This yields three adequate results, but the human in the loop can do better.
Step One: Acknowledge and embrace the eight tribes of intelligence as stakeholders. Create, as Sweden did, a Cooperation Committee (the Swedes get annoyedwhen you call it a Coordination Committee).
Step Two: Use the military, and particularly the National Guard or law enforcement officers who are also in the military reserve, as the cadre for the national watch centre. This allows integrated access to domestic law enforcement and national foreign intelligence in the inner sanctum.
Step Three: Embrace foreign contributions–communities (national, state, local) with high Vietnamese, Russian, Korean, Chinese, or other ethnic minorities should have a mink-lined suite of offices for intelligence officers from those countries invited to serve on rotation who should be full participants in monitoring and interdicting white-collar crime, organized crime, crime alliances of convenience, and street crime.
Step Four: Adopt the Open Source Triad (pun intended)–Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS), Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), and Open Spectrum. The cell phone, Twitter, and RapidSMS should be planned elements of the network from day one. 114 and 119 numbers should be operational from day one, and multilingual.
Step Five: Organize centers along the same lines, ultimately integrating local community intelligence networks of the eight tribes with similar networks at provincial, national, regional, and global levels. The federal government can safely be ignored. A hybrid center that can leverage legally available federal information will be vastly more effective than any center bound by the unethical and unconstitutional institutionalized ineptitude that prevails in the federal bureaucracy today. Plan for the day when the CIA's Open Source Center (OSC) eliminates contractors from the federal OSINT budget, and then fails to deliver.
Step Six: Adopt the Strategic Analytic Model, recognize that education, not regulation, is the primordal medium for maintaining legitimacy and stability, and develop all collection plans with full consciousness of the ten high-level threats, the urgency of understanding true costs of every product and service, and the vital need to harmonize plans, programs, policies, budgets, and behavior across all twelve core domains.
Step Seven: Follow the 80-20 rule–80% of what is produced should be OSINT that can be shared; the other 20% should be as lightly controlled as possible, using time-based risk management rather than stone-age security before sensibility rules.
There's more, but this is a start. If anyone out there wants to get serious and responsible about planning, programming, and budgeting for a sustainable future–a prosperous world at peace–we know how to do that.
