The White House does not understand this and the mandarins fear it. The minute OSINT becomes fully operational, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) should begin demanding 20% cuts in the secret disciplines and in contractor “butts in seats” that are in violation of the inherently governmental nature of secret intelligence. This is not to say those individuals should be laid off, only put on the government payroll if needed, at one third the price we pay now to bloated contractor bureaucracies.
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).
With help from a talented person who must remain anonymous at this time, this was crafted years ago at a time when we thought Intelink-U would be allowed to mature and handle 90 or more countries. It is still stuck at 11 and has zero ability to ingest the multiple firehoses that are easily assembled today.
This remains the intellectual property of Robert Steele and is the core concept for ultimately creating a World Brain and EarthGame that engage all human minds and connect all humans to all information in all languages all the time.
Both the Open Source Information System – External (OSIS-X) and Intelink – X will be United Nations “virtual clouds” that achieve a degree of assured security that is good enough through to the secret level, and thus able to engage all in what the Swedes call Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2).
The US secret intelligence community will never be able to fulfill the National Intelligence Strategy ambitions to provide decision-support to all who need it, so long as they are bonded to the old model of high-side default. A United Nations model of low-side default is the only possible means of achieving pervasive multinational information-sharing and sense-making, all of which can be fed to the high-side in near-real-time, none of which may be mis-directed or constrained by the high-side. OSINT is a free and independent discipline whose center of gravity lies outside the wire and outside the control of any government.
