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Intellipedia. Many of the hottest online tools now in use turn out to be ideal for sharing intelligence, officials say. Two years ago, the CIA launched its own wiki. (A wiki is an online site that allows users to collectively add and edit content, like Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia.) Dubbed simply the CIA Wiki, it now boasts some 10,000 classified pages. In January, the DNI followed with a communitywide wiki, dubbed the Intellipedia. The DNI's National Intelligence Council-which produces the government's weighty National Intelligence Estimates on key topics-has just launched an experiment to produce the first NIE by wiki. The subject: Nigeria. Top experts on the oil-rich African nation are working together on the Intellipedia to help chart its future. "I don't know if it's going to work," says Thomas Fingar, the chief of analysis for the DNI. "It might; might not."

Blogs have also caught on among specialists across the intelligence community. Encouraged by the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, home to the agency's corps of analysts, CIA officials in the past year have signed up for some 200 group blogs and 1,500 individual blogs. After all the early excitement, however, the number of active blogs is now down to about 125. And as on the outside, the intelligence blogosphere is not without controversy. In July, a CIA contractor was summarily dismissed after posting her views that U.S. interrogation techniques violated the Geneva Conventions.

Government censors aside, intelligence blogs sound surprisingly similar to their more public cousins on the Internet. Classified blogs, complains one insider, range from "incredibly stupid" to "a few good ones" that are widely read.