Spooks Use Wiki to Share Intel

The CIA has grown wise to the power of open-source collaboration, and Intellipedia—a classified version of Wikipedia—is humming with activity 3 years after its debut, Time reports. The site boasts 900,000 pages of content written by 100,000 identified intelligence professionals. Advocates cite the rapid treatment of questions as evidence of Intellipedia’s effectiveness.

For example, an agent posted a page asking how to collect evidence from a chlorine-based IED after coming across one in Iraq. "Twenty-three people at 18 or 19 locations around the world chimed in on this thing, and we got a perfectly serviceable set of instructions in two days," says one user. Some hardliners have questioned the site’s security, but other say a rapidly evolving database is exactly what the intelligence community needs to combat the ever-changing face of terrorism.
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