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Intellipedia
In 2004 in my post on the reorganization of the intelligence services, Decentral Intelligence Agency, I wrote:
The implicit model of the 9/11 Commission is command and control - move all the information from the roots of the tree to the top of tree and then one all-encompassing-mind will evaluate it and make the right decision. Does that model sound familiar? Sure it does, that's the model of economic planning that is currently lying on the ash-heap of history. It's the model that Mises and Hayek subjected to withering criticism in the socialist calculation debate of the 1930s...
An intelligence-Czar faces exactly the same problems. So what can be done? The intelligence agencies need tools that can spread information rapidly and widely and that are open to anyone with information whether they are at the bottom or the top of the hierarchy...Sound familiar? Yes, blogs and wikis are the right idea. And no I am not being flip.
Today, I am delighted to learn of the creation of Intellipedia.
The CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have created a new computer system that uses software from a popular Internet encyclopedia site to gather input on sensitive topics from analysts across the spy community, part of an effort to fix problems that plagued prewar estimates on Iraq.
The new system, called "Intellipedia" because it is built on open-source software from the Wikipedia Web site, was launched earlier this year. It is already being used to assemble intelligence reports on Nigeria and other subjects, according to U.S. intelligence officials who discussed the initiative in detail for the first time Tuesday....
The system allows analysts from all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies to weigh in on debates on North Korea's nuclear program and other sensitive topics, creating internal Web sites that are constantly updated with new information and analysis, officials said.
...[Officials] stressed that disseminating material to the widest possible audience of analysts is key to avoiding mistakes like those that contributed to erroneous assessments that Iraq possessed stockpiles of banned weapons and was pursuing a nuclear arsenal.
Thanks to Carl Close for the pointer.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on November 2, 2006 at 07:21 AM in Current Affairs, Economics, Political Science | Permalink
Comments
Wow.
Very cool, and I suspect it could really help. Watching the self-organization of Wikipedia in action is an amazing thing to behold.
I think message boards and wikis like this could catalyze remarkable transformations inside corporate America as well. . .
Posted by: Matthew Cromer at Nov 2, 2006 7:36:55 AM
Yeah, if they can just keep the John Boltons from vandalizing the thing daily ...
Posted by: Anderson at Nov 2, 2006 11:19:54 AM
The concept of "open source intelligence" has been around for a while, and many people criticize the CIA for not doing enough with it.
Posted by: Arnold Kling at Nov 2, 2006 12:09:11 PM
For this thing to be effective, many people have to have access. I wonder how they'll prevent leaks now that many more people can see much more data.
Posted by: Simun at Nov 2, 2006 12:48:14 PM
http://google.com
google
Posted by: Google at Nov 2, 2006 5:45:44 PM
The future of the CIA: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/16
Posted by: bob montgomery at Nov 2, 2006 6:23:41 PM
Open source intelligence is actually a very different beast from this. It involves sorting through & synthesizing openly available information (media broadcasts, press releases, publications, etc.) to produce useful intelligence. This has been a cornerstone of US intelligence for years. The rule of thumb that I have always heard is that ~70% of what appears in intelligence reports comes from open sources. Often, a tiny bit of classified material is tossed in just to give the reports a "Top Secret" rating and the supposed authority that comes with it.
Open source intelligence is also the basis for the discipline of competitive intelligence in the private sector. With the increasing power of search engines, the public availability of high-quality satellite imagery, etc. this has become a very powerful tool for businesses. It is especially valuable when analyzing competitors that operate in many countries with many subsidiaries, contractors, etc.
I been involved in the latter, and I can attest to its value to decision makers. On the Intellipedia thing, I applaud it. Let's just hope that typical stovepiping and bureaucratic thinking doesn't screw it over somehow.
Posted by: madsocialscientist at Nov 2, 2006 6:44:31 PM
Prof. AT,
Analysts, like attorneys are protective of their work product. Many intelligence analysts choose to keep their work private and release it to high ranking officials within the hierarchy at the right time/place to maximize their (the analysts’) return/recognition.
Would intellipedia change this? How?
Posted by: Chairman Mao at Nov 2, 2006 7:40:41 PM
Cool idea, misleading name. Wikipedia is an encylopedia in wiki format. Then again, wiki was also a bad name to begin with. That's what happen when geeks try to come up with names.
Posted by: fling93 at Nov 2, 2006 8:22:03 PM
The question any good economiics student would be asking: What are the incentives?
