NYT: Open-source spying

Sunday's New York Times has an interesting article on the state of technological affairs within our intel community.

The spy agencies were saddled with technology that might have seemed cutting edge in 1995. When he went onto Intelink — the spy agencies’ secure internal computer network — the search engines were a pale shadow of Google, flooding him with thousands of useless results. If Burton wanted to find an expert to answer a question, the personnel directories were of no help. Worse, instant messaging with colleagues, his favorite way to hack out a problem, was impossible: every three-letter agency — from the Central Intelligence Agency to the National Security Agency to army commands — used different discussion groups and chat applications that couldn’t connect to one another. In a community of secret agents supposedly devoted to quickly amassing information, nobody had even a simple blog — that ubiquitous tool for broadly distributing your thoughts.

While the U.S. has been using fire-walled proprietary (and out-dated) tools, our enemy has been using Google and wiki. Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: I was negligent in not making this connection and crediting Belmont Club for being ahead of the curve.