The CIA last week announced the creation of a commercial firm to conduct cutting-edge research on how information technologies can transform the way the intelligence community operates.
The new firm, In-Q-It, will act as a bridge between the intelligence community and the IT industry to form partnerships and foster cooperation on high-tech research projects of interest to industry and the national security community. The goal, according to a statement by CIA director George Tenet, is to tap into the expertise of the IT industry's best and brightest to help the CIA keep pace with the rapid pace of technological change.
The initial research areas that the new firm will tackle include the use of the Internet, information security, knowledge generation and distributed architectures.