Your Aide Memoire came to my attention today. Apart from wishing you every success, I thought to contribute a few ideas.
01 The new meme that has replaced Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) — I taught this to 90 countries including all NATO/PfP and six UN missions in Lebanon — is M4IS2 (Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making).
02 Government is the least important of the eight communities (I used to call them tribes) of information and intelligence (decision-support). The eight communities in alphabetic order are academia, civil society including labor unions and religions, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government/non
03 Governments have failed to be relevant or progressive for two reasons: first, they confuse intelligence (decision support or the outcomes) with secrecy (the method or inputs); and second, most government do not actually make evidence-based decisions, but rather decisions of convenience driven mostly by a mix of ideology and corruption–decisions that favor the special interests of the few against the public interest of the many.
04 Information technology is still in the Stone Age because governments have refused to be serious about the search for common solutions, about the urgency of information sharing and harvesting the massive distributed intelligence of the whole earth, and because corporations such as Microsoft, Oracle, and Google, apart from being collaborators with the US secret intelligence agencies, have been allowed to mutate and migrate their Application Program Interfaces (API) instead of making those an international standard subject to full transparency and consistency.
05 There is in fact a standard toolkit that is needed to empower individual analysts, organizational units, and inter-organizational information-sharing and collaborative sense-making. The eighteen functionalities have been known since 1985, and repeatedly ignored, at least within the US Government, because corruption drives billions of dollars toward secret technical collection systems that are devoid of accountability, do not processing, and treat human intelligence as incidental if not annoying.
06 Open Source Everything (OSE) is the emerging meme, mind-set, and method. I just published the book on this topic, a very inexpensive pocketbook that could easily be used as a United Nations text in multiple languages to change, virtually overnight, the conversation. Open Analytics need Open Access, OpenBTS, Open Cloud, Open Data, Open Hardware, Open Software, Open Spectrum, and Open Standards, among others. With that as a foundation it becomes possible to be truly serious — deeply and broadly — about Open Education, Open Intelligence, and Open Research (or Open Science).
07 I am very concerned by the out of control manner in which NATO has been intervening, often on the basis of lies and fabricated evidence. [To his credit, very recently the US Admiral in charge of NATO has spoken of “open source security,” more or less the point I made in 2000 when I lectured at NATO HQS to all generals and colonels in charge of military intelligence across all NATO/PfP countries]. I am equally concerned by the outrageous use by the CIA and US DoD of drones and special operations teams everywhere without authorization, generally without reliable target intelligence, and always with terrible outcomes for the innocents. In addition, False Flag operations have become commonplace, both internationally and domestically in the US (I consider both the recent shootings in the US to have been organized provocations). If the UN is to evolve to being something other than an archipelago of specialized agencies free to ignore the Secretary General, a Security Council that relies on lies and vetos to block all progress, and a General Assembly that is at best well-intentioned but uninformed, then the UN is going to have to focus on the one thing that is free, scalable, and beyond suspicion: information-sharing and multi-everything sense-making. The UN desperately needs an autonomous independently funded World Intelligence Centre such as Quincy Wright proposed in 1955, but actually a modernized global grid that brings together all information in all languages all the time in the form of a World Brain and a Global Game (the UN is looking at Earth Dashboards at a very high level but what we really need to get to is True Cost data for all products and services and behaviors such that the UN can do three important 21st Century interventions:
— use True Cost information — with no lies, no information pathologies — to move markets
— use ethical open source intelligence — public intelligence in the public interest — to create Global Range of Gifts Tables that connect the one billion rich directly to the five billion poor, cutting out the corrupt intermediaries and making gifts one to one, many to many, all transparent.
– use overt counterintelligence to “out” the lies of specific member states that are not at all in keeping with the UN Charter or the interests of the collective, and use overt counterintelligence to ensure that publics are aware of the lies being told to justify specific policies or campaigns — the US invasion of Iraq was based on 935 now-documented lies, we have similar lies in play today on many fronts.
08 Each region, beginning with the three southern regions (Africa, South America, and South Asia) needs its own Multinational Decision-Support Centre (MDSC) and individual national call centers and poverty cellular networks that education the poor free, one cell call at a time. Indonesia, Venezuela, and South Africa, in my view, have every reason to take the lead in this direction, making the MDSC the support centre for the regional alliance of nations — in the case of the Western Hemisphere, CELAC, not OAS, should be the focus of effort.
I sincerely hope this message is useful to you, and of course I am in your service at any time. My personal life's ambition is to create the World Intelligence Centre, and to provide ethical analysts to all elements of the UN but with one big difference: like the pilots that are today provided by the Directorate of Field Support, the analysts would NOT be subject to the corruption that is commonplace across DSS, DPA, and the SAs, where loyalty to the boss is king and evidence is a tool to advance the king's interest, not the interest of those ostensibly being served. An honest intelligence cadre able to draw on all eight tribes, and able to introduce a global standard of open source analytic tools, would be a formidable and very positive influence on both internal UN culture and external UN accomplishments.
For your convenience, and to make these thoughts broadly available, I have posted the above, and the below links, at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, with the short URL of http://tinyurl.com/Steele4UN.
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Robert David STEELE Vivas
CEO Earth Intelligence Network (501c3)
See Also
1957-2011 Historic Contributions Directory (List)
1989 All-Source Fusion Analytic Workstation–The Four Requirements Documents
2002: New Rules for the New Craft of Intelligence (Full Text Online for Google Translate)
2003: Peacekeeping Intelligence Leadership Digest 1.0 (Full Text Online for Google Translate)
2007 United Nations “Class Before One” Infomation-Sharing and Analytics Orientation
2008 DIA NDIC Multinational Intelligence Fellows
2008 Rebalancing the Instruments of National Power (Full Text Online for Google Translate)
2008: World Brain as EarthGame (Full Text Online for Google Translate)
2008: Creating a Smart Nation (Full Text Online for Google Translate)
2009 Briefing: Open Everything at UNICEF in NYC
2009 DoD OSINT Leadership and Staff Briefings
2009 The Ultimate Hack: Re-Inventing Intelligence to Re-Engineer Earth (Denmark 27-28 October 2009)
2010 M4IS2 Briefing for South America — 2010 M4IS2 Presentacion por Sur America (ANEPE Chile)
2010 Peace from Above: Envisioning the Future of UN Air Power
2010 Reference: Building a University-Based Global Education-Intelligence-Research Web
2011 Thinking About Revolution in the USA and Elsewhere (Full Text Online for Google Translate)
2012 PREPRINT Foreword to Book on Public Intelligence for Public Health
2012 Peace from Above: The Future of Intelligence & Air Power
2012 PREPRINT FOR COMMENT: The Craft of Intelligence
