Top Secret Intranet: How U.S. Intelligence Built Intelink - the World's Largest, Most Secure Network

I was given this book at Hacker's (the MIT/Silicon Valley legal and largely very rich group, of which I am an elected member) by a NASA engineer, went to bed, could not get the book out of mind, got up, and read it through the night. If it were not for the fact that Intelink is largely useless to the rest of the world and soon to be displaced by my own and other "extranets", this book would be triumphal. As it is, I consider it an extremely good baseline for understanding the good and the bad of how the U.S. Intelligence Community addresses the contradictions between needing access to open sources and emerging information technologies while maintaining its ultra-conservative views on maintaining very restricted access controls to everything and everyone within its domain. I have enormous regard for what these folks accomplished, and wish they had been able to do it openly, for a much larger "virtual intelligence community" willing and able to share information. For a spy, information shared is information lost-until they get over this, and learn that information not only increases in value with dissemination but is also a magnet for 100 pieces of information that would never have reached them otherwise, the U.S. Intelligence Community will continue to be starved for both information and connectivity....an SGML leper in an XML world.

I am a contractor associated with the Intelligence Community. This book has proven invaluable to me and my company, and I highly recommend it to anyone who deals with this area. The CD Rom contains previously unavailable information that was very helpful to me.

I agree with the previous reviewer that this book is not the whole story of Intelink. There is a whole political dimension that is not discussed. However, if looked at as a discussion of technology rather than as an examination of cultural battles (which are ultimately more important and more interesting) it is a valuable book.

My familiarity with Intelink extends way back, and I was truly looking forward to this book. I was pleased to be able to read about a topic for which so little information is readily available. The CD-ROM alone is worth the price of the book: to be able to view and interact with an actual sampling of Intelink makes this book a very unique experience.

This book is right on the money in describing this classified network. The CD includes pages from the network (the pages were unclassified). His descriptions of the history of developing this network following the Gulf War are insightful. The author makes some points that the business world could benifit from the design of the intranet, a connection of many dissimilar agencies. I think his arguments fall short here.