Intellipedia: An Encyclopedia of National Intelligence
By Shannon Geis
Most of us who have a computer seem to know about the program Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. Chances are you’ve used it as a source for a report or for information on a subject, or perhaps you find it entertaining to browse through the plethora of articles covering nearly every topic imaginable. Wikipedia has indeed become quite a common site for all types of people.
The interesting and unique feature of Wikipedia is that each article can be updated by users. This allows for articles to bring information from many different sources directly to you. Unfortunately, this can also be a major problem. It is virtually impossible to regulate who edits the articles. For all users can tell, the author of any given article can be a highly regarded college professor or the kid that sits next to them in class. Although there’s no way of telling who annexes or removes information to or from an article, Wikipedia does its best to make sure information is cited and backed by reliable sources.
Now imagine the same type of program, an online encyclopedia, completely dedicated to U.S. National Intelligence. This program would be a site with strict access only to the 16 U.S Intelligence agencies. Just like Wikipedia, it would be a user-modified program existing to share information between agencies.
This is just the program that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has created under the name of “Intellipedia.” The program was released in April 2006 with the hopes of being an answer to miscommunication problems in the past between intelligence agencies.
It has grown substantially in its six months of existence, with 28,000 pages and 3,600 users. It is currently being used to prepare a report on Nigeria to test whether the program will allow national intelligence agencies to communicate as well as hoped.
At a glance, this project seems to be quiet a useful innovation— pivotal information at the fingertips of all of intelligence agencies. To some it may even seem silly that we did not already have a program of the sort in place. Yet there are several important characteristics of this program that should cause some hesitation. Intellipedia has problems much like Wikipedia’s. For instance, because we only know what the government decides to tell us, it is hard to determine how significant the ability to peer-review is. It is also difficult to trace the sources of information posted on the site. Different levels of intelligence exist within departments and it is impossible to know whether the information is from a high-level or low-level intelligence agent. On Wikipedia, there are administrative locks that can be used if pages are vandalized, as has occurred in the past. Hopefully, these same types of locks exist for Intellipedia.
There is also the possibility of the information being politicized. Politics plays a huge factor in everything involving government. It is, however, the goal of this program to prevent issues like the belief that Iraq was storing weapons of mass destruction from becoming so inflamed.
It is important to also remember that as with any computer program, there is always the problem of computer hackers. Although this system is very strict and private, hacking is still a reasonable threat, especially considering the peer-editing nature of the program.
The Department of Intelligence does acknowledge that this could be a very risky program but it feels that it is a risk it is willing to take, according to Michael Wertheimer, the intelligence community’s chief technical officer. It is difficult to determine right now whether the risks of this new program are outweighed by its benefits. Only time can really tell if this is a worthwhile experiment. Hopefully the security of Intellipedia will be sufficient to protect classified information while still allowing for better communication between intelligence agencies.
