THANKS, ADMIRAL:

U.S. spies get a top-secret Web of their own (Scott Shane, September 2, 2007, IHT)

In December, officials say, the agencies will introduce A-Space, a top-secret variant of the social networking Web sites MySpace and Facebook. The "A" stands for "analyst," and where Facebook users swap snapshots, homework tips and gossip, intelligence analysts will be able to compare notes on satellite photos of North Korean nuclear sites, Iraqi insurgents and Chinese missiles.

A-Space will join Intellipedia, the spooks' Wikipedia, where intelligence officers from all 16 U.S. spy agencies pool their knowledge. Sixteen months after its creation, officials say, the top-secret version of Intellipedia has 29,255 articles, with an average of 114 new articles and more than 4,800 edits to articles added each workday.

A separate online Library of National Intelligence is to include all official intelligence reports sent out by each agency, offering Amazon.com-style suggestions: if you liked that piece on Venezuela's oil reserves, how about this one on Russia's?

And blogs, accessible only to other spies, are proliferating behind the security fences.

It's a start, but they're still too insular. The system should be opened beyond the intelligence community.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 2, 2007 8:16 AM