Archives – Page 114 – Public Intelligence Blog

Foreword

It is a pleasure for me – and gives me professional satisfaction – to present this book to the Iberian public. I have known the author for several years, and admired his efforts to translate the lessons from his past life into useful capabilities in the commercial and public intelligence domains.

While some will consider this book to be about spies and secrets and undertakings of great risk, for me it is really a book that can help the public understand that intelligence is not only about spying or secrets. Intelligence is mostly about knowing. Intelligence is about creating ethical evidence-based decision-support for everyone, not just prime ministers and general officers.

Intelligence is about sources and methods – the inputs – and it is about helping leaders of organizations make decisions – the outcomes. Intelligence is about arriving at the best possible understanding of the truth, from all points of view. In commercial intelligence we call this the 360 degree view.

In the pages that follow, I will illustrate and explain four additional points that might help engage public attention in this book’s important offering:

First, spies comprise four of the fifteen “slices” of Human Intelligence (HUMINT). They are the first and most important part of a larger mosaic. I particularly demand good counterintelligence – without it, nothing else can be trusted.

Second, the government intelligence “tribe” is one of eight tribes of intelligence. The other seven tribes need to learn how to “do” intelligence.

Third, our complex world can no longer tolerate governments or corporations that treat the Earth as a personal bank account. The time has come to demand a professional 360 degree perspective focused strictly on the public interest.

Fourth, we can all come together to share most of what we collect, process, and analyze. Sharing creates intelligence.

Continue reading “Robert Steele: Foreword to Spanish-Language Diary of a Spy with PRB Approval”

2013/10/222015/11/20

INTERVIEW: Knowledge is Power (Elevate, Austria)

Articles & Chapters

Knowledge Is Power – Interview: Robert David Steele

Tuesday, 22 October 2013

Ex CIA-Agent Robert David Steele answered Elevate Festival's questions about news services, secrets and the hacker-scene. #e13knowledge

Continue reading “INTERVIEW: Knowledge is Power (Elevate, Austria)”

2013/10/212013/10/21

Stephen Aftergood: What Is Overclassification?

10 Security, 11 Society, Definitions, Government, Ineptitude, IO Impotency, Military, Officers Call

WHAT IS OVERCLASSIFICATION?

When people criticize overclassification of national security information, what exactly are they talking about? Is it too much secrecy? The wrong sort of secrecy? Classifying something at too high a level? Oddly, there is no widely-accepted definition of the term.

But since the solution to overclassification, if any, will naturally be shaped by the way the problem is understood, it is important to specify the problem as clearly as possible.

In 2010 Congress passed (and President Obama signed) the Reducing Over-Classification Act, which mandated several steps to improve classification practices in the executive branch. But in a minor act of legislative malpractice, Congress failed to define the meaning of the term “over-classification” (as it was spelled in the statute). So it is not entirely clear what the Act was supposed to “reduce.”

Among its provisions, the Act required the Inspectors General of all classifying agencies to perform an evaluation of each agency's compliance with classification rules.

To assist them in their evaluations, the Inspectors General turned to the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) for a working definition of overclassification that they could use to perform their task. ISOO's answer was cited by the Inspector General of the Department of Justice in its new report. (Audit of DOJ's Implementation of and Compliance with Certain Classification Requirements, Inspector General Audit Report 13-40, September 2013.)

“Over-classification,” according to ISOO, means “the designation of information as classified when the information does not meet one or more of the standards for classification under section 1.1 of

Executive Order (EO) 13526

.” If something is classified in violation of the standards of the executive order– then it is “over-classified.”

So, for example, information that is not owned by the government, such as a newspaper article, cannot be properly classified under the terms of the executive order. And neither can information that has no bearing on national security, such as an Embassy dinner menu. And yet information in both categories has been known to be classified, which is indeed a species of overclassification.

Unfortunately, however, this ISOO definition presents the problem so narrowly that it misses whole dimensions of overclassification.

Continue reading “Stephen Aftergood: What Is Overclassification?”

2013/10/202013/10/20

2013 ON REVOLUTION — HelpngTransform the US Army Consistent with CSA Guidance

Articles & Chapters

* The Chinese character for revolution, “fire in the lake,” was made well-known to literate Americans by Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Little, Brown and Company, 2009), originally published in the early 1970's. The book remains startlingly relevant to a learning-disabled US military repeating the same mistakes, at the behest of politicians repeating the same mistakes, in over 25 substantive “interventions” now active around the world.

This is a work in progress that will be submitted to SSI as a no-cost proposed monograph, with complete DoD pre-publication review at the theater and national levels. It has not yet been proferred nor accepted. The contents will be those of the individual contributing authors, and not representative of DoD as an institution.

Table of Contents

Continue reading “2013 ON REVOLUTION — HelpngTransform the US Army Consistent with CSA Guidance”

2013/07/192016/03/26

Reflections on Tired Databases versus Wired Analytics + Jack Davis & Analytic Tradecraft RECAP

Advanced Cyber/IO, All Reflections & Story Boards

There are multiple analytic flaws with most source data, and particularly with any source data labeled in relation to terrorism. If Israelis have have touched the data in any way, shape, or form (especially including the software), it must be considered contaminated and severely suspect. While I have nothing critical to say about the application of Sentinel to flawed data, I do feel obliged to point out the sucking chest wounds that afflict most source data.

01 Terrorism is not a threat, it is a tactic. Defining every criminal or political incident in a pre-determined “hot-spot” as being “terrorism-related” is not analysis, it is sophmoric.

02 Databases are an important counterintelligence target. Who created the analytic model and source data parameters, who wrote every bit of code touching the data, who the source feeders and intermediaries are — all of this matters. Apart from data bases corrupted by elements of the US Government to their own ends, we have data bases and information technology systems so totally penetrated by enemy powers and special interests as to call into question the integrity and utility of at least 50% of all standing databases.

03 Incidents are what should be plotted, in context not only of time and space, but of all of the other pre-conditions of revolution that the US Government in particular refuses to contemplate because it would make it obvious that it has severe shortcomings in its intelligence function. Still-born babies and babies born deformed as so many have been in Fallujah, Iraq, are just as important to stability analytics as are incidents of direct violence against “authority” figures or forces.

Continue reading “Reflections on Tired Databases versus Wired Analytics + Jack Davis & Analytic Tradecraft RECAP”

2013/07/192014/02/26