The view on the left is a view from one lacking the deep broad experience to challenge the secret mandarins. It is a subservient position that is both detrimental to the whole of the secret world, and incompatible with external multinational operations.
OSINT is a “hybrid” discipline that is simultaneously:
1. A full-fledged discipline in its own right demanding of its own Program, requirements and collection management system information technology architecture, multilateral global treaties and agreements vastly exceeding the bilateral ones characteristic of the secret world; and terms of reference that default to inclusion rather than exclusion.
2. A supporting discipine for each of the traditional secret disciplines, BUT one that must be fenced because the traditional discplines have clearly demonstrated they do not understand and cannot manage OSINT to good effect in spotting, assessing, and validating, in tip-off, in contextual reinforcement, etcetera.
3. A supporting discipline for each of the consumers of traditonal intelligence, who receive very little return on the taxpayer investment; AND a supporting discipline for all of the consumers, including Congress and the Departments of government outside the traditional national security arena (e.g. Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Veteran's), all of whom know virtually nothing about OSINT, have virtually no real access to world-class OSINT, and are not likely in the near term to allocate or protect OSINT resources. Lest this be doubted, the last time Robert Steele spoke at the Department of State, they bragged that they had four OSINT analysts. Four–for the entire Department.
OSINT has become synonymous with subsevience to the secret government world, one reason why we have moved on to embrace Public and Collective Intelligence. From this day forward, the latter are fully independent of the secret world–we will trade the raw open source feed for money and unclassified sense-making; the secret world can have its open source feed and managers of the secret world can use the open source baseline to challenge the secret mandarins for performance and value improvements, but the secret world will never again be allowed to corrupt, constrain, or contain the emerging discipline of Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2).
