MySpace for Spies (OMG!)

Posted by Brian McDonough on Aug 22, 2007 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

That’s right, there’s going to be a MySpace for spies. And you thought getting an early invite to Gmail was a status symbol.

The U.S. intelligence community is going to launch “A-Space” before the end of the year, according to an article from the Financial Times:

The Director of National Intelligence will open the site to the entire intelligence community in December. The move is the latest part of an ongoing effort to transform the analytical business following the failure to detect the 9/11 terrorist attacks or find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
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Underscoring the power of social-networking sites, the Central Intelligence Agency recently used Facebook to help boost applications for the national clandestine service.

Naturally, the arrival of the CIA and its related mystery agencies to the flashpoint technology of Web 2.0 will change the nature of intelligence work. Mostly, we think the quality of spelling in top secret reports will nose dive. and NSA operatives will totally be hooking up more. And promoting their garage bands. Oh, and everyone will want to have really famous foreign spies prominently in their friends lists. But most importantly, it’s only a matter of time before the spies of Generation Whatever-Letter-We’re-On display the same 4 am, Mountain Dew-addled humor of their lower-security-clearance brethren.

To wit: Where bored teenagers not doing their trig homework or surfing porn created LOLcats, bored spies not finding Osama bin Laden or surfing porn will need … LOLspies. Though crude even by LOLcats standards, Badmouth offers here a few pioneering efforts. We, whenever our boss wasn’t in eyeline of our monitor, furtively repurposed the Bond and Mission Impossible franchises. Actual spy hipsters will use less recognizable faces, such as Aldrich Ames and that Russian guy who got all radioactive. But in the spirit of verisimilitude, we took a shot at the official portrait of CIA director Michael Hayden. (If we don’t get fired by the end of the day, we’ll be in Guantanamo by the end of the week.)

Sexy fake spies are more fun, anyway. We think the real untapped potential is in appropriated Jennifer Garner pictures.