Spies Like Use

What does CIA call Wikipedia? Intellipedia.

What does CIA call MySpace? ASpace.

What does CIA call delicious? We don’t know yet, but it exists. For sure.

CIA has embraced social techologies in a big way, says Financial Times

”Earlier this year, the CIA used Facebook – an excellent peer-to-peer marketing tool – to advertise employment opportunities with the agency,” said George Little, a CIA spokesman. “This effort, part of a much broader campaign leveraging traditional and new advertising media, was used strictly for informational purposes.”

The DNI (Department of National Intelligence)  has also built an internal collaborative site called Intellipedia, modelled on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. It has also created a version of http://del.icio.us, the social book-marking site, for members of the intelligence community. Another tool that has been developed is a national intelligence library, which can be accessed from A-Space.

While MySpace and Facebook have spread like wildfire, particularly among the younger generations of internet users, members of the intelligence community are divided. Mike Wertheimer, the senior DNI official for analytic transformation and technology, illustrates the dilemma with an example from an internal blog thread last year.

FT.com / World – US launches ‘MySpace for spies’

Sorin Adam Matei

Assistant Vice President for Partnerships in Strategic Defense Innnovation and Professor of Communication at Purdue University, Director of the FORCES initiative leads research teams that study the relationship between technological and social systems using big data, simulation, and mapping approaches. He published papers and articles in Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Information Society, National Interest, and Foreign Policy. He is the author or co-editor of several books. The most recent is Structural differentation in social media. He also co-edited Ethical Reasoning in Big Data,Transparency in social media and Roles, Trust, and Reputation in Social Media Knowledge Markets: Theory and Methods (Computational Social Sciences) , all three the product of the NSF funded KredibleNet project. Dr. Matei's teaching portfolio includes technology and strategy, online interaction, and digital media analytics classes. A former BBC World Service journalist, his contributions have been published in Esquire and several leading Romanian newspapers. In Romania, he is known for his books Boierii Mintii (The Mind Boyars), Idolii forului (Idols of the forum), and Idei de schimb (Spare ideas).

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