The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
I will not replicate all that is at www.oss.net and to a much lesser extent, www.earth-intelligence.net, but do want to recognize a handful of extraordinary individuals by isolating their especially meritorious contributiions to the long-running debate about national intelligence reform and re-invention.
Over the years we have gone through perhaps ten different Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) “coordinators” for Open Source Intelligence (DIA), always with the same result–a flurry of motion, push-back (or passive aggressive refusal to provide thoughtful responses)–and then they move on. OSINT has consistently failed to attract the attention of the Director of DIA.
Below is our effort to help whoever was in the job (they are never memorable) in 2004.
These briefings were commissioned by the Ministry of Defense in Italy and delivered over two days with independent official briefings from Carol Dumaine, then the active leader of the Global Futures Partnership Initiative (GFP).
2002 FAILURE of 20th Century Intelligence
2004 The Failure of 20th Century Intelligence (Updated 2006)
2004 COLLECTION: Know Who Knows
2004 PROCESSING: Make the Most of What You Know
Strategic Communications became the buzzword of the decade, along with Information Operations (IO), and it is still sorting itself out. We have a problem: you cannot manipulate perceptions much out of whack with reality–reality has a way of being pervasive, intrusive, compelling, and inevitable. Still, this report was very important in part because it demonstrated how very little we know about the human beings and the societies we are trying to influence. There are other contradictions, one of them humourously depicted to the left here, from our Strategic Communicators in SWA.
This bill was NOT introduced, it was a variation of a much simpler bill created by Congressman Rob Simmons' staff. A version went into the book THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest that enjoys a Foreword from Congressman Simmons, and there is today a 2009 version of the Act that has facotred in the needs of Homeland Security and the opportunities in Civil Affairs and in Multinational Information-Sharing and Sense-Making.
General Peter Schoomaker, USA (Ret), brought back from retirement to be Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, was among a tiny handful of seniors who understood the importance of moving ahead with Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), having himself created the first modern “full spectrum” OSINT unit at the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) in 1997. In the below exchange led by Congressman Rob Simmons of Connecticutt, the two are executing a public “dance” that moves OSINT up the priority ladder.
This Foreword, the first one done by Congressman Rob Simmons of Connecticutt for any handbook or book in the larger Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) arena, would be revised and used for others publications, but in its time, in 2004, this was the first-ever deep high-level statement of both need and opportunity with respect to OSINT as a separate discipline.
