The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
The educational system is in complete disarray and producing masses of mediocrities. Occasionally, however, a student overcomes the inherent liabilities of a factory/rote learning system and excels. This paper from a Georgetown student of D.r Loren B. Thompson is worthy and was included in the Proceedings of OSS '96.
Paul Roger entered mid-career working the Hong Kong Organized Crime target with a special focus on the triads. He mastered the art of working with indigenous street-level sources while leveraging back office colonial processing power. In Australia he invented “time travel” and this was the most provocative element of his OSS '96 presentation, below. We have failed to study the history of organized crime such that we can stop it in its tracks as it migrates from Italy to Scotland, or Latin America to West Africa.
Whenever we get depressed about the inability of large organizations to “hear” we just remind ourselves that no one listens to Brent Scowcroft or Paul Strassmann either despite their stature as intellectual giants.
Strassmann is an enterprise unto himself after decades of being a CIO for Xerox, DoD, and then a reprise at NASA for Sean O'Keefe. His books are among the most vital for executives seeking to actually understand the business value of computing. Below is his presentation to OSS '96.
Something of a renaissance man, Mort Zuckerman is active across real estate, the media (US News & World Report), the talk shows, and the Smithsonian cultural circuit. Below is his hard-hitting commentary as presented at OSS '96. Read this carefully. See especially the use of the word “manic.” The US Government is not trained, equipped, or organized to be intelligent. The consumers of intelligence do not represent the public as much as they do the recipients of the public's largesse, and do not know how to do intelligence in the public interest. The secret intelligence community refuses to create a strategic analytic model, and continues to be driven by budget, technical, and bureaucratic consideration–inputs–rather than desired outcomes.
In 1986, Project GEORGE (Smiley) in the CIA's Office of Information Technology discovered that computers had been designed without ever talking to librarians. There were created as unstructured bit buckets. It turns out that in the analog period, structure and the Dewey decimal system and humanly-constructed taxonomies were vitally important if one was to archive and retrieve knowledge within the limits of the individual human. During the middle period, which is STILL IN PROGRESS, computers have failed to get a grip on unstructured information. As Stephen E. Arnold and others have documented, electronic search yields less than 10% of what is online (apart from deep web not covered by any of the 75 search engines, there are C drives and peripheral drives that have not been indexed). Although David Weinberg is correct in his book Everything is Miscellaneous, and the digital world opens the propect for infinitely sharing information while retaining the original, and for creating infinite wealth by eliminating information asymmetries and data pathologies that favor the few at the expense of the many, there is no single government, corporation, organization, or collective other than Earth Intelligence Network and its affiliated society, Phi Beta Iota, that is actually committed to realizing the full potential of humans as H. G. Wells, Pierre Tielhard de Chardin, Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, and others have envisioned: as the World Brain within Earth Game, all humans, all minds, all the time. See the 2009 article on Human Intelligence by clicking on the icon below.
Mats Bjore, along with Arno Reuser, Steve Edwards, Joe Markowitz, is one of a tiny handful of “originals” who have striven to create the discipline of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) that has now morphed into M4IS2 (Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making). Collective Intelligence, Cognitive Science, and Civil Affairs as well as Civil Society are all congregating outside of government “control.”
This is the 1995 overview of the Community Open Source Program Office (COSPO) and ends with very specific strategic goals, all as briefed to OSS '95. At the Frog is a link to a variation of this briefing.
