TechnologyReview.com

The intelligence reform bill evaded real reform

It is well within our power to create a flatter, more distributed knowledge management system that makes all data within the government available to users in real time regardless of agency affiliation, simply based on privileges assigned to them. But we don’t have it yet.

Nonetheless, the existing system can be enhanced via a few key steps. Unbelievably, many in the national-security community don’t have full access to the Web—because counterintelligence specialists worry that that would permit spies to hack into U.S. systems. Furthermore, much of what is out there is uninterpret­able even to those who see it: the United States lacks specialized analysts, and those it does have don’t have the linguistic skill to translate important data. But outsourcing the analysis and translation of open-source information to the private sector would enhance U.S. capabilities. In addition, the advent of the Semantic Web (which adds definition tags to information in Web pages so that computers can interact more productively) will further empower end users of information and make the Web a much more efficient tool.

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