1995 Bender (US) The Information Highway: Will Librarians Be Left by the Side of the Road?

Academia, Commerce, Government, Historic Contributions, Law Enforcement
Special Libraries Association
Special Libraries Association
David R. Bender
David R. Bender

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.

HUMINT 21
HUMINT 21

1995 Markowitz (US) Community Open Source Program Office (COSPO)

Briefings (Core), Government, Historic Contributions
Joe Markowitz
Joe Markowitz

2006 PLATINUM LIFETIME AWARD   Dr. Joseph Markowitz
Dr. Joseph Markowitz is without question the most qualified Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) pioneer in the ranks of those presently in or retired from U.S. government service.  As the only real chief of the Community Open Source Program Office (COSPO) he tried valiently to nurture a program being systematically undermined by both the leadership and the traditional broadcast monitoring service.  When he moved on to advise the Defense Science Board, he served America well by helping them fully integrate the need for both defense open source information collection and exploitation, and defense information sharing with non-governmental organizations.  His persistent yet diplomatic efforts merit our greatest regard.  1995 Markowitz COSPO

1995 Peters (US) INADEQUATE ANSWERS: Bureaucracy, Wealth, and the Mediocrity of U.S. Intelligence Analysis

Government, Historic Contributions
Ralph Peters
Ralph Peters

Ralph Peters is the only author other than Will Durant to have his own shelf in the OSS/EIN/PBI library.  He can anger, infuriate, provoke and sometimes even drive insane those who are impatient with controversy.  We hold him in the highest regard as one who consistently speaks truth to power.  See the reviews of his many books.

Below is his speech to the Open Source Intelligence Lunch Club on 12 September 1995, as included in the Proceedings of that year's conference.

Inadequate Answers
Inadequate Answers

1995 Ivian Smith (US) on US Intelligence Community Deficiencies

Government, Historic Contributions, Law Enforcement
Ivian Smith
Ivian Smith

Ivian Smith, just prior to going to Little Rock during a Clinton Administration, was the top FBI executive for dealing with CIA on open source intelligence and related matters.  His critique of both CIA and FBI is devastating–and this was in 1995, long before the litany of errors that allowed 9-11 to happen came to light.  His book is less about spies and more about local, state, and federal political corruption as well as FBI incompetency, and highly recommended.  The government is a beneficiary of public intelligence, NOT a source of public intelligence.  We're on our own.

FBI, CIA, OSINT
FBI, CIA, OSINT

1993 (FR) Baumard on Learned Nations

Government, Historic Contributions
Philippe Beaumard
Philippe Beaumard

At the age of 27 Dr. Professor Beaumard was the youngest leader for French strategic planning in modern history.  Today he is a visiting professor at Stanford University.  Below is his historic contribution in 1993, and also, in the same year, his view on the need for economic intellience as a separate area for national inquiry and understanding.

1993 Beaumard Learned Nations (A)
Learned Nations

Economic Intelligence
Economic Intelligence

1993 Herring (US) The Role of Intelligence in Formulating Strategy

Commercial Intelligence, Government, Historic Contributions, Strategy, Strategy
Jan Herring
Jan Herring

Jan Herring, as National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Science & Technology (S&T) at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), tried in the 1970's to adddress the “severe deficiencies” in access to open sources of information.  Historically,  it has been the S&T analysts that understood the availability and value of open source information in all languages.  He failed within government, but did not give up.  He went into the private sector and created the Academy of Competitive Intelligence (click on his photograph to learn more) with Ben Gilad and Leonard Fuld, two of the half dozen “top guns” in the English-seaking competitive intelligence community world-wide.  If Stevan Dedijer is the father of business intelligence (qua decision-support), then Jan Herring is surely the father of business intelligence in the USA, and a global pioneer in training people to use unclassified analytic sources and methods of inestimable value to any group.

Unlike most, Jan Herring also understand the vital relevance of intelligence to the devleopment of strategy.   Below is one of his seminal papers on this topic.  See also his short paper on Business Intelligence.

Intelligence & Strategy
Intelligence & Strategy
Business Intelligence--Or Lack Thereof
Business Intelligence--Or Lack Thereof