Facebook for US intelligence forces launching this month - time to revisit a whole-of-government intranet?

A-Space, an online collaborative space for US intelligence operatives, is planned for launch this month, giving all 16 US intelligence agencies a streamlined and effective tool for sharing information and collaborating - activities that have been criticised as previously lacking across US intelligence initiatives.

As reported in FCW.com, in the article, A-Space set to launch this month, after logging in,

analysts will have access to shared and personal workspaces, wikis, blogs, widgets, RSS feeds and other tools. To log in, analysts will need to prove their identity using public key infrastructure, and their agencies must list them in the governmentwide intelligence analyst directory.

Like many social-networking sites, each analyst will create an online personal profile, and colleagues can see what others are working on and the A-Space workspaces that they are using. In addition, much like Facebook, users can also post notes on one another’s profiles

The A-Space social network will include a search tool and data sets from six agencies at launch, with more to be progressively added.

We've seen several other western jurisdictions introduce cross-agency or whole-of-government intranets (such as Singapore), and there was a commitment made in Australia to establish a whole-of-government intranet by the end of 1998, which never came to fruition.

Perhaps it is time to revisit this.