Public Intelligence Blog

The military is the most important of the eight intelligence tribes for the simple reason that it is the only tribe with a modicum of cohesion in every country, and hence is can serve as both a hub for the other seven tribes within its parent country, and as a reachback hub for a global network of multinational information-sharing and sense-making hubs that are the foundation for the World Brain and EarthGame, with the intermediate objectives of

1.  Getting a grip on all information in all languages all the time; and

2.  Providing unclassified decision support to the United Nations and all organizations concerned with stabiliztion & reconstruction, humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief operations.

The media tribes includes all forms of structured and unstructured reporting, including state-sponsored broadcast organizations such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and citizen-journalism including Blogs.

The media tribe is of special interest because 90% of what a typical journalist knows or records does not get formally published due to varied constraints including word counts, legal caution, and source protection.  There are some substantial opportunities within this community once a combination of aggregate anonymous data mining and trusted sharing protocols can be made publicly available.

Law Enforcement, like secret Government intelligence, is an inherent responsibility of government and we do not support the use of contractors in fulfilling this function.  Private Investigators and all forms of out-sourced contracting for intelligence collection, processing, and analysis are placed within the Commerce tribe.

The government intelligence tribe is much much larger than just the secret national intelligence element.  Govenrment is a beneficiary–a consumer–of open source information–rather than a primary generator.  There are some very positive trends toward assuring that all information paid for by the taxpayer are placed in the public domain in digital form, and some governments, such as those of China and Norway, have made the logical connection between Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) and public intelligence or information–citizens should not have to purchase proprietary software or licenses in order to view and exploit government-provided information they funded in the first place.  State and local governments are also becoming much more important as real-time science and full-spectrum budget harmonization come into play.

The Special Libraries Association (SLA), the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) and the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP) are all representative of this tribe that has access to “ground truth” far beyond that of most governments.