• Reuters, Wednesday, November 1, 2006 12:45 PM

This is cool: apparently the U.S. Intelligence community believes wikis are the key to the future of espionage. On Tuesday, the government agency said it's creating its own secretive version of Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia anyone can edit (with certain reservations). That kind of openness will be key to sharing sensitive information, U.S. Intelligence czar John Negroponte said.

Called Intellipedia, the new service will allow intelligence analysts and other officials to collaboratively add and edit content on the government's classified Intelink Web, which is basically the World Wide Web for U.S. Intelligence. The "top secret" Intellipedia is available to the 16 agencies in the U.S. Intelligence community, enabling the disparate agencies, which once existed in silos, to actually share information with one another.

The service has been around since April 17 and has already grown to 28,000 pages and 3,600 registered users. It is currently being used to develop a report on Nigeria, which is the home of nearly one-fifth of the crude oil the U.S. imports from overseas. Negroponte and others say Intellipedia may one day be the tool that intelligence officials use to produce the president's daily intelligence briefing. Security concerns are outweighed by the instant availability of classified information.

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