If there's a single Founding Father of the Open Source movement, Robert D. Steele is it. Everyone else has been playing catchup. And if you don't know what the Open Source revolution is, you need to read this book. You don't even need to know why! You need to buy it, read it, and then you'll *know* why. No other book on Open Source can open your eyes the way this one can. That's because there's no potential use of Open Source intelligence that Steele hasn't anticipated. Collective Intelligence is coming! It's an unstoppable force. And it will change everything. So if you like to know about things like that in advance, you need to buy this book.
The information age that was created by personal computers was just a kiddie car with a squeaky horn. By comparison, the open source revolution is a freight train. Its potential to change your world is orders of magnitude greater. This is not hyperbole. In fact superlatives can't begin to express the ground-shaking potential of this next wave of human evolution.
5.0 out of 5 stars 6 Star (My Top 10%) Primer for Every Citizen,June 6, 2012
I've had this book in my stack of “to be read” books for some time now, and now that I have read it, I deeply regret not getting to it sooner. Although I have read and reviewed a number of vital serious books in this field, and list ten of them below, I have to say this is easily the single best book of the lot, and I put it into 6 stars and beyond — out of the 1,800 plus books I have reviewed at Amazon, fewer than 10% get this rating.
Perhaps because I had already read the ten books below, I was absolutely floored by the clarity, organization, precision, simplicity, intelligence, and general integrity of this book and its author. Please do take advantage of the Look Inside the Book feature that Amazon offers (click on book cover above). In seventeen chapters, the author has brought to the public a work of elegant explosive yet balanced and measured, FACTS with CONTEXT.
If you read only one book on the destruction of the US economy, the destruction of the US Republic, the destruction of legitimate governance in the USA, this is the one book I recommend. It should not only be read, but also shared. As I go back over the table of contents thinking about what to highlight (I no longer mark up books now that I donate them all as I finish reading them), I am just blown away by the medticulous, sensible, systematic, intuitively coherent manner in which the author starts with the fraud and treason of the Federal Reserve (neither Federal nor a reserve), and ends with his prescription for public banking that I heartily respect.
5.0 out of 5 stars End Result of Quarter Century Walk-About,June 5, 2012
Updated 27 June: Why on earth is this book in top 100 for Espionage? I can only speculate that because I am a former spy, trained over 7,500 intelligence professionals, and have been an arch critic of secret intelligence ever since my 1988 conversion experience, that those who know me or know of my work have tane an interest in the book. They are correct to do so. As the image I have loaded above with the cover, entitled “Intelligence Maturity,” clearly depicts, the craft of intelligence must evolve away from an obsession with spies and secrets and move rapidly through open sources and methods to M4IS2 (Multinational Multiagency Multidisciplinary Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making). Smart Nations and public intelligence in the public interest are the center of gravity for creating a world that works for all, not spies and secrecy that work more often than not for the 1% instead of the 99%.
Now that Look Inside the Book is up, I have deleted the table of contents and the list of opens I provided early on, and thank all those who went ahead with buying the book (Amazon has the lowest price I know of)—you helped put the book in Top 100 for Democracy most days since the book came out — Top 50 on 17 June. Although fleeting, these rankings are a small sign that the Open Source Everything meme has arrived.
The book evolved from my January 2007 keytone to Chris Prillo's Gnomedex in Seattle, the 64 minute video (and various shorter remixes including one that has gone around Anonymous circles) easily found by searching for < YouTube Steele Gnomedex 2007 > without the brackets. Contact Random House Special Markets to buy the book by the case at whatever discount is the norm for them. I am very eager to receive invitations to talk about this topic, especially in relation to the November 2007 “election” that pits one wing of the two-party tyranny against the other wing, with no difference for We the People.
