Speaking at a Google-sponsored panel discussion in Washington yesterday, CIA analyst Sean Dennehy said the government agency was struggling to adopt the Web 2.0 ethos of sharing information through blogs and social networks.
Dennehy said: "Trying to implement these tools in the intelligence community is basically like telling people that their parents raise them wrong."
He was addressing the CIA's three-year-old wiki-tool, Intellipedia, which like Wikipedia, features user-generated and community-edited informative articles on the CIA's own secure intranet.
Dennehy said Intellipedia has split the agency between those that clearly see the benefits and those that are sitting on the fence.
Dennehy claims it challenges the customs of the CIA "because we grew up in this kind of need to know culture and now we need to balance between need to know and need to share".
Since its pilot launch in 2005, Intellipedia has slowly gained the confidence of some of its detractors, and now boasts about 4,000 page edits per day.
Lt Col Patrick Michaelis, also speaking at the Google event, said the US Army was also struggling to implement Web 2.0 into its everyday procedures.
Michaelis helped developed the US Army's Cavnet platform, an online forum for soldiers to share intelligence while in combat. However, the army has regularly cracked down on soldiers using other methods of social networking, including Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.
He said: "In essence we're still culturally a hierarchy when it comes to transferring knowledge and data. It is always a challenge to connect the bottom to the top."