U.S. spies get private 'MySpace' site

WASHINGTON, Aug. 22 (UPI) -- Based on the same principles as the popular MySpace and Facebook Internet social sites, the U.S. intelligence community will soon get its own private version.

Thomas Fingar, the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, told a correspondent for Britain's Financial Times the new system is called A-Space," and will enable the various intelligence agencies' staff members to communicate more freely in a secure environment.

The system, due to go online in December, will be equipped with Web-based e-mail and software that recommends areas of interest to the user, will allow users to create and modify documents and determine user privileges, the report said.

Mike Wertheimer, the senior Director of National Intelligence official for analytic transformation and technology, said a lesson learned from the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was that lives were lost because information wasn't shared.

"We are willing to experiment in ways that we have never experimented before," he told the Financial Times.