MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT: Eradicating Fake News and False Intelligence with an Open Source Agency That Also Supports Defense, Diplomacy, Development, & Commerce (D3C) Innovation to Rebuild America and Stabilize World

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MEMORANDUM FOR  PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
SECRETARY OF STATE
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET
ADMINISTRATOR, US AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

SUBJECT: Eradicating Fake News and False Intelligence with an Open Source Agency That Also Supports Defense, Diplomacy, Development, & Commerce (D3C) Innovation to Stabilize World

For 30 years a handful of innovators have been silenced by a corrupt federal government intent on spending taxpayer funds without regard to citizen needs or accountability for waste on the order of 50% across every domain from agriculture to energy to health to security and water.

An Open Source (Technologies) Agency is proposed. This agency, twice discussed during the past fifteen years within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) (in an earlier information-focused incarnation), is now proposed as a comprehensive innovation engine that addresses nine distinct open source technology groups itemized below:[1]

Open Data
Open Decision-Support[2]
Open Governance
Open Health
Open Infrastructures
Open Manufacturing
Open Provisioning
Open Software
Open Space

The Problem: Domestically we are plagued by fake news and false intelligence as well as a failure on the part of the academy, intelligence community, and media to cover all threats, all policies, all costs, in a fair and balanced manner.

At a global scale, the common defense, diplomacy, and development and commerce (D3C) challenge is the “digital deserts” that are also coincident with energy, water, and food scarcity while being a primary point of origin for illegal immigrants inclusive of criminals and terrorists.

At the intermediate scale, our defense, diplomacy, and development efforts cannot achieve their full potential, both within our Whole of Government context and multinationally, for lack of affordable, inter-operable, scalable and secure information-sharing and sense-making tools that allow holistic analytics, true cost economics, and open source everything engineering (OSEE) to be applied to the ten high level threats to humanity.[3]

At a strategic scale, despite some excellent thinking in relation to Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and related US initiatives, the reality is that donor promises are insufficient and often fail to materialize, and the current development paradigm – inherently bureaucratic with little accountability or coherence, cannot do the job – less than 20% of the funds and often as little as 1% — actually arrive at the village level. The current industrial-scientific paradigm is not affordable, not inter-operable, and will not scale to address the needs of the five billion poorest in time to avoid a climate change collapse that makes today’s illegal immigration look like the thin stream that it is – we envision tens of millions of displaced persons moving north – many of them violent –in our future, absent a radical change in how we do the business of D3.

The Idea: An Open Source (Technologies) Agency funded by defense, under diplomatic auspices, and focused on a mix of Whole of Government and multinational information-sharing and sense-making with a digital Marshall Plan emphasizing Open Source Provisioning (energy, water, shelter, food) as well as Open Infrastructures (free cellular and Internet), will quickly and radically enable leap-frog innovation that stabilizes and reconstructs at a local to global scale.

Texas, where severe water shortages are near-catastrophic, is proposed as the American First node for developing all of these ideas, first for implementation at home, across the parched southwest, and then for export overseas.

Two implementation elements are proposed, perhaps both based within the University of Texas and ideally at the San Antonio campus, with mirrors rapidly established across all state university systems with preference given to those sites serving our long-neglected heartland rural areas.

D3C Information Bureau. The first element, a national Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) center and network, would support a Trump Channel directly to the public, by-passing the fake news media and false intelligence that seeks to start a war with Russia. This bureau will enable free public education one cell call at a time, and begin the process of engaging the American public first, and then the world public in sustainability thinking, ultimately eradicating the average of 50% waste to be found across all policy areas from Agriculture to Energy to Water.[4] The public intelligence produced and delivered to the public at their hand-held device, will allow the President to substitute public education for government regulation across all industry domains.

D3C Innovation Bureau. This multinational open source everything engineering center (with a global network of applied scientists and engineers including many volunteers) would have a division for each of the nine open technologies categories, with initial emphasis to be placed on Open Provisioning – free energy, unlimited desalinated water using free energy, the rapid completion and global deployment of the Global Village Construction Set including pressed-brick shelters (the ultimate affordable housing), decentralized composting, and aquaponics – sustainable agriculture without pesticides. The existing “village in box” idea, for example, would enable the resettlement of one million Somalis now in UN resettlement camps across the region to be moved to northeastern Somalia (uncontested territory with unlimited dirt, sunlight, and seawater) at a cost of $500 per person, inclusive of transport, free cellular, and aquaponics.[5]

The specific early focus of the entire program will be the American southwest where the aquifers are beyond catastrophic depletion, and all areas, both rural and urban, where unemployment is on the order of 23%, with 40% being common to select demographics. Internationally, after proving the value for America First, an export could begin to places such as Somalia, Syria, and Yemen to stop the mass migration to Europe. Our intent is to demonstrate how quickly and inexpensively Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE) can both advance America First, and also advance the D3C capabilities in unconventional threat environments. This will provide a needed alternative to elective wars and allow for a reconstruction of our military.

