I was showing my 15 year old daughter yesterday's Washington Post Article about the "Digital Dragnet," showing her how technology is changing the way the government works. "Gosh, Dad," she said. "I wonder why they don't just check MySpace or Facebook?" This conversation illustrates a lot about what happens when the Government meets Web 2.0, and it's not just the impatience of the Net Generation.

Federal, State & Local law enforcement officers are continuing to leverage the power of harnessing collective intelligence to investigate crimes. The article refers to a commercial approach called Coplink, which relies on the voluntary participation of law enforcement organizations, and the Justice Department's National Data Exchange (N-DEx) (INPUT Opp. # 34575), a Federal effort to link law enforcement databases. While each seems to have different rules and capabilities, they both are highly useful in providing linkages and intelligence that was previously too hard to find. There are several other examples, and, in many cases, this intelligence is making a big difference.

When one reads between the lines, we can find other interesting distinctions between the two approaches. Coplink was developed by the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona with grant money, while N-DEx has been an $85 million endeavor. We don't need too much imagination to wonder about other major scale differences in the speed, flexibility, and cost of implementing these two systems. While the Feds are adopting web technologies, are they still holding on to the same old systems development principles?

Finally, as always seems to happen in these cases, the privacy bugbear raises its head. Civil liberties leaders are worried about what the government might do now that they have access to this new data and – even more frightening – tools to mine for patterns and even predict behavior. The privacy issue seems disingenuous on its face in an environment where people are busy publishing as much information about themselves on the web as they can. Has anyone really considered Spock.com? I stopped when I saw it return dozens of former addresses, political contributions, and who knows what else. Privacy? Nice knowing you. Also, no one seems to care when P&G or Amazon delve through this data to try to peg our behavior, but when the Feds use it to try to stop crimes, red flags go up. Regardless, these challenges will continue to haunt the Government's adoption of Web 2.0.

There is room for optimism, however. Check out the mash-up DARPA made to help our troops on the ground in Iraq.