CIA USING BLOGOSPHERE TO DATA-MINE

WASH POST: The CIA now has its own bloggers.

In a bow to the rise of Internet-era secrets hidden in plain view, the agency has started hosting Web logs with the latest information on topics including North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il's public visit to a military installation (his 38th this year) and the Burmese media's silence on a ministry reshuffling. It even has a blog on blogs, dedicated to cracking the code of what useful information can be gleaned from the rapidly expanding milieu of online journals and weird electronic memorabilia warehoused on the Net.

The blogs are posted on an unclassified, government-wide Web site, part of a rechristened CIA office for monitoring, translating and analyzing publicly available information called the DNI Open Source Center. The center, which officially debuted this month under the aegis of the new director for national intelligence, marks the latest wave of reorganization to come out of the recommendations of several commissions that analyzed the failures of intelligence collection related to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

By adding the new center, "they've changed the strategic visibility," said Douglas Naquin, a CIA veteran named to direct the center. "All of a sudden open source is at the table." But, in an interview last week at CIA headquarters, he added that "managing the world's unclassified knowledge ... (is) much bigger than any one organization can do."

This outfit might help: The cumulative blogosphere has more info and is bigger and more talented and more knowledgeable than any one single organization. It might evolve into an out-sourced/open-sourced version of ABLE DANGER. Let's hope so...

BTW: an earlier press release form the NCI annoucing this re-organization DID NOT MENTION BLOGS.