 | Image courtesy of Vinicitrice, sxc.hu |
This week’s Link of the Week is a secret. So secret, in fact, that we’re not even sure what its real website address is. Sure, you’ve heard of Wikipedia, the site where users can upload and download information from any remote location, adding to the body of knowledge about almost any given topic. But have you heard of . . . Intellipedia? Don’t be surprised, we never heard of it before either. Briefly put, it’s a Wikipedia for the James Bond crowd. Funded by various government agencies—including the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency—the idea is that this is a clearing house of information for . . . well . . . spies. According to the on-line press and a lecture given by Intellipedia operatives at a public conference in Boston on 10 June, there are three layers of access—some of which involves distributed computing—open to those with the right kind of clearance to Confidential, Secret and Top-Secret information. Which sort of runs counter to the whole idea of open source . . . In any case, the two-year-old program has apparently been a real success, judging from the Intellipedia article on the CIA’s own web page, along with stories in e-week.com, among others. (The CIA page says “Intellipedians are using the wiki, as well as other “web 2.0” tools, to improve communication and connect related data and efforts together. Intellipedia provides a cost-effective platform to access expertise wherever it resides across the IC. It allows anyone to connect the who with the what . . . There are approximately 48,000 article pages and more than 200,000 total pages that help tie information together.”) There’s even a Wikipedia entry about it. And while you’re reading that article, be sure to do a search for "A-Space"—the MySpace for undercover operatives. —Dan Drollette, iSGTW | 
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