Spy agencies to open communications to entire intelligence community

After years of delay and false starts, U.S. intelligence agencies are taking concrete steps finally to make their sensitive data available to analysts throughout community and other federal employees with high-level security clearances.

The outgoing director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, has ordered a sweeping technology program “to knit together the thousands of databases across all 16 spy agencies,” The Wall Street Journal reports today. 

“After years of bureaucratic snafus, intelligence analysts will be able to search through secret intelligence files the same way they can search public data on the Internet,” the paper reported. The program – which is expected to make about 95 percent of classified data available to intelligence agency searches – will also solve a communications problem. It will unite the agencies’ email systems into one vast database that includes names, expertise and email addresses.

McConnell said the impact for intelligence analysts “will be staggering.”