Using Web 2.0 in a top-secret environment

Network World magazine has just posted a podcast interview which I recorded with editor Paul Desmond about a month ago, just after speaking at their “IT Roadmap” conference in December. The interview topic is “Using Web 2.0 tech in a top secret world,” and we discuss the DIA and Intelligence Community experience with social networks, wikis, and blogs.  We also discuss cloud computing, enterprise IT, SOA, IARPA, and the challenges of deploying secure software. Representative quote: “Intelligence analysts are much like ‘knowledge workers’ on Wall Street or in the media, they know what’s going on on the Internet, they know what they want, they know what they need, and it’s in the IT side’s interest to try and service them.”

At the end Paul was gracious enough to ask about my new role with Microsoft’s Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments. If your daily life has a 17-minute hole which you need to fill, then dim the lights, crank up the speakers, and mellow out to the Quiet Storm (I was using my NPR voice)….

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IARPA’s First Director: Dr. Lisa Porter

Fact: IARPA has a new Director.

Analysis: The well-known DARPA (part of DoD) will now at last have a full-fledged intelligence-community counterpart. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity – prosaically called “IARPA” – was created last year, but has been stepping out slowly because [/opinion on] of lack of leadership [/opinion off], with only “interim” place-holder leaders.  Many of my friends who were recruited or absorbed into IARPA at the beginning, as it swallowed the old Disruptive Technologies Office for example, felt that the new org was spinning its wheels without traction, for lack of a strong and stable hand at the helm.  [Note also this recent post on IARPA.]

Today the Director of National Intelligence named Dr. Lisa Porter as IARPA’s first Director. She’s been at NASA, and before that DARPA itself.  She and I were at Stanford at around the same time, although hanging in different crowds – she working on her doctorate in Applied Physics while I was over doing the real heavy lifting in the hardest of all sciences, Political Science 🙂  

I’ve never met her, unless I don’t recall from old DARPA visits, so I did a tiny bit of surfing to clip a few salient tidbits from her DARPA work.

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