CIA's A Space Social Network

So, the ODNI is ready to launch A Space, a Facebook-like social networking site for Intelligence Analysts. It seems like a good idea on the surface. Use crowd psychology and an open network (obviously only open to those with proper clearance) to help integrate the dozen or so US intelligence networks. The only problem (other than the fact that every anarchist hacker alive will now have a giant bulls-eye on the network) is that the agency is planning on tracking usage of the network to determine that none of the users are double agents.

"We're building [a] mechanism to alert that behavior. We call that, for lack of a better term, the MasterCard, where someone is using their credit card in a way they've never used it before, and it alerts so that maybe that credit card has been stolen," Wertheimer said. "Same thing here. We're going to actually do patterns on the way people use A-Space." - see the CNN source

Note to the agency...you're doing it wrong. The reason that networks like Facebook and LinkedIn work so well for distributing information is that their users have at least the impression of freedom. While it's true that FB recently had a coding problem that had people thinking that they were tracking users, they've never come out and declared that as their intent. In fact, the official party line from FB is that the glitch didn't reveal the usage information at all. By telling their agents (who are undoubtedly used to feeling followed and tracked as only a intelligence analyst can) that their usage of the site is going to be tracked and analyzed the agency is prematurely limiting the effectiveness of what could be a very valuable tool.