US intelligence community uses secret wiki to track threats

imported ism

Posted Tuesday, 31 October 2006, 17:58 HST @123

This article first appeared on my old blog at http://www.bloglines.com/blog/wsodeman?id=218

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061031/wr_nm/internet_intelligence_dc

Today, John Negroponte unveiled Intellipedia, a wiki application that lets U.S. intelligence experts and analysts edit and share information through web browsers.

You may be familiar with Wikipedia, the most well-known implementation of a wiki. I often site Wikipedia in this blog as a general reference, although I can’t recommend Wikipedia as a reference for student assignments. Wikipedia entries tend to change in strange ways.

Intellipedia has a top secret system, which requires appropriate levels of security clearance to access over 28000 web pages of information contributed by 3600 users.

Analysts are using Intellipedia to assemble a national intelligence estimate on Nigeria, and the U.S. State Department’s annual country reports on terrorism.

Of course, since this is a web-based system, it could be hacked.