1. Steele on Intelligence What can we know, how
Steele on Intelligence What can we know, how? Reflections on the near future.
Robert David Steele Vivas
MALAS in St. Louis
5 November 2005
A copy of these slides are at

2. World War III Players Nation-States Private Sector Bacteria Citizens
Gangs
Nation states are only ten percent of the threat. More threatening are private sector organizations that destroy people’s life savings or export their jobs, or that implant immoral capitalism abroad, enriching elites and disenfranchising all others; ethnic criminal gangs such as we see coming out of Russia, China, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and Colombia; and bacteria.
Finally, we have Mother Earth, on the verge of collapse. The Earth is tired of our talk, wants peace, an end to promises, and perhaps an end to us. [Philip Levine, 1979]
Mother Earth
Water-Air-Green

3. You May Not Be Interested in Reality, But Reality is Interested in You
Information is a substitute for violence, capital, labor, time, and space. Information can create stabilizing indigenous wealth.
Corrupt governments and immoral corporations or gangs destroy this option.
Good news: Collective Popular Intelligence is Emergent

4. Plan for the Briefing Two hours done in twenty minutes
Slides posted so you can reflect more later
5 minutes on state of the art (Silobreaker)
5 minutes on sources in context
5 minutes on emerging technologies
5 minutes of ethics and morality

5. State of the Art Will blow through these
It’s not about separate sources anymore
It’s not about human reading anymore
It’s about integrating everything:
Collecting relevant offline information
Machine-aided collation & exploitation
Connecting experts and their students
Presenting the information is a compelling way

6. OVERVIEW
Start with an overview of what is happening in general in you area of interest

7. FOCUS ON A COUNTRY – VIEW 360
Start with an overview of what is happening in general in you area of interest

8. FOCUS ON AN ORGANIZATION See specifics of people, places, etcetera with frequency of mention

9. FOCUS ON A PERSON Photos, Quotations, Links to Others, Key Details

10. GET NEW INSIGHTS This is the only global information that integrates sources with tools

11. READ IN DEPTH, IN CONTEXT Anything can be sent to the “scrapbook” where other tools can be applied

12. Silobreaker is the Next Google
This costs $400 a year at full price.
Offered at $200 until the end of the year.
Test it free for seven days by following the link at
This has been my secret weapon for years, now we are commoditizing it and moving on to more complex challenges—creating a World Brain.

13. Sources All information, all languages, all the time
Going back 200 years, digitizing hardcopy
185 languages, 33 of them “core”
12 relevant dialects of Arabic
Must follow television, radio, audio, street
80% of this, at least, is overlooked by IC
Cannot be made sense of by single individual

14. Global Intelligence Failure Breakdown in Collection and Understanding
Digital
Analog
Oral/Unpublished
English
Language
Foreign
Languages*
*29 predominant languages, over 3,000 distinct languages in all.
NSA
FBIS
UN/STATE
Cascading Deficiencies:
1) Don’t even try to access most information
2) Can’t process hard-copy into digital
3) Can’t translate most of what we collect
CIA/DO
NRO
This is a very serious depiction of how little we collect in the foreign affairs arena. One study of three countries suggests that we collect less than 10% of what can be known, in part because the only people with money to buy local knowledge are the spies, and they insist on treason as a condition for employment.
We are simply not serious about open sources of information, nor about information in foreign languages. To find 396 terrorist, insurgent, and opposition web sites, as OSS did in 60 days for under $50,000, required the ability to work in 29 languages including Catelan, Gaelic, Kurdish, Farsi, Urdu, and Pashto. If we can do this, CIA and NSA and the FBI should be able to as well. But they don’t have the leadership willing to change.

15. Global Processing Failure Breakdown in Exploitation, Dissemination
50%
Less Costly
More Satisfying
SIGINT
OSINT 0%
HUMINT
IMINT
MASINT
STATE
Does Not Exist
It gets worse. This is an official CIA depiction, from a study done in the late 1990’s, as to the relative cost and satisfaction derived from each collection discipline.
What is most noteworthy--and a major reason why we failed to “connect the dots” and prevent 9-11, is that there is no single place where it all comes together in digital form, with time and geospatial tags, such that we can automatically see patterns and detect anomalies.
Summing up: we collect less than 20% of what we should, process less than 10% of what we collect, with the result that Washington is operating, at best, on 2% of the relevant and available foreign affairs information.

