TIME's Best Inventions of 2008

The Other 49 Best Inventions

Illustration for TIME by Christoph Niemann

32. Facebook for Spies

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Secret agents are people too. They're just very scary people who know lots of classified information. So don't they deserve a social network of their own? That's why in September, the Federal Government launched A-Space, a highly restricted Facebook-style website that's designed to encourage the sharing of ideas and information among members of the FBI, the CIA, the NSA and the U.S.'s 13 other intelligence services. (If you can name them all, you're probably already on A-Space.) They still use Facebook to break up with each other like the rest of the world, though.

See TIME's picks for the best social networking applications.

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