Are the United States intelligence services in a crisis, trying to fight 21st century threats with 1980s technologies? Blogs, wikis and modern web 2.0 technologies should be rolled out to every employee of NSA, CIA, FBI and law enforcement - now the New York Times agrees with me.

Ever since New York Times contributor Clive Thompson posted a piece on December 3, entitled Open-Source Spying, the blogosphere has gratefully picked up the discussion on why the US intelligence community hasn’t embraced modern technologies that every kid uses without second thought: Google, Flickr, Blogging, Wikipedia…. the list goes on and on.

I have posted about this topic back in March 2004, We Need Spy Blogs, so I am glad that Clive Thompson provides an update on how far the intelligence-gathering community has come over the last 30 months. Here’s an excerpt:

When Matthew Burton arrived at the Defense Intelligence Agency in January 2003, he was excited about getting to his computer. Burton, who was then 22, had long been interested in international relations: he had studied Russian politics and interned at the U.S. consulate in Ukraine, helping to speed refugee applications of politically persecuted Ukrainians. But he was also a big high-tech geek fluent in Web-page engineering, and he spent hours every day chatting online with friends and updating his own blog. When he was hired by the D.I.A., he told me recently, his mind boggled at the futuristic, secret spy technology he would get to play with: search engines that can read minds, he figured. Desktop video conferencing with colleagues around the world. If the everyday Internet was so awesome, just imagine how much better the spy tools would be.

But when he got to his cubicle, his high-tech dreams collapsed. The reality, he later wrote ruefully, was a colossal letdown.

Something had gone horribly awry, Burton realized. Theoretically, the intelligence world ought to revolve around information sharing. If F.B.I. agents discover that Al Qaeda fund-raising is going on in Brooklyn, C.I.A. agents in Europe ought to be able to know that instantly. The Internet flourished under the credo that information wants to be free; the agencies, however, had created their online networks specifically to keep secrets safe, locked away so only a few could see them. This control over the flow of information, as the 9/11 Commission noted in its final report, was a crucial reason American intelligence agencies failed to prevent those attacks. All the clues were there Al Qaeda associates studying aviation in Arizona, the flight student Zacarias Moussaoui arrested in Minnesota, surveillance of a Qaeda plotting session in Malaysia but none of the agents knew about the existence of the other evidence. The report concluded that the agencies failed to connect the dots.

By way of contrast, every night when Burton went home, he was reminded of how good the everyday Internet had become at connecting dots. Web 2.0 technologies that encourage people to share information blogs, photo-posting sites like Flickr or the reader-generated encyclopedia Wikipedia often made it easier to collaborate with others. When the Orange Revolution erupted in Ukraine in late 2004, Burton went to Technorati, a search engine that scours the blogosphere, to find the most authoritative blog postings on the subject. Within minutes, he had found sites with insightful commentary from American expatriates who were talking to locals in Kiev and on-the-fly debates among political analysts over what it meant. Because he and his fellow spies were stuck with outdated technology, they had no comparable way to cooperate to find colleagues with common interests and brainstorm online.

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