This may come as a surprise to no one: The Intelligence Community (IC) of the US, comprising over a dozen agencies across the civilian and military spheres, has introduced a variety of social networking technologies in order to facilitate… no, not dating … but rather knowledge dissemination and sharing across organizational and professional silos and compartments. The not-so-original named “Intellipedia” was announced in 2006, and modeled after… well, I think you can figure that one out. A number of sites have some interesting info on it, including of course Wikipedia. You can also find more info than you probably want on it here.
The point of all this is not to re-hash old news; rather it is to flag an interesting debate within (and, of course, outside) the IC, which has been sparked by the decision to go ahead with a number of social networking technologies. In addition to Intellipedia, there is now “A-Space.” Can you guess what that emulates? Yes, A-Space, tagged as a kind of MySpace for Spies — probably unfairly — has been introduced as a way to get people talking with each other across intra- and inter-agency lines. Crudely put, the contours of the debate just mentioned revolve around two views: On one hand are those who feel that social networking technologies will help to break down the ossified barriers which contributed to the well-documented intelligence failures around 9.11. If Jane can’t post certain documents and invite others with a similar security clearance to have a look and make comments; or if Joe can’t float certain ideas to his peers or cast about for others, then (the argument goes) the IC will not have properly taken advantage of today’s cutting-edge technologies to help reform the byzantine rules and governance structures having to do with the community’s knowledge production and dissemination. On the other hand runs the counter-argument, loose lips sink ships. A slip here, a misstatement there, and irreparable harm may come either to the security interests of the US or to actual operatives in the field — or both. If Jane’s document contains sensitive information that Joe is not supposed to know about (even if he has a comparable clearance), then Jim’s cover might get blown. And that could be bad.
I have had an abiding interest in the last few years around questions of what makes knowledge dangerous, including the forms dangerous knowledge takes. In this case, it seems, danger exists not so much at the level of the individual (at least, I don’t see it that way), but in the fact that a (rhizomatic?) network of information threatens extant structures that govern information — structures which adhere to values and practices associated with secrecy. One question, interesting to pose, difficult to study: What effect will these technologies and this form of social organization have not only on the production and dissemination of knowledge, but on the forms knowledge takes? What form(s) will dangerous knowledge take both in the IC and in the public at large as these technologies evolve and are embedded more firmly in a variety of critical infrastructures? Indeed, at a more general level: What is the relationship between information and infrastructure?
This is extremely interesting and raises questions beyond the domain of security. Think of Nowotny et al. and what they say about recent changes in knowledge production. Think also of the abiding concern with dissemination of knowledge which seems to have become an end in itself (with “publication” (i.e. a certain form of the dissemination of knowledge) as the main marker of “academic excellence”.) There are interesting conflicts emerging, as Dale points out, between different regimes that value the circulation of information (and knowledge (what is the difference between these two terms?)) such as “accountability” and regimes which are concerned with the risk of circulation, i.e. biosecurity, for instance.
One critique of this over-excitement with and over-attention to the flow of information, and potential obstacles in the flow, is that it obscures the way information is turned into knowledge and becomes part of a form of life. Rather than assume that people would act on the information if they only had it, one might ask why, when, and how do specific kinds of people act on specific kinds of information? And how are actions, or anticipated actions, already written into information?
This brings us back to Wittgenstein and Foucault in quite interesting ways. Technical infrastructures are not enough to make information do its work. A bodily infrastructure is important such as tacit knowledge, technical skill, intuition, imagination, organizational expertise, etc. etc. On the other hand, certain kinds of information come with the imperative to act. The action is already in the information, so to speak.