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Information Peacekeeping &

The Future of Intelligence:

The United Nations, Smart Mobs, & the Seven Tribes1

Robert David Steele

 

      The future of global intelligence is emergent today.  There are five revolutionary trends that will combine to create a global information society helpful to global stability and prosperity.   

      First, the traditional national intelligence tribe, the tribe of secret warfare and strategic analysis, will be joined by six other tribes, each of which will gradually assume co-equal standing in a secure global network: the military, law enforcement, business, academic, non-governmental and media, and religious or citizen intelligence tribes—the latter representing the emergence of “smart clans” and “smart mobs” challenging “dumb nations” for power.   

      Second, in those specific areas generic to all tribes, collaborative advances will be made, and codified in “best practices” defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO);2 included will be shared competencies and standards related to global multi-lingual open source collection, massive geospatially-based multi-media processing; analytic toolkits; analytic tradecraft; operations security; defensive counterintelligence; and the capstone areas of leadership, training, and culture.   

      Third, multi-lateral information sharing rather than unilateral secrecy will be the primary characteristic of intelligence—we will still need and use spies—including spies skilled in offensive counterintelligence and covert action, not only clandestine collection—but fully 80% of the value of intelligence will be in shared collection, shared processing, and shared analysis.   

      Fourth, intelligence will become personal, public, & political—it will be taught in all schools and become a core competency for every knowledge worker; it will emerge as a mixed public-private good and a benchmark against which investments of the taxpayer dollar can be judged; and it will impact on politics as elected and appointed officials are evaluated by the voters based on their longer-term due diligence in applying intelligence to the public interest.   

      Fifth and finally, intelligence will transform peacekeeping by simultaneously making the public case for major increases in funding for “soft power” instruments among the Nations—to include funding for permanent United Nations (UN) constabulary forces—as well as a United Nations Open Decision Information Network (UNODIN), itself a strategic and tactical intelligence architecture for multicultural policy, acquisition, and operational decisions having to do with global security.3 
 
 

Robert David Steele, Intelligence Coach, a 25-year veteran in U.S. national security, is the founder of OSS.NET.

Seven Intelligence Tribes
 

      First, the tribes.  When it first became clear to me, around 1986, that no single nation and certainly no single intelligence organization, was capable of single-handedly mastering the data acquisition, data entry, and data translation or data conversion challenges associated with 24/7 “global coverage,” I initially conceptualized a global network of national-level agencies cooperating with one another. 

      However, in the course of sponsoring over fifteen international conferences, during which I have deliberately sought to bring before my national intelligence colleagues the best that the private sector has to offer, it has become obvious to me that there are seven tribes of intelligence, not one; that all of these tribes are at very elementary stages in their development; and that the tribes share some generic functionalities that lend themselves to burden-sharing, at the same time that the tribes also have unique conditions where they alone can excel. 

      For the sake of simplicity, and recognizing that the evaluations will vary from nation to nation, I will tell you what I think of our intelligence tribes in relation to my concept of an objective or “perfect” intelligence standard.  On a scale where 100 is the achievable score, I see National at 50%, Military at 40%, Business and Academic at 30%, and the remaining three tribes—Law Enforcement, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO)-Media, and Religious-Citizenry, at 20%, as shown in Figure 1. 

Figure 1: Subjective Evaluation of the Objective Capabilities of Each Tribe4 

      So—only at the national level are we halfway competent, and we still receive a failing grade—50%.  The military, in part because of massive spending on targeting and virtually unlimited manpower, is close behind with 40%.  Business is skewed upwards to 30% by the oil, pharmaceutical, and some financial or insurance companies, or it would be 10%.  Similarly, academia has some centers of excellence that help the group achieve 30% but it too is closer to the 10% mark.  Finally, in the lowest tier, are religions, clans, and citizens—although Opus Dei, the Papal Nuncio, B’Nai Brith, the Islamic World Foundation, and segments of the Mormon religion and certain cults are themselves in the 40% range, overall this group is at 20% and the masses are at 10% or less.  The average performance level for all seven tribes in the aggregate is at the 30% level—this is probably too generous, but it will do as a baseline for our assessment. 

