Wiki in the works for sharing safest travel routes in Afghanistan

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is building a wiki-like network in Afghanistan to help nonmilitary personnel navigate treacherous terrain safely, a top DNI official said on Thursday.

The country has no common system the U.S. Agency for International Development, the State Department and nonprofit organizations operating in Afghanistan can use to share data. They rely on an ad hoc system of Google e-mail and Web-based documents to ferry information over the Internet, said Greg Gardner, deputy chief information officer for DNI. He was speaking at a lunch in Pentagon City hosted by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, which represents government and industry professionals in the fields of IT, communications, intelligence and homeland security.

DNI envisions a system in which individuals from nondefense groups and military members can type in their location, the route they plan to take and their intended destination to retrieve the latest information on surroundings.

"I'm at Camp Alpha, and I'm going to Town Eagle" the user would enter into a protected unclassified system, and then retrieve a graphic display of a safe route through the country, Gardner explained.

"We're thinking in terms of Web 2.0 social networking in ways that we haven't done before," he said, adding the approach will mean accepting some risk in return for knowledge of much greater value to information sharing. The network is in limited use, Gardner said in an interview with Nextgov, but he could not comment on when it would launch officially.

The application would work like a wiki -- a Web site that any user can edit -- "so you get this growing base of current knowledge," he said at the lunch. It would communicate safety information and mission-critical details, such as the last time a public health team visited the town or the amount of money that governments have invested nearby schools.

"Like everything that's designed at a national level, it's not going to be executed as cleanly as I've described. It's going to take time," Gardner said. "We've got to convince people that getting off Gmail and Gdocs is the right way to go."

Gardner noted to the audience that DNI decided against a cloud system -- a Web-based network hosted by a third-party -- because the agency could not obtain certification and accreditation for such a network.

Over the past decade, the intelligence community has come under fire for information-sharing gaps that failed to detect potential terrorist attacks. The common perception is the United States has the right data, but it is not getting it to the right people. Gardner noted that part of the problem in relaying information is understanding who makes decisions and for what purposes.

"We recognize that this is an issue, and we're working on it," he added.

President Obama in a January memo directed the intelligence community to repair systemic weaknesses identified after the Christmas Day attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound jet. Specifically, the memo called on DNI to immediately clarify the role of analytics in "synchronizing, correlating and analyzing all sources of intelligence related to terrorism" and to expedite IT upgrades to improve "knowledge discovery, database integration, cross-database searches and the ability to correlate biographic information with terrorism-related intelligence."

Some technology and security specialists said this information sharing approach sounded like the underpinnings of the controversial Bush-era Total Information Awareness project that Congress terminated following a backlash from civil liberties advocates. The Obama administration has said it is not resurrecting TIA, which was intended to probe health care data, credit card accounts, cell phone records and other private information. The new strategy will comb only government data sets, not outside data sources, officials added.

Gardner said one of the larger IT challenges from the perspective of the CIO's office is, "What are we going to do with all this data?" For example, DNI must retain terabytes of video for specified periods of time for the National Archives and Records Administration.

"NGA is going nuts," Gardner said, referring to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which produces imagery and map-based intelligence for defense, homeland security and navigation safety. "We need some policy relief to deal with those storage issues."