Opened My Eyes to Cost of UNNECESSARY Secrecy, June 11, 2009
Thomas P. Coakley (ed)
This book opened my eyes to the cost of unnecessary secrecy. The following quote from this book is what inspired my advocacy, as a recovering spy, of Open Source Intelligence, and ultimately led to my realization that the secret unilateral intelligence community is “inside out and upside down.” I owe Harvard, the editors, and Rodney McDaniel in particular, an intellectual debt I can never repay.
“Everybody who's a real practiioner, and I'm s ure you're not all naive in this regard, realizes that there are two uses to which security classification is put: the legitmate desire to protect secrets, and the protection of bureaucratic turf. As a practitioner of the real world, it's about 90 bureaucratic turf, 10 legitmate protection of secrets as far as I am concerned.”
Rodley B. McDaniel, then Executive Secretary of the National Security Council, on page 68 of this most helpful book.
Subsequently quoted as above on page 65 of On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World, and again on page 203.
Other books focusing on the non-secret value of intelligence include:
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
Peacekeeping Intelligence: Emerging Concepts for the Future
Information Operations: All Information, All Languages, All the Time
The Smart Nation Act: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace
All of the above books are also free online. Free online also look for the NATO Open Source Intelligence Handbook, the NATO Open Source Intelligence Reader, and the NATO Intelligence Exploitation of the Internet.
