NEFA Report: Web 2.0 Tools and Counterterrorism

By Jeffrey Breinholt

Something amazing happened on the day of the London subway bombings, which occurred at 8:50 a.m. on July 7, 2005. By the end of the day, as authorities continued to pick up body parts, the most comprehensive account of what happened came not from CNN or BBC but from the Wikipedia. The 14-page summary was the collaborative effort of some 2,500 witnesses and experts. Is it any wonder that the U.S. intelligence community has seized at the promise of wiki and blog technology, and established classified versions of those tools to help exploit all-source intelligence?

There are plenty of people who ridicule the Wikipedia and blogs as an example of junk science, and journalism run amok. I am not convinced that their fears are well-founded. There is a certain inevitability about technology championed in the private sector being harnessed for national security. If the intelligence community is a marketplace, economic principles say that the value of particular information will ultimately reach an equilibrium point, which depends on its reliability, timeliness and usefulness. These factors will vary according to how the information is delivered. If the delivery system is the Wikipedia, timeliness is increased, even if reliability is fluid and not immediately as strong as information from more sensitive sources.

The examination of how the Wikipedia may be harnessed in American counterterrorism might involve a look at how the online encyclopedia has started to be used in another context that involves a search for the truth: American litigation. Judges are notoriously hide-bound. If they start to use Wikipedia in their judicial opinions, we may be seeing the beginning of the process in which Web 2.0 tools start becoming incorporated into a wide variety of American institutions.

In late 2007, I set out to determine the history of American judges citing Wikipedia. Among other things, I found that the most common usage of it in legal opinions is as a dictionary, to define slang terms that came up in a legal controversy that were too new to be defined by standard reference works. I also found, somewhat surprisingly, that there is no correlation between federal judges’ reliance on Wikipedia and political ideology. The full results of my study are contained in a NEFA Foundation report, “The Wikipediazation of the American Judiciary.”

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