The student evaluated the Central Intelligence Agency's website. They searched for "Adolf Hitler" and found 47 documents. The search options were limited and only allowed sorting by category or date/relevance. The website serves as an informational hub about the CIA's mission, history, jobs, and declassified information. However, it does not provide strategic plans or current intelligence, as most of the CIA's work is secret. The site is useful for historical reports but not for finding sensitive or current information.

1. Module 12 Assignment
By: Robbie Miller

2. For this assignment I have decided to do an evaluation of our nation’s
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY which is most often referred to
simply as the “C.I.A.”
The URL to access their website is
https://www.cia.gov/index.html

3. Looking at this website I noted that there was a search box located in the
upper right hand corner of the screen. Compared to other databases used, I
found that this one is not very sophisticated and only allows for very limited
searching parameters which is based solely on the users input of terms.

4. I decided to do a search of Adolf Hitler. I typed his name into the search
engine, and the results revealed 47 documents. From this results screen I
noted that there were a handful of limiters and options that were available to apply
to this search. Those options included a drop down list to categorize the
documents, as well as an option to sort the material by either date or relevance.

5. Concept and Understanding
After thoroughly looking at this website, what I gather from it is that it serves
as an informational hub and point of access for those people who are
interested in learning about what the CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
does whether it be their mission, their history, their employment opportunities,
the branches within the agency, or general and historic news about the CIA.
As the agency works primarily in the mission of foreign intelligence and
foreign counter-intelligence, most of the business they conducted is done in
secrecy and the information they are collecting is not immediately made privy
to the general public. The website does provide documentation and sources
on some topics which the federal government has de-classified. As far as
providing resource information, it is my understanding that the websites
concept is to provide historic documentation about past events which no
longer serve as a threat to the United States.

6. Opinion on the Usefulness of this .gov site
Like any other website, I feel that this one could provide useful
but it all depends on what type of information is being sought or
the type of report being written. If someone was writing a
historical report on the CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY the
information and website would be perfect, but as far as finding
strategic plans or what the United States government is doing or
even thinks happened to the Malaysian Airlines flight that
disappeared it will not be an immediately helpful website. I do
not think this is the case for every .gov site as there are many
other websites out there which it is their main objective to get
free information out to the public, but unfortunately this website
is not one of them.