Americas's spies, like America’s teenagers, are secretive, talk in code and get in trouble if they’re not watched closely. It’s hard to imagine spies logging on and exchanging “whuddups” with strangers, though. They’re just not wired that way. If networking is lifeblood to the teenager, it’s viewed with deep suspicion by the spy. The intelligence agencies have something like networking in mind, though, as they scramble to adopt web technologies that young people have already mastered in the millions. The idea is to try to solve the information-sharing problems inherent in the spy world — and blamed, most spectacularly, for the failure to prevent the September 11 attacks. In December, officials say, the agencies will introduce A-Space, a top-secret variant of the social networking websites MySpace and Facebook. The “A” stands for “analyst,” and where Facebook users swap snapshots, homework tips and gossip, intelligence analysts will be able to compare notes on satellite photos of North Korean nuclear sites, Iraqi insurgents and Chinese missiles.A-Space will join Intellipedia, the spooks’ Wikipedia, where intelligence officers from all 16 American spy agencies pool their knowledge. Sixteen months after its creation, officials say, the top-secret version of Intellipedia has 29,255 articles, with an average of 114 new articles and more than 4,800 edits to articles added each workday.A separate online Library of National Intelligence is to include all official intelligence reports sent out by each agency, offering Amazon.com-style suggestions: if you liked that piece on Venezuela’s oil reserves, how about this one on Russia’s? And blogs, accessible only to other spies, are proliferating behind the security fences. “We see the Internet passing us in the fast lane,” said Mike Wertheimer, of the office of the Director of National Intelligence, who is overseeing the introduction of A-Space. “We’re playing a little catch-up.”It remains to be seen, however, whether technology alone can bring to secretive bureaucracies the connectedness that comes naturally to cybersurfers in the outside world. But the September 11 attacks revealed how hoarding information could lead to catastrophe. In a report released last month, the Central Intelligence Agency’s inspector general described a dysfunctional spy family, in which the National Security Agency refused to share intercepts from al-Qaeda with the CIA, and the CIA, in turn, withheld information from the FBI. More than 50 CIA officers read cables in early 2000 about two future hijackers but failed to ask the State Department to put them on a watch list, the report said.To prevent such blunders, Congress created the post of director of national intelligence in late 2004 with orders to rope the 16 spy agencies into a single enterprise. The National Counterterrorism Center serves as a hub for threat information. There are plans to train analysts from different agencies together.
