Spies and Bloggers / TechNewsWorld article

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Spies and Bloggers

By John P. Mello Jr.
TechNewsWorld
03/10/05 8:01 AM PT

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/41254.html

"You get a lot of these obsteperous guys who don't defer to hierarchy, but smart executives all over the place now are trying to figure out ways to capitalize on people like me," said W. David Stephenson of Stephenson Strategies. "It's just dumb to filter out that potential information just because the people who are offering it are not like you."


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Could the American spy community improve its intelligence activities through blogging? A captain in the U.S. Army Reserve thinks so and says as much in the March issue of Wired magazine.

Capt. Kris Alexander, a millitary intelligence officer, argues in an essay that blogs should be incorporated into the intelligence community's classified computer network , Intelink, and that the community should cultivate bloggers outside itself to gain additional insights and analysis.

"It's a great idea," John Robb, a writer, analyst and publisher of the globalguerrillas blog, told TechNewsWorld. He maintained that the intelligence community should blog for the same reasons companies have begun doing so: Large organization have found that their top-down methods for organizing massive amounts of information simply don't work. "It's too big of a task," he explained. "It can't be done."


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In his essay Alexander recalls his experience with Intelink while assigned to U.S. Central Command during the Iraqi wars.

"While there were hundreds of people throughout the world reading the same materials, there was no easy way to learn what they thought," he writes. "Somebody had answers to my questions, I knew, but how were we ever to connect? The scary truth is that most of the time analysts are flying half blind."

He maintains that blogs, which so far have not been incorporated into Intelink, could provide the connections needed to improve analysis of intelligence on the network.

"It's not far-fetched to picture a top-secret CIA blog about al Qaeda, with postings from Navy Intelligence and the FBI, among others," he noted. "Leave the bureaucratic infighting to the agency heads. Give good analysts good tools, and they'll deliver outstanding results."

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