Intelligence reform from the ground up?

I have previously blogged about what I would call the 'revolution within the revolution' currently taking place in the military. Essentially, it is an effort to increase the sharing of knowledge - and the 'knowledge database' of the junior officers and NCOs who are most in need of information. Now from Wired, another call for bottom-up (rather than top-down) reform of the intelligence community:

Instead of embarking on an expensive and decades-long process of reform - the type loved by bureaucrats on Capitol Hill - the services can fix this themselves. There's no reason our nation's spy organizations can't leap­frog what the Army is already doing with Web technology and, at the same time, build upon what the public is doing with the blogosphere.

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The first step toward reform: Encourage blogging on Intelink. When I Google "Afghanistan blog" on the public Internet, I find 1.1 million entries and tons of useful information. But on Intelink there are no blogs. Imagine if the experts in every intelligence field were turned loose - all that's needed is some cheap software. It's not far-fetched to picture a top-secret CIA blog about al Qaeda, with postings from Navy Intelligence and the FBI, among others. Leave the bureaucratic infighting to the agency heads. Give good analysts good tools, and they'll deliver outstanding results.

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All this is possible with resources that currently exist. It won't require a complete overhaul of intelligence services, or the creation of a cabinet-level "intelligence czar." (Has the drug czar won the war on drugs?) Intelink blogging would immediately improve the information being used in the war on terror. AKO has managed to connect nearly 2 million members on an annual budget of about $30 million - that's chump change compared with the cost of a day's operations in Iraq. You do the math.

I think perhaps the author gets a little bit carried away in describing the possibilities for collaboration between the CIA and the blogosphere in general - I'm not sure if we'll ever see "an official CIA Iraq blog" open to the general public - and I'm not sure if we should. Many of the problems in the intel community already stem from too much bad information circulating with the good. And, much as I like to think of the blogosphere as a new means of processing and producing knowledge, there is still a lot of junk floating around - and often building momentum as "truth" as it bounces around the echo chambers of blogrings, blog alliances, and the dedicated readers of the top 10-20 (or) so U.S. blogs (Instapundit, Dailykos, Power Line, etc.). The idea of analysts sharing ideas, theories, and a general pool of knowledge within the classified Intelink system is a good one. The idea of having analysts delve into the "open" blogosphere to look for possible leads and new information seems appealing as well -but I don't like the idea of an official CIA/DIA/whomever blog.

Intelligence Reform
Blogging
military