16. Seven Views of Reality Not sharing, not listening, costs us.
Military
Law Enforcement
Business
Academic
National
NGO &
Media
Religions
& Clans
With State leadership, we can change how we make a difference, leveraging all seven tribes.
Faith-based diplomacy can be quite dangerous—witness the combination of Texas evangelicals and Zionist zealots focused on spawning the perfect Red Calf—or it can be quite constructive.
Journalists, academics, business professionals, non-governmental organizations—they are all acting now in isolation, based on limited information. We can offer them all a voluntary framework for collaboration in the sharing of legal and ethical information.

17. OLD PARADIGM NEW PARADIGM # = Your Top Issues, Local, National, Global
You Are Here... 1 2 3
Far Future
Near Future
Present
Historical Memory

18. New Craft of Intelligence
Lessons of History II
Global Coverage
III
National Intelligence IV
Spies & Secrecy
China, Islam, Ethnic, Etc.
Cost-Sharing with Others--
Shared Early Warning
Narrowly focused!
Harness distributed intelligence of Nation
My second book, THE NEW CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE: Personal, Public, & Political, lays out the future of intelligence as I believe the citizen-taxpayer must insist it be.
Specifically, we can no longer afford to ignore either history or the historical statements of other players in their own languages; we must devise a means of sharing the burden of monitoring all open sources in all languages all the time; we must harness the considerable knowledge we have in our private sector; and we must focus our spies on the hard stuff.

19. Technologies Cell phone, not PC, will be primary access
XML, Geocoding, standards, are making data smart—the context is in the content
IBM just linked DB2 with Google Enterprise—when we add CISCO AON and CISCO IPICS, we will have a globally distributed instantly exploitable World Brain
Foreign language man-machine networks and distributed advanced analytics will add value
Gaming, not reports, will rule

20. Five Technical Trends
Cell phones allow for constant pervasive data entry including streaming video/audio, and for instant locationally-aware receipt of relevant intelligence
Googlization of intelligence, when enhanced, will put industrial era spies and aggregators out of business—CIA, Factiva, LEXIS, DIALOG--dead
Open Hypertext Document (OHD) from Bootstrap (Doug Englebart) allows links, discovery, and micro-cash purchase at the paragraph level
Synthetic information breaks the copyright chains—can still pay by the paragraph, but can also create new synthetic knowledge that is original
Virtual reality games, not reports, will teach, inspire, allow for safe testing of different scenarios and investment strategies.

21. Ethics & Morality
Secrecy is pathological—secrets can be ignored and manipulated—witness Iraq
Secrecy displaces dialog—cult of secrecy
Secrecy enables corruption & treason—not just by governments but by corporations (Enron), Media (NYT, medical journals), and religions (Catholic Church)
Secrecy undermines social understanding of reality and allows rich to steal from the poor

22. A Revolution is Underway
Peer-to-Peer Distributed Ubiquitous Collective Intelligence Now Possible
TIME IMPACT SHORT
TIME IMPACT LONG
MULTI-CULTURAL & TRANS-NATIONAL EQUITIES
SINGLE-CULTURE SINGLE-ORGANIZATION EQUITIES
LEADERS DECIDE
PEOPLE DECIDE
TOP-DOWN
COMMAND & CONTROL
SECRET
SOURCES & METHODS
BOTTOM-UP
INFORMATION-SHARING
OPEN
OBVIOUS DETAIL
OBSCURE DETAIL
OLD
NEW

23. Teen-Agers are Center of Gravity
World War III will be fought in the hearts and minds of teen-agers
Half the brain—the half that can understand “other” views—dies by the age of 35
Morality self-directs between the ages of 25 and 35—that’s when the brain matures
Faith matters—not ideological zealotry, but a belief in the Golden Rule and respect for cultural and religious paths chosen by others over the course of centuries.

24. Reality Won’t Go Away End of cheap oil cascades across everything
End of free water is actually a bigger threat
Rise of pandemic mutating infectious disease could rebalance populations
Rise of crime and corruption reflects the failure of all governments, including USA, to adapt to fast-changing real world issues
Collection popular intelligence is in a race for life, a race that will determine our future.

25. Peace & Prosperity Can Be Achieved By Changing When & How We Intervene
Public warning can change public policy
More Prevention
More Peacekeeping
More Education
More Long-Term Aid
Less Corruption
Less Censorship
We have a sacred duty.
Between Google and Wikis, Moral Democracy Possible

26. Spread the Word Robert David Steele Vivas CEO, OSS.Net, Inc.
Coach, Global Intelligence Partnership (20 companies & rising)
Will speak for sushi.
Use MoveOn.Org OSINT topic to organize everywhere in the world