US intelligence agencies are going through a tech renaissance, and a new generation of tech savvy analysts are dragging Cold War intel veterans into a new era, apparently.

The CIA and its sister agencies have launched Intellipedia, a classified version of Wikipedia some three years ago, and the men in cheap suits claim the service has revolutionized the way classified information is being used and shared throughout the intelligence community.

The plans for Intellipedia were first shown to skeptical CIA decision makers in 2006, and since then the encyclopedia of stuff mere mortals are not supposed to come across has grown to a 900,000-page resource, with some 100,000 users and 5,000 edits a day. In fact, traffic became so heavy last year, that additional funding had to be allocated to expand server capacities.

One example of collaboration was an entry concerning an IED attack in Iraq, in which chlorine was used. Twenty-three people at 18 or 19 locations around the world shared info on the attack, telling officers how they should gather evidence of chlorine usage. Not that chlorine is the state of the art when it comes to chemical warfare, it was used in World War I, and even then it was obsolete and mostly ineffective, although it did force soldiers to shave more regularly so their gas masks would fit snuggly.

Intellipedia is the brainchild of CIA analyst D. Calvin Andrus, who wrote a paper dealing with Wiki and Blog use for intelligence purposes back in 2004. However, the biggest hurdle to creating this impressive intelligence resource was not technical, but rather political, or bureaucratic if you like. Old school Cold War veterans were a bit skeptical about security issues, as they grew up in the time of the Red scare and duck and cover educational videos.

Eventually, the green light was given, and Intellipedia was built into the existing secure and classified networks known as Intelink, which connects 16 US intelligence agencies. Intellipedia is divided into three levels: unclassified, classified and top secret. Oddly enough, the top secret level is the most active one.

More here.