“A-space” is a new social-networking site for analysts within the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies. Much like on Facebook, analysts can collect friends on A-Space, but the site will not be used to find out who’s shopping list your on, or what mood your best friend is in.
Instead, in an interview with CNN, Michael Wertheimer, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, said: “It’s a place where not only spies can meet but share data they’ve never been able to share before. This is going to give them for the first time a chance to think out loud, think in public amongst their peers, under the protection of an A-Space umbrella.”
“A-space”, which launches Sept. 22nd is highly classified and will only be available for members of the intelligence community. We might never know just how successful this project will be for the intelligence community, but I do think that commercial social networks should learn from this.
My guess is that “A-space” is designed similar to how you would think an FBI or CIA intelligence database is designed. Access is carved out in a way that only allow users with the appropriate authorization level to get at certain resources, and of course every action on the system is audit trailed, monitored, and reported on. This way, users of the intelligence community can contribute data to the cloud, but at the same time protect the overall integrity of the data, and most important of all – protect the identity of the user who actually uploaded the data. As you might have already noticed, my mission (no pun intended), is to preach for a better, more privacy oriented social web. Its obvious that the technology to pull it off exists, but consumers need to demand it, and site operators need to understand that as the social cloud gets littered with personal data, users will start to back off go wherever they feel their privacy and identity is safe.