[Infowarrior] - US IC ugov.gov shutting down

[Richard Forno]

Shutdown Of Intelligence Community E-mail Network Sparks E-Rebellion

http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/10/shutdown_of_intelligence_community_e-mail_network_raises_concerns.php

The intelligence community's innovative uGov e-mail domain, one of its  
earliest efforts at cross-agency collaboration, will be shut down  
because of security concerns, government officials said.

The decision, announced internally last Friday to the hundreds of  
analysts who use the system, drew immediate protests from intelligence  
agency employees and led to anxiety that other experimental  
collaborative platforms, like the popular Intellipedia website, are  
also in the target sights of managers.

It follows reports that another popular analytic platform called  
"Bridge," which allows analysts with security clearances to  
collaborate with people outside the government who have relevant  
expertise but no clearances, is being killed, and indications that  
funding for another capability, the DoDIIS Trusted Workstation, which  
allows analysts to look at information at a variety of clearance  
levels -- Secret, Top Secret, Law Enforcement Sensitive-- is being  
curtailed.

uGov, rolled out in 2005, is an open source server designed to allow  
analysts and intelligence collectors from across the 16 different  
agencies to collaborate with ease and security. More prosaically, it  
processes unclassified e-mail for ODNI employees, contains an open- 
source contact and calendar management system, and allows employees to  
access less sensitive collaboration platforms from computers outside  
their offices.

UGov has been especially popular among the large tranche of analysts  
who joined the community after 9/11. The Office of the Director of  
National Intelligence (ODNI) runs the network.

Already, analysts have contributed to a "save uGov" wiki on a  
community-wide network which, unless you're got access to the secret  
network, you can't access at this url: https://www.intelink.gov/wiki/Save_uGov 
.

According to several who have seen the site, it includes anecdotes  
about how uGOV has been essential to performing critical national  
security tasks. Such a show of force -- a protest petition -- is  
unprecedented in the annals of the intelligence community.

"In order to improve security and enhance collaboration, the decision  
was made to phase out the "ugov.gov" unclassified web-based email  
system currently in use by a limited number of Intelligence Community  
personnel," said Wendy Morigi, the ODNI's spokesperson. "This  
transition will be executed in an orderly manner that sustains  
functionality and minimizes the impact on individual users.  Access to  
Intel-link, Intellipedia, and similar services will not be affected.   
The ODNI remains committed to investing in and providing high-quality  
enterprise services for the Intelligence Community."

An ODNI official said that security concerns prompted the termination  
decision but would not go into details.

uGov and Intellipedia are part of a philosophical approach to  
intelligence called "Analytic Transformation," which former National  
Intelligence Director Mike McConnell emphasized as a top priority  
during his tenure. Recently, Adm. Dennis Blair (ret), the current DNI,  
appointed former FBI public affairs director John Miller as head of  
the office's analytic transformation efforts.

"Since major new systems are not in procurement the legacy systems are  
not being turned off," said Bob Gourley, a former chief technology  
officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency.  "That puts the new,  
innovative, small, agile programs like uGov [and]  intellipedia]... at  
greater risk.  In fact, in some cases we are seeing IT departments  
cancel everything associated with innovation-- which would be a sign  
of a dying organization in the private sector."

A spokesperson said that Blair fully supports analytic transformation.

Current intelligence community analysts, and former senior officials  
say that uGov has proved essential for their jobs. They use their uGov  
user name and password to edit the Intellipedia, a Wikipedia-like  
repository created for collaborative analysis that transcends the  
biases of individual agencies.  Recently, a twitter-like service  
called "Chirp" premiered on the uGOV platform. Users can access the  
unclassified version of Intellipedia from any computer.

ODNI frequently stands up temporary analytical groups that take in  
analysts from agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the  
DIA and the National Security Agency (NSA); the uGov domain made it  
easy to give all of them a common platform.

John Hale, the former chief of solutions delivery at ODNI, tweeted on  
Saturday:  "Question has to be asked, if DNI can shut down the  
ugov.gov service with no alternative, what is the future of  
Intellipedia?"

Lewis Shepherd, a former senior Defense Intelligence Agency official  
who now works in the private sector, tweeted his agreement. "Decision  
to kill the uGOV network: [Did] we negotiate a reciprocal takedown by  
adversaries? Course not: unilateral disarament."

An current analyst at a three-letter intelligence agency said his  
colleagues were "shocked and confused" by the uGov announcement.

The implication, here, is that DNI, which manages the analytical  
product for consumers of intelligence like the president and policy  
makers, may have soured on these initial, inexpensive collaborative,  
open-source, efforts and instead deferred to long-time -- and  
discredited -- intelligence community practice of trying to speak with  
one voice, and to limit information sharing and gathering under the  
pretext of operational security. This "need to know" mentality is said  
to limit the damage that individual ne'erdowells can do; a "need to  
share" culture, by contrast, may enhance the analytic product but  
might also heighten the risk of security violations.

More sensitively, UGov was also a testbed for collaboration platforms  
that could one day be migrated to the JWICS network, which the  
intelligence community and Department of Defense use to share  
information at the TOP SECRET/SCI level.  In 2008, the DNI rolled out  
a platform for users with TOP SECRET/SCI clearance called "A-Space,"  
and described it publicly as an intelligence community version of  
Facebook or Myspace. By most accounts, A-Space is a success.

A DNI spokesperson said that uGov would be replaced, and that the  
migration plan will include a process for moving emails and data to  
the replacement system.

The DoDiis work station is especially popular at the Defense  
Intelligence Agency, and about 20,000 terminals across the  
intelligence community use the software. The Bridge program was  
developed by the intelligence community's in-house research shop as a  
respond to a request from the DNI in 2008.

According to its website, Bridge " ... provides a mechanism for  
companies with interesting technologies to evaluate their technologies  
in the context of intelligence community mission challenges and for an  
ability to work in the intelligence community enterprise" as well as a  
platform for secure public-private collaboration on intelligence  
matters.

"Big enterprises can be good at change and the [intelligence  
community] has dramatically adjusted over the last decade. But big  
enterprises sometimes don't see the right path and it can take  
exogenous input to bring about the positive change," Gourley said.