Category: #OSE Open Source Everything

Putting the Steele into intelligence reform

Robert Steele is one of the more interesting writers on intelligence. Based in the US, and a former practitioner he has brought an enormous amount of energy to the questions around intelligence effectiveness and intelligence reform, and can rightly be thought of as a grandfather of the open source intelligence movement, and more recently the expanded “Open Source Everything” meme. I should insert the health warning that he has appeared in the Companion guide that Mike Goodman, Claudia Hillebrand and I edited, so I am not entirely impartial on this, but I would place myself as a ‘critical friend’ of his work.[i]

He has recently published a semi-manifesto piece about US intelligence and it can be found on this link. I have distilled the following key points from it, that I want to write around briefly here, but the original piece is where his take on these issues sit, obviously: 1) intelligence should be about decision support; 2) intelligence is currently being justified along the lines of the quantity of secrets it produces the Executive without regard to the total government need; 3) there is a dominant discourse that only secret intelligence agencies are equipped to ‘do’ intelligence; 4) Parliament and politicians in general desperately need intelligence qua decision-support, sense-making applied to all information secret and open that applies to their functional domains; and 5) the public desperately needs intelligence, again in the form of decision support.  Recently the public has become the object – Americans would say the target – of intelligence agencies, which is quite the opposite of the public being a virtual intelligence network in being, contributing to national and public security more effectively by leveraging the creative commons approach to information, what some call collective or co-intelligence.[ii]

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