Robert David Steele, born in New York in 1952 (63) is a long-time activist for intelligence reform (he is a former spy, honorary hacker, and a top proponent for Open Source Everything). Also a former Marine Corps infantry officer he returned to the Marine Corps from the CIA to be the senior civilian responsible for creating the Marine Corps Intelligence Center. He resigned from government to lead the open source intelligence revolution from 1993-2010. In 2011 he joined Occupy and tried to get them interested in Electoral Reform. In 2012 he was accepted by the Reform Party as a candidate for their nomination, and spent six weeks creating a web site that is still online (We the People Reform Coalition) and challenging all the other presidential candidates to come together on electoral reform. What he learned is available online in his article, How I Tested the Boundaries of the Two-Party Tyranny. Recently, in consultation with selected transpartisan leaders, he has come to the conclusion that the time is right to mount a total offense that unites Independents and small parties — the Libertarian Party being the largest and best organized small party — to demand an Electoral Reform Act of 2015 that would make it possible to elect Libertarians and others across the country in 2016. His overall campaign can be viewed at http://tinyurl.com/OpenPower, he has also created a Libertarian post at http://tinyurl.com/OpenPower-Libertarian. His strongest new realization is that we are all fragmented across multiple issues, and there is only ONE THING that can bring us all together and ONE THING that we can actually win on: Electoral Reform. Once achieved, Libetarians would have a level playing field for addressing each of their vital issues — without Electoral Reform, Libertarians will remain a side show. Robert is also the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction, reading in 98 categories. His new book, Open Power: Electoral Reform Act of 2015 – Open Source Activist Tool-Kit has been #1 in Civics at Amazon Kindle, and includes hundreds of book reviews on Democracy Lost.
It was great to meet you, to talk for hours with enthusiasm and humor, and to establish a connection with Argentina's DemocracyOS movement. (For the info of those on the To and Cc list above who are not familiar with DemocracyOS it is a grassroots open source system in Argentina for online proposals, discussion, and voting on legislation. It is connected to a separate political party – the Net Party – which runs candidates committed to voting on legislation according to what citizens decide on DemocracyOS. Both DemocracyOS and the Net Party have some parallels elsewhere in the world and are themselves spreading their memes to other places.)