I have to credit Tom Atlee, Jim Rough, Harrison Owen, Buckminster Fuller, Russell Ackoff, David Weinberger, Lawrence Lessig, Kent Myers, among many others, for the raw material that helped me flip the tortilla–this book is a rejection of tyranny, toxicity, and theft in favor of transparency, truth, and trust. I list a few books below, but point to all 1800+ of my non-fiction rewviews as relevant to the evolution of my thinking since I recognized the pathology of secret intelligence and rule by secrecy.
At Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog I have and will continue to post three short excerpts from each chapter (up to Chapter 5 as of this update), and also posted the 33 graphics as color slides, and an interview by Warren Pollock of myself, 11 minutes long. He is a gifted interviewer and video editor, extracted with precision and presented with flair.
This book completes the circle I started walking in 1988.
Robert Steele
ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World
5.0 out of 5 stars Intelligent, Endearing, Inspiring, Useful, Rooted in Reality, June 3, 2012
The author asked me if I would review this book, and sent me a PDF version. I've just gone through it and it earns a solid five. If you have any doubts, use Amazon's great Look Inside the Book feature, and read the specifics in the Table of Contents.
It was the table of contents that first impressed me. I've been an intelligence professional most of my life, and in the process of getting to 60 years of age, have developed four strategic analytic models that remains best in class today. I also read a lot — across 98 non-fiction categories, with the last 1,800+ books reviewed here at Amazon (and accessible by category at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog).
I say all of that by way of saying that the author's selection and articulation of the core issues facing humanity — immediately followed by the author's even more inspired outlining of key values, key behaviors, key perspectives — all with citations interspersed and talking points for parents or mentors or teachers and children — impressed me enormously.
5.0 out of 5 stars A gem of a book, still relevant today,March 24, 2012
I picked this book up as a used library book, and should have spent time with it sooner. It was published in 1997. It is still relevant today. Although I list ten other related works below, I cannot find anything exactly like this, so if you have an interest in this area, this is still a valuable book.
The best thing I can say about this book is that I would value it's being brought up to date and re-issued. The next best thing is that I love the readable print and lay-out. This is NOT a “fine print” encyclopedia. Each page has two columns, entries run from very short to several two-column pages.
The authors made it a point to integrate a variety of reference sections including organizations, authors, and books related to conflict resolution. I should say that this encyclopedia covers “full spectrum” conflict resolution from domestic violence all the way to world war.
I treasure books, and many books today annoy me with their silly colors, gaudy covers, and very small print. This book is a “classic” in perfect form, a real pleasure to use. I would venture to say that if and when it is updated and re-issued, this 1997 version will still be of high value as a benchmark. Now that we are into everything from neuro-economic to neuro-pyschology, I don't imagine we are too far from neuro-peacekeeping based on transparency, truth, and trust (instead of secrets, lies, and violence).
These books I have reviewed, and I also provide at the end the words for finding my two master lists of book reviews I did in support of my last book as well as my next one.
I stumbled on this book by accident, and it has astonished me. With all the books I have read, this is the one book I might recommend to anyone — in school or beyond school — including those who (like myself) have multiple graduate degrees and/or read continuously.
This book so impressed me that I was contemplating making it a Six Star and Beyond (10% of the books I read make it into that category, see the rest of them at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog under Reviews / 6 Stars. All my reviews lead back here to Amazon. What the book is missing, and I certainly recommend it to the publisher for what I hope will be another printing, is an index of all names, and a consolidated bibliography. The endnotes are superb — this is a solidly researched and very nicely presented over-view of all of the negative forces seeking to destroy the possibility of a world that works for all.
Although the author takes care to cover the usual suspects — the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, etcetera, he is the first author I have found who truly “gets” that every organization is a “front” and that no organization has a New World Order agenda — that is the preserve of the top 200-300 families who regard the Earth as their personal farm. They operate under what is called “deep secrecy” (no paper trail, no audio trail). The organizational leaders — including the President of the United States — are puppets who are fed a mix of information and money to keep them on “on course.”
PREPARE TO HAVE YOUR MIND BLOWN!,June 24, 2012
