This is straight out of Ripley’s Believe it or Not.

Remember those clowns in the U.S. intelligence services who failed to see the 9/11 attack coming but managed to see non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

Yes, those dodos now want to launch an internal communication tool called A-Space modelled on the popular social networking sites MySpace and Facebook. 

No, we swear we are not making this up.

We got this from the Financial Times.

Thomas Fingar, the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, believes the common workspace – a kind of “MySpace for analysts” – will generate better analysis by breaking down firewalls across the traditionally stove-piped intelligence community. He says the technology can also help process increasing amounts of information where the number of analysts is limited.
“Burying the same number of analysts in ever higher piles of hay would no more increase the number of needles,” says Mr Fingar.

The FT story says that the Director of National Intelligence will open the site to the spooks in December.

The FT piece has more to say on this bizarre idea:

A-Space will be equipped with web-based email and software that recommends areas of interest to the user just like Amazon suggests books to its customers. The site will also allow users to create and modify documents, and determine user privileges, in a similar fashion to Google Documents. 

The CIA has also been using social networking sites like Facebook for recruitment to its clandestine services.

What next…will the CIA start using AOL and Hotmail?