      It merits comment that the relative sophistication of the groups is going to change in inverse proportion to their current status.  Religions and clans and citizens—the non-state groups—have fewer legacy investments in technology, and are much more likely to leap ahead of the government and business communities by making faster better use of wireless broadband smart tools, and by being less obsessive about old concepts of security that prevent burden-sharing.   

      In the new world order, unless governments get smart and deliberately nurture a new network that embraces all of the tribes and brings to the government all advantages from progress being made by the various tribes, I anticipate that this list will be turned on its head—non-state actors will be better at intelligence than governmental organizations, with business and academics remaining loosely in the middle.  Law enforcement, unless there are strong business and public advocacy demands at the national level, is likely to remain severely retarded within the new intelligence domain.

Professionalization through Standards
 

      Second, the generic areas for progress.  I listed these in the beginning and show them again in Figure 2.  It is obvious to me that the single easiest place to begin is with a global web-based architecture for ensuring that all useful open sources are digitized, translated, and linked using the Open Hyperdocument System (OHS) conceptualized years ago by Doug Englebart, one of the pioneers of the Internet.  You should visit him at www.bootstrap.org. A Digital Marshall Plan funded by the USA, and regional joint open source collection, processing, and translation centers, are an obvious and—one would think—non-controversial starting point for a global intelligence community. 

Figure 2: Generic Areas for Tribal Co-Evolution 

      In a related and equally vital area, I would note that the dirty little secret of all government and corporate Chief Information Officers is that they are only processing, at best, 20% of what they collect, and they are only storing perhaps 20% of what their people generate in the way of records.  Electronic mail is rapidly becoming both the primary vehicle for communicating knowledge, and the primary vent for the loss of knowledge.  Let me put this in a different way: by developing information technology without having an intelligence architecture in place, we have in effect, slit both our wrists in the bathtub—we do not know when we will die, but death is certain.  Along with global coverage of all open sources, we urgently need to create the framework for a globally-distributed processing system that is not held hostage to proprietary vendor technologies.  The Europeans are completely correct—especially the Germans—in pressing forward with Open Source Software.  Now that the Chinese are also taking LINUX seriously, the way is open for global progress.5  The sooner we neutralize Bill Gates, the sooner we will be free to develop a truly comprehensive European intelligence community as well as the integrated analytic toolkits that are vital to the intelligence profession.6 

      We have known since the 1980’s that there are eighteen distinct analytic functionalities that must be available to every knowledge worker, regardless of tribe, as itemized in Figure 3.  These include not only the standard desktop publishing, multi-media presentation, and real-time review and group editing functions, but the much more complex intermediate analytic functions such as collaborative work, structured argument analysis, idea organization, interactive search and retrieval, map-based visualization, and modeling or simulation using real world real time data.  At the bottom level, fully half the functionalities deal with data entry and conversion—digitization, translation, image processing, data extraction, data standardization, clustering and linking, statistical analysis, trend detection, and alert notification.  We are nowhere near achieving these integrated functionalities because our governments have failed to understand that national information strategies must provide for the coordination of standards and investments as a sine qua non for creating Smart Nations.

Figure 3: International Analytic Toolkit7 

      We must develop standards so that all data is automatically processable regardless or origin, or language, or security classification.  XML Geo, for example, is an emerging standard for providing all data with a geospatial attribute or attributes, and is vital to international data sharing as well as global automated fusion and pattern analysis.  The Americans are moving too slowly on this—I would like to see the Europeans press forward on this specific international standard.  Mandating transparent stable Application Program Interfaces (API) is an obvious need as well, enabling European, Asian, Near Eastern, and other third-party softwares to mature together rather than in competition with one another. 

