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Grand Central Political Magazine
Eye Or Pie In The Sky?
By Dr. Mark D. Drapeau
As the Democratic National Convention starts today in Colorado, it will likely be the most watched in history, due in no small part to media coverage. Now with Generation Y largely eligible to vote, "new media" including bloggers and online video propagandists will be detailing every bit of important news, all the mundane moments, and any juicy bits of gossip as much as the major networks and other more traditional forms of media.
The federal government itself will also be blogging.
A little-known component of the Department of Defense provides support to many critical events like the Super Bowl, Presidential summits, the California wildfires - and the political conventions. According to their mission statement, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA, provides timely, relevant, and accurate geospatial intelligence in support of national security. Traditionally, and mainly, this has meant use of geospatial data from satellites, some of the most highly classified secrets that the U.S. government has.
But more recently, it has also meant mashups. A tour down memory lane reveals that what most people now know as Google Earth was once a CIA-funded applied research project at a company - Indeed, that technology was how intelligence analysts began to understand and mark up satellite information in the modern age. Nowadays, mashups of maps and photos with other information about building structures, protective forces, other intelligence, and much more make up a holistic approach to event safety.
During the week leading up to the start of the Democratic National Convention in Colorado, the NGA stepped into the Government 2.0 world even further. A team from their Office of Corporate Communications has been attending preparations alongside the "operations" staff in order to blog about specific technical issues related to how NGA responds to queries from law enforcement and other groups and delivers timely products that reinforce homeland security.
At first glance, it may be surprising that such a technically sophisticated agency has never before had real-time communications coverage of what they do. But while this new initiative will clearly allow the team to better inform readers from a technical standpoint, it hasn't occurred in the past largely because of the Intelligence Community (IC) requirement to carefully balance "need to know" with "need to share."
For now, this balance seems to lie at the point where the blogs exist, but are secret. Yes, secret government blogs. On the terrific INTELINK system, there are versions of many of the Web 2.0 sites you know and love - Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, and much more - for private use by the IC. Lately, INTELINK has been remarkably successful at increasing quality information sharing ("connecting the dots") amongst the diverse people in the intelligence, defense, diplomatic, and law enforcement communities; for example, in 2006 when a small plane flew into a Manhattan building, within 20 minutes an "Intellipedia" page was created, and it was edited over 80 times in two hours by analysts from nine different agencies. They quickly determined that the plane crash was not terrorism.
So in the case of the NGA blogging from the DNC, you will probably not be able to read what they write. The primary audience is employees of the NGA (via an intranet blog) and the larger readership of INTELINK. But this is a critical first step into "Government 2.0" and one that should pay dividends. In particular, near real-time, confidential information streaming from special events like this would be extremely useful to intelligence, security, and law enforcement professionals if an incident occurs.
Understanding and utilizing new media is a great challenge for super-secret government agencies like NGA (see the great New York Times Magazine article by Clive Thompson, "Open-Source Spying," for more). There are many legitimate concerns about what information to share, how to share it, and how to not let said sharing blow back in your face. There are security concerns, and also public relations concerns. But at the same time, in the modern era, citizens are demanding to know - often in real time - more and more information about what their government is doing. How much do they "need to share" with the public?
Ultimately, there is a middle ground. Debates about where the line is drawn when institutional cultures try to develop a Gov 2.0 mentality are taking place right now. Next month, I will attend a government-only meeting at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Maryland, where Gov 2.0 advocates within the IC - many of whom are on Twitter and other popular sites - are playing host to high-profile people from new media to tell government policymakers the benefits, and costs, of social tools.
The significance of social media self-coverage of the NGA's work at the DNC this year cannot be overemphasized. Within a government system that often measures time in four-year blocks, it shows an evolution in not only timeliness of news, but also technological sophistication affecting method. It also signifies the commitment of NGA to be seen as leaders within the IC collaborative movement. As Thompson poignantly notes in his article, "Social software doesn't work if people aren't social."
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Dr. Mark D. Drapeau is the AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy in Washington, DC. These views are his own and not the official policy or position of the National Defense University, the Defense Department or the U.S. government. (You can follow Mark's musings at http://twitter.com/cheeky_geeky.)