First, American spooks said they wanted to scour* Second Life* and other virtual worlds for terrorists. Then, they said that kids who hang out in those digital spaces may be unfit to join the intelligence community. Now, the country's spies want to build a *Second Life *of their own. And they want it to have a time machine.
The project, dubbed "A-SpaceX," is designed to create a host of "synthetic worlds" where intelligence analysts can not only share data with one another, but "also with themselves and their previous states of thought about a problem. Analysts will be able to explore their own past thinking about the data as well as enabling the proactive exploration of how that data might change in the future," according to a military announcement. The effort is a collaboration between the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the newly-formed Intelligence
Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA).
"We cannot control the types of problems that future analysts might face. We cannot control the demands for understanding information and the pressure for faster decision making," the announcement adds. "We can, however, provide the analyst with an environment that encourages creativity, reasoning, collaboration with internal and external experts... within a multi-dimensional information rich synthetic world.
However, unlike players of* World of Warcraft or Eve Online*, A-SpaceX's analysts will be able to turn back the clock, and see how they arrived at conclusions. "We believe a key dimension of exploring changing data will be the ability to manipulate time in the synthetic worlds – in effect turning these worlds into Time Machines," the announcement notes. And those machines ought to be able to go forward, as well. "Proactive analysis could be explored by applying predictive models that look forward in time and suggest indicators leading to future events."
This new effort builds on A-Space, an intelligence community collaboration tool that's under development.
When completed, it is supposed to allow spooks to instant message, blog, share documents and photos, trade competing hypotheses, and do
Facebook-style social networking.
However, A-SpaceX goes several, several steps further -- designing a whole virtual world for spies, not just their answer to MySpace. Which leads some in the intelligence community to be downright skeptical of the program. "They can't do plain old forensics right and they're going to develop a mechanism that rolls the clock backwards and forwards based on multiple inputs?" one source asks. "It should be good
R&D, but its just that: no chance this becomes operational in a meaningful timeframe."
An open planning meeting for A-SpaceX is scheduled for next Tuesday,
July 8th, in College Park, Maryland. Originally, folks were going to be able to "attend" the meeting "via a web simulcast and via Second Life." But those plans had to be scrapped.
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