The headquarters of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) is now complete and being inaugurated in Quito, Ecuador on 5 and 6 December 2014.
I was just in Ecuador, delivering a briefing on the importance of civil-military relations in professionalizing intelligence. That briefing is available free online in both Spanish and English. It was featured on the front page of Ecuadorean intelligence web site, which for me represented all that is right with Ecuador and all that is wrong with the USA — my ideas, nine books, two Senators, and a Congressman later, have NEVER been accepted by the $100 billion a year US Intelligence Community — indeed, they call me “Open Sores.” (Alvin Toffler, in the chapter on “The Future of the Spy“, more kindly refers to me as “the rival store.”)
Below I provide a very short assessment of what I believe is going to emerge from UNASUR, and three ideas that I have proposed to UNASUR directly and also indirectly via the Government of Ecuador.
Profit is Sustainable – If You Build Upon Intelligence with Integrity
There are so many success stories today on the edges of the economy and society – EcoVillages, Transition Towns, and Intentional Communities among them – but the core concept of sustainable profit consistent with social and ecological integrity has yet to go mainstream. At the same time, the progressive activists are nearly incoherent – they do not share information, lack tools for thinking, and have virtually no political power to speak of. On this point, see Mich Sifry’s lovely new book, The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn’t Fixed Politics (Yet).
There is good news on two fronts. First, a breaking of ranks among the elite, moving away from their industrial-era control precepts; and second, an emerging concept for uniting the eight information networks needed to create sustainable future-oriented hybrid governance rooted in ethical evidence-based decision-support.
Intel is doing something new and useful. They have introduced a Conflict-Free Smelter Program (CFSP) to migrate toward assuring Intel consumers that its offerings are free of minerals from conflict environments — tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold are the ones they are focusing on.
What Intel is doing impresses me for two reasons.
First, they are re-introducing strategic ethics into their business model. As a professional intelligence officer and the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction I will assert with confidence that Will and Ariel Durant nail it in their capstone work, Lessons of History, when they write to the priceless value of morality. Morality — ethics — is “root” for human consciousness and the transmission of core cultural, economic, and social lessons from one generation to the next. I am certain that Ethics, which embodies the intangible value of being right with one another and right with Nature, is going to be a 21st Century stand-out.
It was my great privilege to be a co-founder with Winn Schwartau of the first Information Warfare Conference in the early 1990's. Winn, through his books and Congressional testimony did more than anyone else to warn us of both NSA's likekly malfeasance (see his 1980's book Terminal Compromise) and of the vulnerability of the Internet to melt-down if we did not address security at the code level.
It was also my privilege to serve on rotation to the CIA's Office of Information Technology where I led the effort to introduce advanced information technologies including artificial intelligence, from 1986-1988. When Bill Casey died this initiative died with him. We still do not have today the tri-fecta I called for back then: geospatial attributes for all data in all mediums and languages; open standards and embedded security to allow for the inter-operability of all information and communications technologies and related data; and finally — defined much more ably by Diane Webb and Dennis McCormick, eighteen integrated desktop analytic functionalities (look for CATALYST – Computer-Aided Tools for the Analysis of Science & Technology).
Since 1990, when I first itemized six things that US intelligence needed to do in order to better serve the USA, I have been persistently troubled by the lack of leadership and the lack of integrity in this profession that I consider so fundamental to creating a prosperous country at peace with itself as well as the rest of the world.
Today, 24 years later and no less than $1.2 trillion dollars down the drain, most of it spent on technical collection (mass surveillance) that is not actually processed, not a single one of these six fundamentals has been addressed with integrity.
I've been invited to participate in The New Story Summit in Scotland, and they are paying all expenses, which matters since I have no salary, no pensions, and no savings. The event is closed now to further registration, but open to any who wish to take advantage of the live streaming portions. For myself, with help from Tom Atlee, it is an opportunity to reflect on the past quarter century of failed activism in favor of government intelligence reform, and at the same time to lay down some aspirations for the next quarter century during which I intend to be active in new ways — creating the people's world brain. Although there are those — including Buckminster Fuller (don't fix a broken system, create a new system that displaces the old) and Russell Ackoff (stop doing the wrong things righter, do the right thing instead) that might consider my time and energy wasted these past 25 years, I do not — everything has its time and place. Now is the time for me to take what I have learned from tilting at windmills owned by others, and apply that deep experience to building the people's windmill — what Google and Microsoft and IBM should have been doing all this time.
I was thinking this morning about how little has changed since I was a founding member of the Advanced Information Processing and Analysis Steering Group (AIPASG) and also a member of the Information Handling Committee (IHC) for the US secret world (late 1980's early 1990's).
I note in passing my continued dismay as I see — year after year — papers that address the problem without doing their homework. In relation to just two of the eight factors below (proessing), I note that one paper, “Top Ten Needs for Intelligence Analysis Tool Development“(Batelle, 2009) did a nice day's work without ever discovering the original four requirements documents (CIA, USMC, 1989). Worse, I am seeing papers today about to be published, that themselves take the 2009 article at face value without having a clue that there is so much more work that has been done….and been ignored by intelligence community seniors. Everyone goes through the motions. NGA means well but it will never accomplish what it claims to be already be doing. Ask them when their cave will be at the White House. At OMB. At CIA or DIA. At a theater command. In Afghanistan. The truthful answer is “not in my lifetime.”
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NGA's ideas are very expensive non-inter-operable, bandwidth-impossible, non-scalable day dreams. Saying — as was said today at AFIO — that the NRO is responsible for all the big data hard stuff — the pipes, the speeds, the feeds — is an unprofessional cop-out. Even the idea of reversing the 75-25 ratio between legacy government software and COTS is wrong headed — only open source everything is affordable, interoperable, and scalable. What NGA leadership does not know about nuts and bolts is troubling. If the next USDI goes down this path, our analysts will continue to be the redheaded step kids locked in the closet with a sock in their mouth — and our strategists, policy-makers, acquisition managers, and operational commanders will continue to be (as Mike Flynn was and remains) screwed by a system that cares more about keeping the money moving than it does about serving our troops and those that train, organize, and equip our national capabilities. CrisisMappers, humanitarian UAVs, non-US commercially-created geospatial, and unfettered multinational open sources are all part of the solution — and are all banned from discussion within the US secret world.
When things are not going well, until you get the truth out on the table, no matter how ugly, you are not in a position to deal with it. Bob Seelert, Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide (New York)
Below is my rough take on where the US Intelligence Community stands today on analytic excellence. The green outside the IC borders represents all of the possibilities that are actively and inexpensively present.
I worked with four quadrants, as is my custom.
Quadrant A: Source Diversity and Source Integrity
Quadrant B: Processing Big Data and Processing Desktop
Quadrant C: Analyst Education & Training and Analyst Outreach
Quadrant D: Analyst Access to Deciders and Deciders Integrity