      I won’t discuss analytic tradecraft, security, and counterintelligence here, but they are all important and they can all be developed in an unclassified generic manner that is beneficial to all seven intelligence tribes.8 

      Let me spend a moment on leadership, training, and culture. If there is one area where we must go in entirely different directions from the past, it is in this area of human management.  Intelligence professionals are “gold collar” workers, not factory workers or bank clerks or even engineers.  Their job is to think the unthinkable, to make sense out of evil, to draw conclusions while blind-folded with one hand  tied behind their backs.  The Weberian model of bureaucratic management is simply not suited to the intelligence profession.  Thomas Stewart, in his book The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-First Century Organization makes the point: “All the major structures of companies—their legal underpinnings, their systems of governance, their management disciplines, their accounting—are based on a model of the corporation that has become obsolete."9  This is ten times truer for intelligence organizations.   

      In the 21st Century, the intelligence leaders that will succeed are those who break all the “rules” of the past—they must confront their political masters instead of allowing policy to dictate intelligence; they must be public rather than secret; they must share rather than steal; they must think critically rather than silence critics.  We must migrate our cultures to emphasize multilateral over unilateral operations; open sources over secret sources; human expertise over technical spending; analysis over collection; multi-lingual perspectives over mono-lingual; the acknowledgement of mistakes versus the concealment of mistakes, and finally, long-term thinking over short-term thinking.  There is no training program for such a culture today, and in America, at least, we have no leaders committed in this direction. 

Figure 4: The New Intelligence Paradigm

      Within the individual Nations, it is virtually impossible to find leaders who are skilled at working with more than one intelligence tribe, because that is not where we have placed our emphasis.  Apart from obsessing on the national intelligence tribe alone, we have allowed the bureaucracy of intelligence to further isolate individual leaders within the culture of an individual organization with a functional specialization, such as signals intelligence, imagery intelligence, clandestine intelligence, or analysis.  We have also done badly at respecting the vital roles played by counterintelligence and covert action. 

      At the global and regional levels, while it might appear to be even more unlikely that we can identify, develop, and empower leaders able to work with all seven tribes across national boundaries, I believe it could in fact be easier, because at this level there are no pre-conceived bureaucracies, doctrines, or biases.  In my view, if the financial resources can be made available by the United States of America, and key people can be seconded by the various Nations to regional as well as United Nations (UN) intelligence centers and networks, then new intelligence concepts and doctrine and management, and training, and culture, can be devised over the next twenty-five years. 

      There are three initiatives that can contribute to the accelerated development of intelligence professionalism to a new global standard. 

      First, a project must be undertaken to interview international intelligence specialists in each aspect of intelligence, both functional and topical, with a view to documenting best sources and methods.  Such a project is about to begin an initial two-year period, and I believe it will succeed because 9-11 has finally demonstrated that how we do intelligence now is simply not good enough—in combination with other non-traditional threats, e.g. from disease, I believe there is now a demand for new knowledge about the craft of intelligence.10 

      Second, and ideally with help from our European intelligence colleagues, we must convert what we learn from the first project, into International Organization for Standardization (ISO) metrics or measures of merit.  An ISO series for intelligence will be revolutionary, in part as a means of sharing knowledge about the profession of intelligence; in part as a means of enabling an objective nonpartisan evaluation of the state of intelligence in any given tribe or nation or against a specific target of common interest; and in part as a means of accelerating the evolution of the intelligence discipline from craft to profession. 

