This was a very original piece of work and a major step forward in the thinking on this topic. It would lead to a publication for the U.S. Institute of Peace in 1997. It is appropriate at this juncture to credit Dr. Professor Doug Dearth, long-time course coordinator for the National Senior Intelligence Officers Course at the Joint Military Intelligence Training College, and Col Al Campen, USAF (Ret), the father of DoD C4I as a concept, and long-time publisher for the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA). Alone among thousands, these two officers recognized the value of this thinking, and pressed for finished work in the form of articles and chapters, and then books. Their three books on CYBERWAR were a gift to national policy-makers that has never been properly acknowledged.
Something of a renaissance man, Mort Zuckerman is active across real estate, the media (US News & World Report), the talk shows, and the Smithsonian cultural circuit. Below is his hard-hitting commentary as presented at OSS '96. Read this carefully. See especially the use of the word “manic.” The US Government is not trained, equipped, or organized to be intelligent. The consumers of intelligence do not represent the public as much as they do the recipients of the public's largesse, and do not know how to do intelligence in the public interest. The secret intelligence community refuses to create a strategic analytic model, and continues to be driven by budget, technical, and bureaucratic consideration–inputs–rather than desired outcomes.
We must “recognize that 80% of what we consider intelligence–decision-support–is now either erroneously classified or not done at all, and this is the fundamental weakness of our national intelligence community.
On 1 March 1996, the Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community (the Brown Commission) issued its report to the President and to Congress. On 26 March, Studies in Intelligence board members Brian Latell, Robert Herd, John Wiant, and Bill Nolte met at the Commission's offices in the New Executive Office Building with Ann Z. Caracristi, a member of the Commission; Staff Director L. Britt Snider; and staff members Douglas Horner, Brendan Melley, Kevin Scheid, and William Kvetkas. What follows is an edited transcript of the discussion with them, reviewed in advance by the participants.
The protection of “sources & methods” is a political gambit, not a legitimate claim for immunity. This testimony to the Moynihan Commission on Secrecy lays out the hypocricy in detail.
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.
Mats Bjore, along with Arno Reuser, Steve Edwards, Joe Markowitz, is one of a tiny handful of “originals” who have striven to create the discipline of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) that has now morphed into M4IS2 (Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making). Collective Intelligence, Cognitive Science, and Civil Affairs as well as Civil Society are all congregating outside of government “control.”
