The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Mike Hayden introduced the important concept of being able to connect the dots across disciplines from ingestion point onwards, not only at the finished production level. Steve Edwards flipped chart to show dots coming it at the top, and Robert Steele added the last three bars, Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), Information Operations (IO), and all Other.
This was the original depiction. Since then the media have been separated from the non-governmental organizations (NGO). They were combined initially as a “ground truth” tribe, but are clearly better understood separately. Similarly, as Paul Harper from the UN has pointed out, within each tribe, there are huge schisms and diversities of culture and point of view. Eight tribes are simply a starting point.
This is a basic regional centre that would initially work exclusively with open sources of information, but could, as trust and mutual intersts coincide, extend to do focused clandestine and covert actions, for example, against transnational criminal gangs, corrupt government officials and predatory corporate officials that loot commonwealths by bribing single officials at key points.
This tribe includes all the non-profit organizations but is distinguished from civil society by its structure and orientation. This tribe now vastly outnumbers all the other tribes combined on the battlefield and across the arena of hybird operations. It's intelligence or decision-support capabilities are severely deficient at the same time that it represents an extraordinary opportunity to harness vast time-energy resources including contributed funds and contributed goods as well as contributed labor.
NOTE: Commentator is clearly experienced. We have grouped all of these because the discipline of public intelligence is just emergent now. In the future each of the eight tribes should self-determine useful distinctions such as those below elevated from the Comment to the main page:
+ International Organizations (IO) have specific roles in international law.
+ Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) are chartered by different countries, some have observer status and some do not, depending on the specific domain.
+ Within UN Mission Areas (e.g. Peacekeeping) there are different cultures and capabilities from humanitarian workers and human rights workers.
The military is the most important of the eight intelligence tribes for the simple reason that it is the only tribe with a modicum of cohesion in every country, and hence is can serve as both a hub for the other seven tribes within its parent country, and as a reachback hub for a global network of multinational information-sharing and sense-making hubs that are the foundation for the World Brain and EarthGame, with the intermediate objectives of
1. Getting a grip on all information in all languages all the time; and
2. Providing unclassified decision support to the United Nations and all organizations concerned with stabiliztion & reconstruction, humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief operations.
The media tribes includes all forms of structured and unstructured reporting, including state-sponsored broadcast organizations such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and citizen-journalism including Blogs.
The media tribe is of special interest because 90% of what a typical journalist knows or records does not get formally published due to varied constraints including word counts, legal caution, and source protection. There are some substantial opportunities within this community once a combination of aggregate anonymous data mining and trusted sharing protocols can be made publicly available.
Law Enforcement, like secret Government intelligence, is an inherent responsibility of government and we do not support the use of contractors in fulfilling this function. Private Investigators and all forms of out-sourced contracting for intelligence collection, processing, and analysis are placed within the Commerce tribe.