      Third, and in tandem with the first two initiatives, we need both a web-based and a regional center-based approach to intelligence training that permits the best existing training programs from any nation or organization to become available more broadly, and by thus enabling savings, also permits varied nations and organizations to share the burden of creating new training, including distance learning, on all aspects of both the profession of intelligence, and the objects of its attention—the targets.  I envision an Intelligence University with a small campus in each region, perhaps co-located with a major national university, where multi-national classes are offered to the very best candidates from each of the seven tribes, and where they can learn while also getting to know one another at the entry level, at mid-career, and at senior management levels.  I also envision a global multi-lingual training curriculum for intelligence—both its practice and its targets—that is web-based, to include interactive video counseling and multi-media visualization, and that fully integrates open sources of information, all of the elements of the analytic toolkit itemized in Figure 3, and direct access to experts at appropriate levels of availability and cost.11 

Global Coverage through Multilateral Intelligence 

      In the third area, that of multi-lateral sharing, I will use both South Asia and Central Asia as examples.  It is clear to me that Central Asia—the former Muslim khanates of Bukhara, Khiva, and Kokand, and an area inhabited by unruly Turkmen, today known as Kazakhstan, Kyrgzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—we have an intelligence challenge of considerable proportions.  When we combine that with three countries of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia known as the Caucasus, and with the rest of the Muslim crescent from Pakistan through the contested areas of Kashmir, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, down to Malaysia, portions of the Philippines, and Indonesia, what we have is a new form of “denied area,” one as complex and challenging as Russia and China have been in the past, and as Arabia and India remain today. These areas are denied to us by our ignorance, not by any lack of access.   

      As I do my intelligence headlines every morning, and I select articles about new forms of joint military-police intelligence cooperation within individual countries, or a series of bi-lateral intelligence cooperation agreements between Australia and each of several different Asian countries, I keep thinking to myself, “We need several regional intelligence centers that combine the resources of the many nations and the seven tribes to focus, respectively, on the Caucasus and Central Asia; on Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and the contested areas; and on the South Asian Muslim crescent.”  It is clear to me that the time has come for both national and global revolutions in how we manage intelligence, and the figure below highlights key aspects of this. 

Figure 5: Key Aspects of the  Revolution in Intelligence Affairs 

      I have written elsewhere12 about the need to consolidate classified intelligence capabilities under the authority of one Director of Classified Intelligence (DCI); the need to create a counterpart Director of Public Information (DPI) who is empowered, at least in the United States of America, with a $1.5 billion a year Global Knowledge Foundation,13 and the need for a National Intelligence Council at the Prime Ministerial or Presidential level which can fully leverage and integrate the expertise and access of all seven tribes of intelligence.  Although not specified in Figure 5, it is also essential at the national level that there exist a National Information Strategy, and a single National Processing Agency that can be entrusted with the secure integration and exploitation of all information available to the national government, both secret and non-secret (e.g. immigration applications). 

      The global revolution in intelligence affairs should be manifested in the establishment of three multi-national coordination councils, each consisting of the respective Associate Deputy Directors of National Intelligence for Collection, for Processing, and for Analysis.  An executive secretariat for each, and a secure web-based means of tracking requirements, data, analytic products, and individual experts, would complete this global partnership.  At the same time, there must be at least six regional centers where multi-lateral intelligence coordination and cooperation becomes a reality.  Below is a depiction of one such center, for South Asia. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Figure 6: Regional Intelligence Center 

      It merits emphasis that the regional centers would have both management and staff that are truly international, with “out of area” managers and staff being especially helpful in ensuring that “localitis” does not undermine the professionalism of the activity.  Naturally there would be various means of carrying out quality assurance, and each Nation would retain the prerogative of managing its own unilateral collection, processing, and analysis.  Each participating Nation would receive management positions commensurate with its financial or staffing contributions as well as its expertise, and every position would have both a primary and a secondary incumbent, with the secondary always being from a different nationality.  Over time, each center would strive to integrate managers and staff from all seven tribes, not only the national tribe, and rotationals to at least one Center would become a pre-requisite for promotion to the highest levels within any tribe but especially the national tribe. 

