CorpComms Magazine

Would you like to be poked by James Bond? Or how about a game of Scrabulous with Jason Bourne? US intelligence agencies have woken up to the world's enthusiasm for social networking and have set up an online communications hub - like Facebook or MySpace - for spies.

Called A-Space, the spooks' digital community was launched in December by the US assistant deputy director of national intelligence, Mike Wertheimer. It has the capacity to allow 10,000 American spies to exchange tips, recommend useful reading material, plead for help or swap gossip. 'It's a way to build the social network for all analysts,' said Wertheimer. 'We put more eyes on more problems.'

Being discreet by nature, the folks at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia are not letting on whether A-Space will feature Facebook-style time wasters, such as computer Scrabble. Nor have they said whether agents will be allowed to showcase their favourite music in MySpace-style clips.

The aim is deadly serious: A-Space is part of an urgent effort to improve the way America's secret agents communicate after a chronic lack of coordination in the run-up to the terrorist attacks of September 11. An official report by the CIA's inspector general criticised poor collaboration between the 16 US intelligence agencies - including the CIA, the FBI, the Defence Intelligence Agency and the State Department - saying they 'did not always work effectively and cooperatively' and that failures to share information were 'potentially significant'.

First contact
Donald Daniel, a security studies expert at Georgetown University, welcomes the new concept. 'Anything that encourages intelligence people to speak to one another laterally, across the community, is a good idea,' he says. 'It's important to avoid people becoming compartmentalised, having physical barriers between them. Something that allows them to speak to each other spontaneously makes sense.'

A-Space is by no means the only effort by intelligence bosses to embrace the collaborative spirit of the internet's so-called Web 2.0. There's also a fount of knowledge modelled on Wikipedia called Intellipedia, which allows agents to combine their insights on any given topic. And there's tag|Connect, a way for intelligence staff to share bookmarks, modelled on Yahoo! 's popular site del.icio.us.

'The intelligence community is very large - it can be hard to get to know everyone who's working on a particular subject,' says Daniel. 'This will make it much easier for people to just send out a query. Who knows who might respond?'

Security chiefs have caught on to something the business community has gradually realised: social networking may initially seem like a costly distraction for the workforce but it is here to stay - and can be put to good use. In a recent discussion paper, Forrester Research analyst Rob Koplowitz said employers face a paradox: 'Here's the problem: Web 2.0 tools have almost certainly entered your organisation under the radar through unsanctioned employee usage.'

Koplowitz says these technologies can, and frequently are, used 'to generate frivolous content about Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears.' But they are too valuable for bosses simply to banish them from the workplace, he adds.

Wikis, for example, are a handy way to gather inputs from multiple authors - both within and without a company. Blogs are an informal method of communicating with staff. And social networking, for all its vicarious temptations, can break ground in driving learning 'across organisational, geographical and hierarchical boundaries. Before you decide to ban these technologies from your organisation, take a hard look at how Web 2.0 tools can be applied in a business context,' Koplowitz advises.

Converts include consumer product giant Procter & Gamble, which uses Facebook to coordinate interns and inform staff about corporate events. Fast-food chain McDonald's has built its own social networking platform, Awareness, after an internal report noted that staff were using external sites to seek out colleagues with specific areas of expertise.

Need-to-know basis
In the intelligence community, the inspiration for harnessing Web 2.0 technology partly comes from the Galileo Awards, established by former CIA boss George Tenet in 2004. These offer prizes to intelligence officers submitting essays that contain good ideas for improving communications.

The first recipient of the award, Calvin Andrus, argued in a paper entitled 'The wiki and the blog' that 21st century challenges needed faster and faster reactions. The Iraq war, for example, needs decisions from central command taken within minutes, rather than the days allowed by America's drawn-out conflict with Japan in World War Two.

Blogs, argued Andrus, are part of the answer: 'Because they are real-time, self-authored, hyperlinked bodies of knowledge open to everyone in the system, they can adapt as fast as a person can enter information.'

The uptake among spies has been enthusiastic. When a New York Yankees pitcher crashed his small plane into a New York tower block in October 2006, the Big Apple was briefly stricken with fear that terrorists were again attacking from the sky. On the newly minted Intellipedia, an entry on the unfolding events was updated 80 times within two hours as officials across the US pooled incoming information.

For your eyes only
One risk, naturally, is that the wrong eyes could access such material - and Wertheimer, who is in charge of digital technology for the security services, openly admits this is a challenge. 'Let's not be Pollyanna-ish about this,' Wertheimer said recently. 'This is a counter-intelligence nightmare. You've got to ask yourself, If there's one bad apple here, how much can that bad apple learn?'

 To avoid hackers, the intelligence services clearly need an iron-clad defence - what the internet community calls a 'walled garden'. Inside the community, intelligence chiefs can watch out for red flags, such as stand-out search terms or unusual traffic patterns.

Not everybody is convinced, however. Richard Russell, professor of national security affairs at the National Defense University in Washington, is a self-confessed Luddite who feels far too much emphasis has been placed on modern technology. He believes the reason US intelligence agencies have been reluctant to talk is due to a deeply ingrained culture of secrecy rather than a lack of forums for chatting.

'We had methods in place already for sharing information,' Russell points out. 'The American psyche is such that people think if we fix the technology, it will solve all our intelligence problems.'

Instead of pumping funds into online gadgets, Russell suggests the services should concentrate on improving core intelligence gathering and agents' analysis skills. 'I'd draw a contrast with the UK,' he says. 'Frankly, we're handicapped by our wealth. If you don't have so much money, you concentrate on the basics: the quality of intelligence and analysis. That approach has served the British well.'

Rude awakening
The Brits, of course, had a nasty introduction to the dangers of the internet in 1999 when a list of 116 agents working for MI6 surfaced online. As the names spread unstoppably through cyberspace, the government blamed renegade spy Richard Tomlinson for the leak and frantically pumped out false lists to try to muddy the waters.

A-Space faces challenges - its designers will need to be on constant guard. Daniel says spies are not used to having to check the security clearance of everybody they speak to within the intelligence community. 'If you're working within the community, people don't tend to query whether you've got a particular level of clearance,' he says. 'There's an assumption that you've been vetted, that you wouldn't be allowed to be talking if you hadn't.'

All agree that such forums will need to be protected: it's one thing to swap holiday snaps on Facebook, and quite another thing to exchange classified satellite photos of suspected nuclear weapons factories on A-Space.

On InformationWeek's website, where tech-heads enjoy lively exchanges of banter, one reader weighed in on A-Space by warning: 'Unless this is going to run on an isolated network with communication lines completely separated from the internet, it is just a matter of time before the top secret becomes public domain - and our field agents start turning up dead.'

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