small conference about using social tools for information sharing hosted at Johns Hopkins University and sponsored by the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). Our hosts for three days were the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) World Intelligence Review (WIRe) and the Director of National Intelligence's (DNI) Intelligence Community Enterprise Services (ICES). They were able to bring together the people who build social tools, those who evangelize about them, and influential end users to have candid and open discussions about them.
In the intelligence community, as in the defense community where I primarily work, there are what people call "cylinders of excellence" – different agencies and units that internally may perform their functions very well, but they do not necessarily have a culture of community leadership and partnership in something larger than themselves. Some in the IC have been promoting information sharing as opposed to keeping secrets. (What's the joke about secrets? Only two people know, and one of them is dead.) Lately, a big part of information sharing has been the INTELINK system, which is closed to outsiders and includes terrific "clones" of Wikipedia, YouTube, Digg, Flickr, AIM, Wordpress, and more – "These tools have no respect for the formal org chart,” Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee put it to the audience.
And the toolkit is expanding. The big development in IC social networking tools hitting the news recently is A-Space, essentially a mashup of Facebook, LinkedIn, and GoogleDocs designed to be an addictive work environment for analysts with access to sensitive human intelligence (HUMINT). A-Space will have status updates a la Twitter, subscriptions to updates, feeds and friends, activity streams, content management a la Sharepoint, a community grid tag cloud, RSS feeds from outside, drag and drop capability, discussion/question threads, a 'scrapbook,' and widgets. This system – frankly better than anything I know about in the private sector at the moment – should increase collaboration and analytical thinking.
All the talk about collaboration inspired an interesting formal debate among two IC thought leaders, Geoff Fowler of the WIRe, and Chris Rasmussen, an IC 2.0 evangelist based at NGA. In a fun twist, the debate was moderated using a public Twitter feed by Carmen Medina, a former CIA Associate Deputy Director (Intelligence). The debaters were influenced by Medina's comments and also by the audience's, and by the end, participants from outside the conference were asking questions – which for the very private IC is quite profound. Debate largely centered around the question, “Who is an expert?” with the general acknowledgement being that despite the need for subject matter experts, "Buford T. Justice is now involved in the national security process."
More futuristically, analysts will be able to use A-Space feeds for more than news and personality information. One the government connects the huge number of sensors and other devices reading all sorts of information (temperature, heat, satellite imagery, sonar, radar, robotic sensors, RFID tags, biometric scanners, law enforcement raid cams, views from pilots' cockpits…) to these feeds (for example, a Navy analyst could subscribe to a feed from underwater sensors looking for suspicious activity happening near maritime facilities), the possibilities are endless.
At the end of the film The Good Shepherd, the new CIA director says to Matt Damon's character, "A Senator once asked me, 'Why don't you say 'the' before CIA? And I asked him, Do you say 'the' before God?" With regard to integrating social technology tools into everyday intelligence operations and analysis the IC is not quite godlike yet… but they're getting awfully close.