      The case of the United Nations, unlike the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) or INTERPOL, merits a brief comment.  The UN is conflicted about intelligence, equating it with espionage instead of decision-support.  Unfortunately, the UN approach now, one of classic denial, is to tip-toe toward “information” functions in a vain attempt to achieve intelligence, while refusing to take seriously the value of intelligence as a craft, as a process, and as an emerging profession.  On the one hand, despite the most recent commitment of the Secretary General to reform the Department of Public Information (DPI), that department remains a one-way highway from the UN to the Public, with 77 disparate “lanes” (information centers) that are good at dissemination but not  good at collection, processing, or analysis.  Earlier, in 2000, the Secretary General created an Information and Strategic Analysis Secretariat within the Department of Political Affairs, in cautious recognition of the UN’s deficiencies in strategic intelligence analysis.14  This has not, however, resolved the urgent gaps in intelligence support for peacekeeping and humanitarian policy, acquisition, and operations, nor does it actually provide a full range of intelligence services—including tailored overt collection and massive multi-media processing—for political affairs.  In this sense, it may be said that the Secretariat is a dangerous stop-gap, misdirecting UN “intelligence” at this early point in the Secretary General’s consideration of longer-term needs for broad reforms that will lead to strategic, regional, tactical, and technical decision-support for all UN policies, procurements, and programs.  It may be that the UN, NATO, ICRC, and INTERPOL should consider sponsoring both an intelligence-information “audit” of their own organizations, and follow this with a joint two-week workshop with world-class intelligence authorities whose task it might be to educate senior managers about intelligence; to elicit from them their vision of emerging and changing requirements for intelligence from within their organizations; and to devise, in partnership with those senior managers, a campaign plan for both defining generic “best practices” suitable for adoption by the UN, and establishing a program within each organization that integrates overt, legal, ethical intelligence practices into every aspect of their operations.15 

Intelligence as a Public Good 

      This leads to the fourth area of change, in which intelligence must become personal, public, & political.  I believe that there is a proven process of intelligence that has extraordinary value, and that there are among us a few great practitioners—of intelligence collection, of intelligence analysis, of counterintelligence, of covert action in all its forms—whose best practices must be documented and standardized and taught to entire societies.  In my view, national security and national prosperity in the 21st Century are absolutely contingent on our rescuing the population from its factory-era educational system that creates drones—slaves for machines.  We must migrate the essence of the intelligence profession to the other six tribes, and make every citizen an “intelligence minuteman,” as Alessandro Politi put it so well in 1992.  I believe that intelligence is a mixed public-private good16, and that our policy makers will not make intelligent decisions, nor respect intelligence, until we first establish our value in the minds and hearts of those who pay taxes and elect politicians—the citizens.  

      Especially important will be our establishment of longer-term perspectives that hold policymakers accountable for foolish decisions with very bad consequences far out into the future, and our provision of useful intelligence to the public that will help citizens demand responsible decision-making with respect to public health, the environment, water and energy scarcity, cultures of violence, and other non-traditional threats to the future of our children. 

      My concept for a global revolution in intelligence affairs restores the connection between taxation, representation, and action.  Citizens pay taxes, are informed by public intelligence, hold their representatives accountable, and demand actions that are consistent with global security and prosperity, rather than decisions detrimental to the common good and secured via corrupt means. 

Information Peacekeeping from Public Intelligence 

Figure 7: Public Intelligence and Information Peacekeeping 

      Alvin Toffler in his book PowerShift talked about how information is a substitute for both wealth and violence and of course Sun Tzu spoke centuries ago of how the acme of skill is to defeat the enemy without fighting.  These and other ideas inspired me in the mid-1990’s to focus on the concept of information peacekeeping, and I concluded then, both in a paper for the U.S. Institute of Peace subsequently published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and in a chapter for one of the CYBERWAR books, that information peacekeeping is both the purest form of war, and the best means of avoiding and resolving conflict.17  But how, one might ask?  I will answer. 