Resource Requirements: In the earlier information-focused incarnation, twice discussed in the past fifteen years within OMB (always contingent on the White House or a Cabinet Secretary endorsing the idea) the proposed funding was IOC $125M toward FOC $2B. This substantially enhanced variation of the idea, focused on sixty technology areas in nine groupings, is recommended for IOC $125M toward $3B, and would serve as the centerpiece for mobilizing and guiding over one trillion dollars in other people’s money toward achieving the SDGs.

Critical Next Steps: A single conversation among the principals to whom this memorandum is addressed should suffice to set this idea in motion. The Vice President would be ideal as chairman of the oversight board, with the new agency to be established as a sister agency to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), using non-reimbursable funding from DoD. A Smart Nation – Safe World Act is available as concise implementing legislation. The leadership team should be given full independence – this will fail if it is subordinate to any existing bureaucracy.[6]

Changing Public Diplomacy & Development with Science & Technology: In combination, the D3C Information Bureau and the D3C Innovation Bureau will change both domestic development and infrastructure, and public diplomacy and development by an order of magnitude. The D3C Information Bureau will enable free public education world-wide one cell call or hand-held screen at a time in 183 languages while providing tools for progressive activists to share information and practice extreme democracy – this will eliminate the “digital deserts” of concern to the White House. The D3C Innovation Bureau will make all science and technology “open” thus accelerating the elevation of the five billion poor with resilient villages, smart cities, and prosperous nations at peace, all able to eliminate the 50% waste – and the legacy legal barriers to innovation – characteristic of Western development.[7] We start in Texas.

Endnotes

[1] The top three authorities on Open Source Everything are Robert Steele, author of The Open Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, & Trust (North Atlantic Books, 2012); Dr. Marcin Jakubowski, founder of Open Source Ecology and the Global Village Construction Set, and Michel Bauwens, founder of the Peer to Peer Foundation. Their consensus on the nine open source categories within which sixty open source technologies are organized can be found at http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Open_Source_Everything.

[2] Education, Decision-Support, and Research comprise Applied Collective Intelligence. The term decision-support is used to distinguish this category of information-sharing and sense-making across all boundaries, from Open Data, which is focused on raw multidisciplinary, multidomain, and multilingual data digitization at source. While decision-support is a synonym for “intelligence” in its proper construct of outputs rather than inputs, as used here the term is in no way associated with secret intelligence sources and methods. While the new agency would radically increase the amount of open source data and open source information that could be immediately provided to the high side, the information bureau focus is on creating open source technologies that enable local to global sharing of information among eight major information-producing and consuming “tribes:” academic, civil society including labor and religions, commerce especially small business, government especially local, law enforcement, media including alternative media and bloggers, military, and non-government/non-profit.

[3] LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft, USAF (Ret) was the US member of the UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Changes that reported out with A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility (United Nations, December 2004) with the following ten threats in the following priority order:  01 Poverty 02 Infectious Disease 03 Environmental Degradation 04 Inter-State Conflict 05 Civil War 06 Genocide 07 Other Atrocities 08 Proliferation 09 Terrorism 10 Transnational Crime. Our current information sharing and policy making capabilities are severely skewed toward threats 04 and 05, while neglecting all the others, particularly in relation to true costs over time and returns on investment. No one anywhere is focusing on integrated open source everything engineering.

[4] Agriculture: Nadia Arumugam, “UN Says Europe Wastes 50% of Fruit and Vegetables – and America Isn’t Must Better,” Forbes (4 October 2012), Dana Gunders, “Wasted: How America is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill,” National Resources Defense Council (August 2012); Energy: Barry Fischer, “US Wastes 61-86% Of Its Energy,” CleanTechnica (26 August 2013); Health: Michael Galper et al, “The price of excess: Identifying waste in healthcare spending,” PriceWaterhouseCoopers (April 2008); Military: Scot Paltrow, “Behind the Pentagon’s doctored ledgers, a running tally of epic waste,” Reuters (18 November 2013), Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, “The US spends more on defense than the next eight countries combined,” Peter G. Peterson Foundation (13 April 2014), Perry Chiaramonte,  “War on waste: Pentagon auditor spotlights US billions blown in Afghanistan,” Fox News (28 July 2014); Water: Robert David Steele, “Water: Soul of the Earth, Mirror of Our Collective Souls,” Huffington Post (7 January 2011).

[5] An informal cost study is available. The point is that for the first time, someone actually thought through with modest precision what it would take to convert dirt, sunlight, and seawater into a habitat using an integrated approach to energy, water, shelter, food, and connectivity.

[6] The author’s biographies, testimonials, profiles, and production can be viewed at http://robertdavidsteele.com. A new web site funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation, Open Source Everything for the 21st Century – Creating a Prosperous World at Peace, was created on 1 December 2015 at http://ose-21.org.

[7] After publication of Robert Steele’s submission to the UN SDG Global 2016 Report, visible at http://tinyurl.com/SDG-OSEE, a major India-based NGO met with Robert Steele and after discussion a new briefing was produced that has been sent to India for consideration, visible at http://tinyurl.com/EIN-BRICS-OSEE. Separately one European foreign minister and one European defence minister are being asked to inquire of their counterparts as to the status of this memorandum. In the ideal, the USA would create an OSEE “hub” that would then interact with regional multinational-development OSEE hubs, achieving the SDG within a decade.

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