Ever since the 9/11 Commission Report castigated U.S. agencies for their lack of intelligence sharing, a key goal of the intelligence community has been to facilitate information sharing across traditional organizational borders. No one assumed that achieving this goal would be easy, but even the more pessimistic planners may have underestimated the challenges facing the community. These range from cultural and legal barriers to technological hurdles born of new information technologies.

The very technologies that have made the information age possible have been both a blessing and a curse. Agents and analysts now have access to magnitudes more information than just a couple of decades ago. And, this information is far more diverse. Nontraditional areas of intelligence collection abound with data, much of which is open-source.

This wealth of information produces new challenges. Analysis, processing and dissemination are more complicated with so much diverse data available. Old notions of data tagging are obsolete in the face of new sources and targets. Merely keeping inventory on the vast amounts of data is difficult enough, but managing it without hindering its utility to its customers is even more daunting. And, the extension of the network down to individual warfighters promises to complicate this challenge even further.

On the legal front, government organizations must be able to share information—but only the right type of information and with the right organizations. Classification levels must be maintained along with privacy laws and separations of power. Too much emphasis on the boundaries of information sharing can be as counterproductive as an open-book environment that ignores the individual rights inherent in a free society.

Despite the new capabilities of the information age, intelligence cultural barriers remain. Government leaders have strived to eliminate some of the cultural barriers that kept members of one intelligence organization from sharing their findings with those of another. But some cultural barriers go deeper than mere personal habits. They are an outgrowth of missions and focus areas that represent ingrained tactics, techniques and procedures. Even amid the best of intentions, breaking down these cultural barriers will require a broad-based transformation of elements of the intelligence community.

But, the enabling technologies that have created these challenges also offer potential solutions. New data tagging techniques are allowing archivists to get a hold of the mountains of intelligence data amassed daily. Security engineers are working to develop multilevel security measures that will enable different degrees of classification to be shared appropriately and seamlessly. New collection technologies also offer the potential for processing data before it reaches an analyst.

Perhaps most significantly, the intelligence community is experimenting with its own Intellipedia in which professionals can contribute and refine reports on a topic. As with its more well-known public namesake, Intellipedia represents a cultural change in the availability and processing of information. Instead of collectors and analysts keeping control of their data, they would create a wiki dedicated to their data or add it to an existing entry. Either way, it would become part of the intelligence collective for others to improve on or exploit. If this approach succeeds in both performance and scope, it might provide the cultural change necessary for the intelligence community to fully take advantage of its information assets.

Still more solutions are likely to emerge as new technologies and techniques add capabilities—and challenges—to the intelligence community mission. Success in the Global War on Terrorism depends on the success of the intelligence community’s mission. The superb intelligence that is being generated will not contribute if it is not available when it is needed most.