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 Schnittker (CA) Use of Open Sources in the Criminal Intelligence Program of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)

Historic Contributions, Law Enforcement
Lori Schnittker (Text)
Lori Schnittker (Text)

Lori Schnittker, along with Steve Edwards at Scotland Yard, Frans Mulschlegel at EUROPOL, and Ivian Smith at the FBI, did all they could to press forward with the exploitation of open sources in support of criminal intelligence.  Steve Edwards had the most success–Scotland Yard not only cuts it counter-terrorism and arms trade costs in half, they increased by 100-fold the amount of ill-gotten gains they could confiscate after conviction (spies don't do real estate and yatchs).

To the left, Lori's text (if anyone knows Lori, I'd love to replace this with an updated photo).  Below, the slides.  Lori is one of the pioneers.

RCMP OSINT (Slides)
RCMP OSINT (Slides)

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