In another post I said that I'm interested in research regarding how to make information easier to find. I have to admit that Google has done a great job solving that problem, but even Google makes mistakes.

One of the tricks to getting solutions is to look at who else has whatever problem you have, and see what they've done. For instance, the CIA deals with massive amouns of information, and needs to make sure it's easy to find. But the information doesn't fit into a database model as well as a sales history would. Turns out, one of the CIA's tools is to use blogs. In my opinion, that's brilliant.

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As an aside, I don't feel so bad about the "software contractor" in this story. First, her writing doesn't sound all that special ("writing about lunch meat one day, the war on terrorism the next" isn't all that hard; writing well about different activities is). Second, she claimed to have read classified documents, and when asked about it she denied having read classified documents; the CIA leadership had to determine which statement was a lie, and whether she could be trusted if she ever did get her hands on classified documents. On top of that, CIA management had to determine if the lie had an effect on CIA employees reading her blog, since it could have sounded more believable than when the New York Times accused the CIA of torture. And, while I don't mean this as a terrible jab, her job was to "performance and stress test" computer programs. That really doesn't require much training. You find ways to feed a lot of information to the program. Understanding the results and coming up with solutions, that's hard; but stress testing's easy.