Good vs Evil

I caught up on some personal reading over the holidays and came upon a NY Times Magazine cover story by Clive Thompson called “Rewiring The Spy ($)”” (Dec 3). It’s about the precarious information situation facing American intelligence professionals.

The article focuses on how US intelligence agencies are being forced to adapt from the threats of the Cold War (big plodding Soviet Union, professional spies, Mutually Assured Destruction, etc.) to the post-9/11 world filled with non-state actors who are irrational, unprofessional, and multilateral threats. Sure, this is well-trodden territory but Thompson covers new ground when discussing the imminent and dangerous implications of social media in the pursuit of terrorists.

While most of us run roughshod over the web, absorbing the benefits of the new collaborative environments we’ve created, professional spies are caught keeping the necessary secrets of their trade and fighting an enemy that no longer resembles the Soviet Bloc. It’s quite challenging, as Thompson points out, to encourage open collaboration among professionals whose lives and livelihoods rely on “need-to-know” bases.
CIA, FBI, and NSC officials are cautiously encouraging their analysts and agents to collaborate online, to use the ‘hive mind’ to piece together complex puzzles that no individual analyst could. What’s wild, though, is that they’re essentially trying to emulate the communication tactics that seem so well-suited to America’s enemies.

Consider how terrorist networks operate: independent mission-oriented cells, non-national IDs, non-hierarchical structures. Terrorist cells are ideal micro communities to use our new social media tools exactly because they’re disparate, discrete and always on the lookout to recruit new participants. That’s exactly how we use social media ourselves, whether it’s by blogging, tagging, or digging information we find useful and we want to have absorbed (or vetted) by the electronic universe.

You can see why the intel community is at such a disadvantage, though there’s a palpable opportunity that Thompson does well describing. The article subtitle says it all: “Could wikis and blogs prevent the next terrorist attack?”

Technorati Tags: NY Times, social media, spy