Robert David STEELE Vivas has committed himself to being intelligence officer to the public, and to the five billion poor in particular, for the balance of his life.
Below are some definitions that matter, as of 1 August 2009 [this is a work in progress, will try to complete it soon, and then future definitions will be separate postings]
BRAIN: Only a living creature can have a brain, an organic or biological device that has over billions of years evolved to its present state. The following quotation from James Bamford is instructive; it is the final sentence of his book, BODY OF SECRETS: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Intelligence Agency (page 613)
COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE (CI): Collective Intelligence overcomes groupthink and individual cognitive biases by leveraging a process of consensus decision-making that respects–even demands–diversity of inputs and perspetives. At its best it can be a society of the human mind, achieving conscious evolution as a species. CI is a return to the precepts ofthe Founding Fathers, and in particular Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The industrial era, characterized by Lionel Tiger as “The Manufacture of Evil,” separated the public from both information and elite decision-making, while still taking public money. Bureaucracy fostered secrecy, and secrecy fostered pathology. Collective intelligence restores the power of the people over their commonwealth, and neutralizes the power of vested interests that manipulate information to concentrate wealth. NOTE: a fuller definition that draws on Robert Steele's many publications can be found at WordIQ, which tends to be more balanced than Wikipedia. Colloquial terms, each a book title, include Smart Mobs, Groundswell, Here Comes Everybody, Army of Davids, Wikinomics, and Wealth of Networks.
DATA: The raw direct human observation or articulation, raw image, raw signal, raw signature, or in machine terms, the lowest possible element of information that can be isolated in and of itself with its own provenance.
DATA MINING: The direct exploitation of information already in-hand, or procured for a specific investigation i.e. generally internally-generated and oriented. Often mis-represented as Business Intelligence. See also Knowledge Management. At its best, Data Mining is a huge fraud buster, detecting patterns of import-export tax avoidance, money laundering, and insurance fraud.
DECISION-SUPPORT: The conversion of information, which costs money, into intelligence, which makes money–or achieves other goals, public, and private, of specific interest to a specific individual or body making a decision of import. See also Intelligence. An alternative for those organizations such as the United Nations that have long been abused by the confusion of secret sources & methods with the world “Intelligence.”
EARTH INTELLIGENCE (EARTHINT): Earth Intelligence, the subject of a new book (the second book to be published by the Earth Intelligence Network, the first was on Collective Intelligence) is defined by its outcome, the creation of a prosperous world at peace. We have adopted Buckminster Fuller's objectives as our own.
GEOSPATIAL INTELLIGENCE (GEOINT): Actionable decision-support drawn predominantly from imagery and geospatial information sources. 99% of all geospatial information is not classified; most of it is not expensive; and a great deal of it, especially the “ground truth” direct access hand-held and air-breather geospatial measurements, are controlled by people for whom English is not their primary or even secondary language. Unlike HUMINT, most GEOINT is not actually “Intelligence,” but rather very powerful tangible information that has benefited from substantial machine enhancement and anslysis. Three-dimensional depictions of remote locations, at a neighborhood level of granularity, are an example of GEOINT.
HUMAN INTELLIGENCE (HUMINT): As with many other definitions, this one has been abjectly corrupted by over two centuries of government emphasis on secret sources & methods to the exclusion of proper stewardship of education, open source intelligence, and research. HUMINT is any process that relies on a human mind to collect, process, and convert data and information into intelligence. 99% of HUMINT is not secret or expensive. Most of its is also not in English. Below is illustrated a concept for “Full Spectrum HUMINT” that leads to Organizational Intelligence and ultimately to a Smart Nation, a Smart Continent (Africa First), and a Prosperous World at Peace.
IMAGERY INTELLIGENCE (IMINT): Actionable decision-support drawn predominantly from imagery and geospatial information sources. 99% of all imagery is not classified; most of it is not expensive; and a great deal of it, especially the “ground truth” direct access hand-held and air-breather images and geospatial measurements, are controlled by people for whom English is not their primary or even secondary language. Unlike HUMINT, most IMINT is not actually “Intelligence,” but rather very powerful tangible information that has benefited from substantial machine enhancement and anslysis.
INFORMATION: Elements of data that have been combined by machine or human processing to provide a larger mosaic, a building-block of knowledge, that is of generic value to multiple parties.
INFORMATION ASYMMETRY: The “free market” and the economics of capitalism are severely flawed in that they “assume” information symmetry. As we have learned from Goldman Sachs and such early warnings in the 1990's as Michael Lewis's “Liar's Poker,” the market is neither free, nor honest. Electied official have been bribed by Wall Street to do great evil in favor of the few (special interests) at the expense of the many (public interest), and appointed officials as well as civil servants–good people trapped in a bad system–have lost sight of their Constitutional oaths to protect the Republic (people sovereign over the government) and instead sacrified their integrity in the name of loyalty to the “chain of command.” The primary purpose of public intelligene in the public interest is to eliminate Information Asymmetry and the abuse, corruption, fraud, and waste that it fosters, so as to achieve Infinite Wealth for the public at large.
INFORMATION PATHOLOGIES: Below are illustrated a number of Information Pathologies, previously called Data Pathologies. Data does nto lie–people lie. Buckminister Fuller understood the full meaning of the world Integrity and its role in assuring Clarity, Diversity, and Sustainability in Earth Systems. The below list is limited. Other forms of information pathology, all stemming from the loss of integrity by specific human beings, including forgotten knowledge, partisan ideology, and individual corruption such as displayed by the US Senate and the White House when they chose to ignore Peak Oil wanrings clearly and responsibily delineated in public testimony from 1974-1979.
INTELLIGENCE CONTEXT: The chart below combines Knowledge Management, Collaborative (Human) Work, External Research, and Organizational Intelligence to illustrate the larger context within which the process of intelligence can take place.
INTELLIGENCE INPUTS: Apart from data or information, the most common intelligence input in government is money, and the most common intelligence input in the private sector is biased opinion. Inputs including human skill sets, man-hours, documents purchased, digital bytes processed, images collated, signals or documents translated, having nothing to do with the evaluation of Intelligence. Only the intelligence process (efficiency), product (resolution), or outcome (achieved objective) are relevant to the evaluation of Intelligence.
INTELLIGENCE OUTPUTS. The most common, and the least valuable, Intelligence Output is a product that can be provided indirectly to the intended beneficiary. Most intelligence products are worthless because they are too generic, not timely enough, out of context, and lacking in nuanced relevance to the immediate concern of the decision-maker. Below is an illustration of the old (and still extant) Linear Paradigm versus the emergent Diamond Paradigm. In the age of Intelligence, the acme of skill for the Intelligence Analyst is to understand the immediacy of the question, and connect the person with the question with one or more human experts who can create answers that are immediate, nuanced, and more often than not, not previously published in that exact form and application.
INTELLIGENCE PROCESS: The combination of informed requirements definition; collection management; source discovery and validation; multi-source fusion; desktop and back-office tool applications; analytic exploitation, synthesis, validation, and visualization; and tailored, timely, actionable delivery to a specific decision-making individual or body of individuals. With respect to humans, the most most important part of the intelligence process, this includes travel, training, and reflection, none of which are properly budgeted for today by anyone.
INTELLIGENCE PRODUCT:
