my own drum

Imagine the prospect of thousands of individuals in places all around the world, each communicating what they know with one another. If they are doing this on a wiki website or a blog, chances are good that their communications would be indexed with a good search engine, making them readily available for all the world to see. What if that same group of individuals all shared a common chat room? Maybe one of them has an image or a file that needs to be shared with the others. Wait, that sounds like.. the internet.

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And now our government security agencies are considering the possibility of just such a system for interagency sleuthing. Before you get anxious realize that the discussion is about a private network, not plan to infiltrate the public network (any more than it already is).

We need to think big, start small and scale fast

What little public furor there was has has died down as a result of the F.B.I.'s failure of a multi-million dollar system overhaul in 2005. The problems were truly technical. Think Y2K beyond steroids. Much of the problem arose because the software was proprietary and managing the changes was simply overwhelming. And so now they have been ordered to buy off the shelf. And they are looking at the Open Source community. Tests have been done and so far the results seem impressive.

The Spying 2.0 vision has thus created a curious culture battle in intelligence circles. Many of the officials at the very top, like Fingar, Meyerrose and their colleagues at the office of the director of national intelligence, are intrigued by the potential of a freewheeling, smart-mobbing intelligence community. The newest, youngest analysts are in favor of it, too. The resistance comes from the “iron majors” — career officers who occupy the enormous middle bureaucracy of the spy agencies. They might find the idea of an empowered grass roots to be foolhardy; they might also worry that it threatens their turf.

There is good reason to be concerned about certain critical information, and it is with good reason that agents should, and do, guard their information. To be sure, however, we are talking about sharing bits of information with like minded individuals who are working with similar bits of information, and when put together, may provide the clue that will help put solid intel into the right hands. It's already been made pointedly clear that certain disparate bits of information gathered prior to 9/11 could have proven enough to prevent an attack. None of that information contained highly sensitive information. In theory, it would have been on a secure network.

It's past time for our security services to work more closely together. And with any change will come a steep learning curve as those agencies not only learn to trust one another, and to what degree they can extend that trust, but also for devising and developing a system that is truly functional. The open source community has prevailed at making the internet more accessable than ever, and it's time our security services looked at some real alternatives. Maybe the Homeland Security should just contract with one of the major search engines to supply a secure network. When it comes to search and connecting the dots, who does it better?