This is what happens to the taxpayer dollar when they stop demanding free and fair elections instead of the current two-party tyranny farce that we have; and when they fail to keep their elected “representatives” honest. For decades now both the Senate and the House have lacked integrity and consistently voted in favor of the special interests that pay them instead of the voters that elected them. Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is the government manifestation of what we are now calling Public Intelligence, which is the actualization of Collective Intelligence.
Human Intelligence (HUMINT) no longer exists as a serious craft in the USA. The Clandestine Service, a few exceptions not-with-standing relies almost completely on hand-outs from foreign liaison services who know the limits of American historical and cultural savoire faire, and the depth of American naivete. In the Department of Defense (DoD) the current clandestine training has been described as “push-ups done silently.” Across the government, the human brain and the inate value of the human being is at an all-time low and there appears to be no one of any leadership standing actually willing to demand that we get HUMINT right.
The White House does not understand this and the mandarins fear it. The minute OSINT becomes fully operational, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) should begin demanding 20% cuts in the secret disciplines and in contractor “butts in seats” that are in violation of the inherently governmental nature of secret intelligence. This is not to say those individuals should be laid off, only put on the government payroll if needed, at one third the price we pay now to bloated contractor bureaucracies.
The view on the left is a view from one lacking the deep broad experience to challenge the secret mandarins. It is a subservient position that is both detrimental to the whole of the secret world, and incompatible with external multinational operations.
OSINT is a “hybrid” discipline that is simultaneously:
1. A full-fledged discipline in its own right demanding of its own Program, requirements and collection management system information technology architecture, multilateral global treaties and agreements vastly exceeding the bilateral ones characteristic of the secret world; and terms of reference that default to inclusion rather than exclusion.
2. A supporting discipine for each of the traditional secret disciplines, BUT one that must be fenced because the traditional discplines have clearly demonstrated they do not understand and cannot manage OSINT to good effect in spotting, assessing, and validating, in tip-off, in contextual reinforcement, etcetera.
3. A supporting discipline for each of the consumers of traditonal intelligence, who receive very little return on the taxpayer investment; AND a supporting discipline for all of the consumers, including Congress and the Departments of government outside the traditional national security arena (e.g. Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Veteran's), all of whom know virtually nothing about OSINT, have virtually no real access to world-class OSINT, and are not likely in the near term to allocate or protect OSINT resources. Lest this be doubted, the last time Robert Steele spoke at the Department of State, they bragged that they had four OSINT analysts. Four–for the entire Department.
OSINT has become synonymous with subsevience to the secret government world, one reason why we have moved on to embrace Public and Collective Intelligence. From this day forward, the latter are fully independent of the secret world–we will trade the raw open source feed for money and unclassified sense-making; the secret world can have its open source feed and managers of the secret world can use the open source baseline to challenge the secret mandarins for performance and value improvements, but the secret world will never again be allowed to corrupt, constrain, or contain the emerging discipline of Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2).
