Major General Dale Meyerrose jokes that he doesn't think much of millennials. But he does largely credit that generation with fundamentally changing the way the US intelligence community collaborates.
In 2005, when Meyerrose worked as the Associate Director of National Intelligence, he was tasked with figuring out how to get 16 different spy agencies---all accustomed to decades of siloed secrecy---to talk to each other. In the end, one of his most lasting accomplishments was championing a small grassroots effort led by young analysts that resulted in what would become Intellipedia.
Think of Intellipedia as a Wikipedia for spies. It works the same, except that there's no anonymity for contributors, and nothing can ever be unsourced. Its contents range from Unclassified to Top Secret, though it's the lowest rung of Top Secret. Anyone in the executive branch---which includes the intelligence community---has enough clearance to access it. According to one intelligence official who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak publicly on behalf of the community, the Intellipedia that exists today is part wiki, part bulletin board, part internal newspaper. "It's a great place to come in and see what's happening in the community as a whole," the official says.
That's helpful, but it's not the game-changing collaboration tool National Geospatial Intelligence-Agency analyst Chris Rasmussen, who was one of Intellipedia's earliest and most ardent users, had hoped for. Back in 2006, he and his fellow Intellipedians, as they called themselves, imagined full crowd-sourced intelligence reports, those official documents that land on the desks of high-level government officials and shape foreign and domestic policy. It's fallen well short. Intellipedia helped the intelligence community catch up to Web 2.0, but still has far to go before it lives up to its original promise.
In the days after 9/11, intelligence operatives learned that their aversion to sharing information had allowed warnings about the attack to go unheeded. The spy agencies were operating as they had since the Cold War, when their main enemy was the Soviet Union, a monolith they understood and, more importantly, could predict. Now, not only was the enemy more broadly distributed, there was more information than ever, and no single place to organize and share it.
The idea for Intellipedia first caught on after D. Calvin Andrus, an Innovation Officer at the CIA, wrote an essay in 2005 that suggested the same power of Wikipedia and blogs to aggregate and share information could also support the high-stakes world of spying. The essay spread, and before long, Meyerrose gave the all-clear to set up a server to try it out. "It was truly a grassroots effort, bottom up in the analyst community," he says.
What wasn't obvious to the powers-that-be back then, before the iPhone or Facebook existed, was that anyone would use it. "Nobody thought it would catch on," Meyerrose says. "Looking back on it, I'm absolutely certain of all the senior officials I told 'Oh, this is a good idea,' most of them thought that it would die of its own weight."
It didn't. Rasmussen and the other young analysts just kept writing articles and submitting them to the growing Intellipedia library. There was cachet in getting your contributions accepted. When people contested facts in the discussion section, things got hairy. "This is tribal warfare," Meyerrose says. By 2008, when he retired, he couldn't go into any field office and not see a shortcut to Intellipedia on every computer screen.
Over a decade since its inception, Intellipedia has grown into a standard part of the intelligence community's workday. It has a homepage with featured and developing articles, help pages, and requests for collaboration. You can find tips on tradecraft in its pages, and primers on conflicts in certain parts of the world. After news broke Tuesday of a leak of CIA hacking data, you can bet there's a page explaining what's known about that. It runs on Intelink, the internal classified intranet network that links all the agencies and is operated by a team overseen by DNI.
The New York Times reported last week that Obama aides had scrambled to get as much information about the investigation into Russia's meddling with the 2016 election onto Intellipedia as they could, knowing that would mean a broad range of analysts across multiple agencies would see it. Which makes sense. Intellipedia can help spark conversation. It's the spying world's office water cooler.
Rasmussen always wanted it to be more, though. His dream was that eventually analysts could use Intellipedia---or something like it---to streamline the process of creating National Intelligence Estimates. But when Intellipedians tried to write NIEs on Intellipedia in 2006, 2007, bureaucracy got in the way. Every agency has a slightly different process for writing reports, and getting people to deviate from that for something so radically crowd-sourced proved impossible.
Realizing Intellipedia wasn't ever going to be accepted as an official voice of the intel community, Rasmussen tried to create a more official version of it after-the-fact. He called it the Living Intelligence System, and you can watch his YouTube video pitch about the specifics of how it worked here. Though it won accolades from the community, and became a real opt-in program, Living Intelligence never caught on.
"Everyone agreed that the tech was better, most people agreed that the process benefits were better, but they just couldn't make the pivot," Rasmussen says.
But Rasmussen is tenacious. He fervently believes that the intelligence community would benefit from streamlined collaboration. To find a place for it, he just needed a part of the process that wasn't already mired in bureaucracy.
He found it by focusing on a specific chunk of most intelligence reports. Any given report will be roughly 20-percent classified info--"the spooky stuff," Rasmussen calls it---and 80-percent unclassified context and background that someone reading the spooky stuff needs to know to understand why the hell it matters. It's less sensitive. It represents an opportunity.
For the past few years, Rasmussen has led a team working to create an entirely new way to crowdsource that 80 percent. It still won't live up to that original dream of fully crowdsourced reporting---but it could get the community most of the way. It'll even, because this is 2017, have an app.
As Meyerrose would say, the millennials will love that.