I'd be much more encouraged if employees could make bonuses on the order of 25% of salary for predictions in a centralized internal prediction market.
Posted by: Andrew Lacey at Nov 2, 2006 10:30:03 PM
I remember asking myself "Who exactly funds and supports Wikipedia, and why do people put their efforts into supporting a vast database?" I came to the conclusion that Wikipedia is a modern-day form of the Carnegie library.
Around the turn of the century, Andrew Carnegie used his huge amount of wealth to build libraries all across the United States, as well as many other countries. Carnegie derived utility from his "Gospel of Wealth" and using his money to advance public knowledge.
Carnegie then evaluates alternatives giving him the most utility for the money spent. Therefore, private charitable giving has a market just like food or clothing, as consumers spend the least amount of money possible for the most product.
Wikipedia, today, impresses me as an extremely efficient form of charity. For little money, or time in the case of the editors of the articles, the public access to knowledge can vastly increase.
However, Wikipedia often does not go very deep into most subjects. The incentive of charity is not strong enough for Wikipedia's information to equal that of an authoritative text. For the more in depth information, authors expect payment rather than doing hours upon hours of research for charity alone.
Unfortunately, this could be the downfall of Intellipedia. If the CIA expects agents to only give information to the service out of altruism, then Intellipedia will not have the depth really needed by such a database.
Hopefully the government can determine some method of incentive for contributing to such a database. If that happens, then Intellipedia could very well become extremely useful.
Posted by: Matthew at Nov 2, 2006 11:53:19 PM
Great points Matthew. I'd further point out that the community that Intellipedia is working with is much smaller than the pool of possible contributers to Wikipedia. Additionally, the wikipedia is deep where people were interested in making it deep for whatever reason. I'm not in anyway convinced that the intelligence community can reply on the "right" topics getting deep just because people are interested in them. Again, what are the incentives?
Perhaps if every employee were giving a blog or two blogs (internal and external) and encouraged to post information there. This would allow credit and a system of cross linking to establish authority. People could be paid on accurancy and how cited posts were. A shared ontology for topics and common terms would help to make the individual blogs globally searchable and aggregatable.
Finally, we have the well know power law of public participation. A very few contributors do most of the work, a large number do some work, and most do little or nothing. It does resemble an market in many ways, but it many ways the interactions and the effects are quite different. It's a bit simple-minded to look at this and think: yeah, decentralization and markets at work!
Posted by: Andrew Lacey at Nov 3, 2006 1:19:23 AM
There is a story today in the NYT regarding the Iraqi documents put online 'under pressure from Congressional Republicans who said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein' and subsequently removed 'after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials.'
I question the ability of the government to manage the opposing challenges of access and secrecy.
Posted by: Andrew Lacey at Nov 3, 2006 11:47:51 AM
That sounds like one one of the coolest ideas in a long time. I would worry about one of the same problems that wikipedia faces, people posting wrong information. In wikipedia you might get a bad grade if you use it as a source and the info is incorrect, but if our national leadership is using that information to decide policy that could be bad.
Posted by: Walter Vandeberg at Nov 9, 2006 12:34:03 AM
One interesting thing about Intellipedia is they make every edit attributable according to their google-like service, Intelink. So this helps stop the process that Wikipedia deals with of people posting bogus information. Plus, like wikipedia, articles are watched by "enough eyeballs" so all errors are shallow.
This has the potential to break down the stovepipes naturally created by bureaucratic organizations, and network people around issues across the IC. The 9/11 Commission called for a new "Goldwater-Nichols-like" act, much like the one in the 1986 which unified the services of the military into a cohesive whole. The same way that services--Army, Navy, Airforce, Marines--were put under functional commands (STRATCOM, SOCOM, TRANSCOM, JFCOM) and theater commands (CENTCOM, EUCOM, NORTHCOM, PACOM, SOUTHCOM), the IC needs to organize around issues (like the function commands) and areas (like the theater commands). This takes it to a whole new level of actually creating a virtual cyber community where the IC can be just as dynamic and fluid to the security environment and self-organize around issues.
My biggest worry is that each agency will want their own wiki. The Director of National Intelligence doesn't seem to have enough power to keep that from happening. Very cool though, and congrats to the DNI for pulling this off. Somethings are finally happening that were called for in the 9/11 Commission Report. The American people needs to support these initiatives.
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