First the federal government uses a key logger to conduct a drug bust, and now national security agencies are planning to roll their own version of MySpace. Dubbed, A-Space, this program will allow intelligence agencies to communicate more easily with one another. The hope is that this open communication will give them a greater ability to predict disasters, like the tragedy on 9/11, before they happen.

Intelligence 2.0

This is not the first time that the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) has attempted to give the traditionally insular intelligence community a Web 2.0 makeover. Intellipedia was their take on Wikipedia and they have also created a version of the social bookmarking site del.icio.us for internal use.

The CIA has also leveraged pre-exisiting networks like Facebook and MySpace for recruiting purposes, causing people to question whether or not they might have other reasons for perusing the world’s largest dossier.

Web 2.0 Roundup

It’s good to see the intelligence community realize the importance of free information exchange. What will be interesting to see is how they will overcome the typically low expectations that people have for these networks. It’s one thing to use Facebook to keep track of what your friends did over the weekend, it’s quite another to apply the same theory to analyze global terrorism.

This is probably exactly the push that social networking needs to allow people to understand its wider uses. It may be the first step towards a more mature social web.

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