The hardcore Chaos Computer Club points to a Sept 05 article by D Calvin Andrus of the CIA called The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community. The abstract reads

US policy-makers, war-fighters, and law-enforcers now operate in a real-time worldwide decision and implementation environment. The rapidly changing circumstances in which they operate take on lives of their own, which are difficult or impossible to anticipate or predict. The only way to meet the continuously unpredictable challenges ahead of us is to match them with continuously unpredictable changes of our own. We must transform the Intelligence Community into a community that dynamically reinvents itself by continuously learning and adapting as the national security environment changes.

Says it all really. We think of a conservative security community, struggling perhaps in the chaos of an increasingly online world, but somehow solid, predictable, reliable.

What happens when they become as wired, chaotic and creative as online artists, designers and gamers? And can they do that without coming out of the isolation that is hard-wired into their culture? How could politicians hold accountable a security service that is constantly reinventing itself?

A security service that engages online, as opposed to just listening, would be a very different bunch of people with a different set of skills.