One of our contributors passed this to me and asked me to comment in relation to the alarm that Winn Schwartau, Bill Caeli, Jim Anderson, and I sounded in 1994, in writing, to Marty Harris, then head of the National Information Infrastructure (NII).
Stuxnet, the cyberweapon that attacked and damaged an Iranian nuclear facility, has opened a Pandora's box of cyberwar, says the man who uncovered it. A Q&A about the potential threats.
EXTRACT:
CSM: How would you characterize the year since Stuxnet – the response by nations, industry and government?
LANGNER: Last year, after Stuxnet was identified as a weapon, we recommended to every asset owner in America – owners of power plants, chemical plants, refineries and others – to make it a top priority to protect their systems…. That wakeup call lasted only about a week. Thereafter, everybody fell back into coma. The most bizarre thing is that even the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Siemens [maker of the industrial control system targeted by Stuxnet] talked about Stuxnet being a wakeup call, but never got into the specifics of what needed to be done.
This book remains the single definitive reference on the Smart Nation Act as developed by Robert Steele in support of Congressman Rob Simmons (R-CT-02). As pointed out in Hamilton Bean's recently published book, No More Secrets: Open Source Information and the Reshaping of US Intelligence the Open Source Agency (OSA) has become the subject of competing visions–on one side, those who favor accountability, effectiveness, transparency, and respect for the public…..on the other, those who favor corruption, profitable waste, secrecy, and the exclusion of the public.
Most recently, INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability provides the strategic, operational, tactical, and technical contexts for leveraging both Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2) in order to create a prosperous world at peace–and at one third the cost of what the USA spends on war today.
If an OSA is created–it can only be a success under diplomatic auspices as OMB has twice agreed (provided the Secretary of State asks for it as a sister agency to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), it could–it should–host the Multinational Decision Support Centre (MDSC) as proposed to DoD and implicitly called for in several Defense Science Board (DSB) reports. The MDSC could be located in Tampa, Florida, as the Coalition Coordination Centre has been, but staffed by intelligence professionals instead of logistics professionals.
Put most simply, an OSA restores intelligence and integrity to the entirety of the US Government, and changes everything about how we do policy, acquisitions, and operations. It restores the Republic.
The Open Source Agency (OSA) was first proposed by Robert Steele to the Open Source Council in 1992, as an Open Source Center outside the wire. The rationale was that best in class sources would change constantly, and access was needed to all information in all languages all the time. CIA and MITRE conspired to substitute instead the Open Source Information System (OSIS), a still-anemic unproductive system with limited sources and no analytic tool-kit worthy of the name.
Despite the history of opposition, and the fact that the CIA's Open Source Center (OSC) today only deals with eleven countries on a more or less regular basis, while going through the motions with others, a robust multinational network has been developed over time that includes at least 90 countries, some of which have made gains in harnessing the eight tribes of intelligence, some not. The Nordics, and especially Sweden, have been especially effective, at furthering the concept of M4IS2 (multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, multidomain information-sharing and sense-making).
There remains a need for an Open Source Agency (OSA) that is under diplomatic auspices as suggested by Dr. Joe Markowitz and endorsed by Congressman Rob Simmons (R-CT-02) and Robert Steele, both writing and speaking on this over the years. Below are some references that bear directly on the need for and the means by which an OSA might be created.
UPDATE of 19 Oct to resurface the CORE COMMON ISSUE and add THIRD PARTY book reviews (immediately below the line). The legislative proposal still needs work, e.g. ballot access not well covered, but this is the starting point. It was created by Jim Turner and Robert Steele based in large part on points made by Ralph Nader is his book Crashing the Party–Taking on the Corporate Government in an Age of Surrender. We cannot understand why Ralph Nader, Ron Paul, Cynthia McKinney, and Jackie Salit–and Mike Bloomberg–don't get serious about this ONE THING they can all agree on….
Click on either of the images to see a collection of documents on Democracy in America as it could be, should be, must be. The Republic has been destroyed by a combination of domestic enemies and a public slow to realize that it was being disenfranchized.
Click on the page below to read the single page summary of eight simple reforms, most conceived by Ralph Nader, as refined by Jim Turner (Nader #2 for many years) and Robert Steele.
Electoral Reform Act of 2009
Only recently have major financial figures such as John Bogle and Peter Peterson come forward with works that call into question the integrity, santiy, and viability of the Republic as it is now being looted by Wall Street and the two-party tyranny. Below are several titles worthy of study, with links to the summary reviews of those titles by Robert Steele. Below them are twice as many titles capturing the spirit of the Republic that has been in re-gestation for decades. The mood of Middle America is clear: we want our Republic back, and we want both government and commerce to be open, honest, and in the public service. We are going to get what we want by 2012, peacefully, on the strength of our numbers and our common collective intelligence.
Use the Reviews menu to rapidly survey over 1,400 non-fiction books all focused on the future of the Republic and the Earth in the context of restoring the faith of humanity in itself. Each review leads back to both the Amazon page, and to the original review on Amazon should you wish to vote on the review.
Phi Beta Iota: With a tip of the hat to Marcus Aurelius, this document is provided for information. On balance it is rich with insights that are not available elsewhere and consequently must be very highly regarded as a baseline for where US intelligence reform (and US intelligence) are today: dead, with a $75 billion a year casket that shows no signs of atrophy. Below are summary extracts both positive and negative.
With the right conditions in place — education, entrepreneurialism, and environmental awareness among them — a young, eager, educated workforce can be the key to prosperity.
When conditions are right, large numbers of young workers can drive a nation’s growth to remarkable levels. This theory is known as the “demographic dividend,” a phrase coined by demographer David Bloom. He proposes that when young working-age adults comprise a disproportionate percentage of a country’s population, the national economy is affected in positive ways.
