Tearline is an iPhone App for American Spies

Tearline is a new iPhone app for senior US intelligence officers. Designed by Chris Rasmussen, an analyst inside the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Tearline is a wiki-style collaborative platform that lets spies read and write unclassified intelligence reports.

Wired notes that while you might review notes for a presentation before heading in to work, spies cannot. Understandably, they can only access their work from a secure facility. However, this is limiting especially since most of the information collected by the intelligence community isn't actually top secret. About 20% of an intelligence report is usually classified, the remaining 80% is unclassified.

In industry terms the tearline separates the classified and unclassified information. “Above the tearline would be the classified version,” Rasmussen explains. The 80% of information under the tearline is currently only available on the classified intranet inside intelligence agencies and when printed out can only be viewed in secure facilities. There is no system for separating it from the classified parts and that's what the Tearline app is trying to address.


“I was briefing this very, very senior official at the Pentagon, and he was like, I wake up at 5am, and I get the presidential daily brief at 9am. If you can give me 80 percent of the story unclassified before I even walk into the secure facility, that would be awesome,” says Rasmussen. “So that’s the goal.”

A team of 'Pathfinders' have already written some unclassified reports to get the app going but its success will depend on whether intelligence officials contribute new reports and update old ones.

“If there’s not 10 new stories in the next 90 days, the apps are going to die,” Rasmussen says.

You can download Tearline from the App Store for free at the link below but unless you're a spy you won't be able to log in.


Download [via Wired]