Shutdown Of Intelligence Community E-mail Network Sparks E-Rebellion
The Atlantic POLITICS
Marc Ambinder
Oct 6 2009
The intelligence community's innovative uGov e-mail domain, one of its earliest efforts at cross-agency collaboration, will be shut down because of security concerns, government officials said. The decision, announced internally last Friday to the hundreds of analysts who use the system, drew immediate protests from intelligence agency employees and led to anxiety that other experimental collaborative platforms, like the popular Intellipedia website, are also in the target sights of managers.
It follows reports that another popular analytic platform called “Bridge,” which allows analysts with security clearances to collaborate with people outside the government who have relevant expertise but no clearances, is being killed, and indications that funding for another transformational capability, the DoDIIS Trusted Workstation, which allows analysts to look at information at a variety of clearance levels — Secret, Top Secret, Law Enforcement Sensitive– is being curtailed.
Phi Beta Iota: Despite its incrementalism and its avoidance of transformative leadership, all three DNI's have tried to do well within their perceived lanes in the road. What they do not understand is that the road leads nowhere but over a cliff. Transformative change starts with an Open Source Agency that provides unclassified intelligence for the President AND Everyone Else (see the HUMINT Trilogy), and then adds the classified layers in new ways with new security capabilities. Security “leaders” are from the era of physical security and have no clue. The DNI needs to flip the system–start with the Defense Intelligence Open Source Program Office (DIOSPO) elevated to a directorate (DO) within DIA, and go from there.