      First, as intelligence professionals we have to admit to ourselves that we have failed to impact on policy where it matters most: on how the national treasure is spent.  In America we spend roughly $400 billion dollars a year on military “heavy metal” that is useful only 10% of the time; and we spend roughly $40 billion a year on each of the three other major domains of national power: diplomacy including economic, educational, and cultural initiatives; intelligence; and homeland security or counterintelligence.  We spend almost nothing, at the strategic level, on global public health or global environmental stabilization, areas where some estimate that $100 billion a year is needed for each of these two challenges—modest sums, considering the replacement cost of an entire population or planet.  As we move toward a future in which intelligence is very much a public good and laboring in the public service, I expect that we will spend less on conventional military forces, and more on “soft power.”18  At some point, if multi-cultural intelligence is effective and the seven tribes work together, I expect us to make the case for a global health service and universal health care; a fully-funded standing United Nations constabulary force with organic weapons, mobility, and communications capabilities; and also a fully-funded global “rescue fund” for stopping environmental degradation. 

      This answers the question of what we must buy in the way of instruments of national power.  It will take at least twenty years to achieve the influence that I believe we are capable of, and thus strike a better balance in how major Nations spend taxpayer dollars. 

      That leaves another question unanswered: when do we intervene in failed or rogue state situations or conditions?  Intelligence has failed here as well.  Kristan Wheaton, one of our most capable defense attaches, today supporting the International Tribunal, has written a fine book called The Warning Solution: Intelligent Analysis in the Age of Information Overload (AFCEA International Press, 2002). He explains why we have failed and focuses on the simple fact that policymakers are overwhelmed with $50 billion dollar problems right now, and do not have the time to consider $1 billion or even $5 billion “interventions.”  Robert Vickers, the National Intelligence Officer for Warning, a man who did what he could to get the U.S. policymakers to focus on Rwanda and Burundi, on Bosnia and Kosovo, in time to prevent genocide, has coined the term “inconvenient warning.”  In England they speak of “warning fatigue.”   

      In the aftermath of 9-11, when over 3,000 people died in a very dramatic way, there was much talk about how this would change our understanding of the world and our appreciation for how we must invest in alternative forms of national power.  Nothing has changed.  We have given billions of dollars to the same bad managers and old mind-sets that failed to protect America in the first place, and our President decided to pick a fight with Iraq while deliberately ignoring North Korean nuclear weaponization—possibly even keeping this information from the Senate19—he also decided to support outrageous Israeli incursions on the Palestinians; to avoid confronting the Saudi Arabian financiers of global terrorism; to accept Pakistani and Chinese and Russian deceptions; and to shun his responsibilities for the 32 complex emergencies, 66 countries with millions of refugees, 33 countries with massive starvation issues; 59 countries with plagues and epidemics; the 18 genocide campaigns; and the many other issues of water scarcity, resource waste, corruption, and censorship that contribute to what William Shawcross calls a state of endless war among and within nations.20  If intelligence is remedial education for policy-makers, as Dr. Gordon Oehler, one of the truly great CIA analyst-leaders has said, then we have failed here as well, over the course of many Presidents, not just the one we have now. 

      Norman Cousins, in his book The Pathology of Power (Norton, 1987), observes that governments cannot perceive great truths, only small and intermediate truths.  It is the people that can perceive great truths, such as the need for massive new endeavors to stabilize our world and deal with what can only be considered global transnational multi-cultural issues under the jurisdiction of no one nation, and of vital importance to all nations. 

      Inspired in part by Cousins, and Shawcross, and many others who have spoken at OSS conferences over the years, or whose books I have read and reviewed on Amazon.com, I came to the conclusion after 9-11 that another 5,000 Americans will die, within the American homeland, before the people become angry enough to demand change.   

      Change is not going to come from the bureaucracy, nor from the politicians and their corporate paymasters, until the people are aroused.   

      I expect at least 5,000 additional deaths across Australia, Europe, and Russia—all are as much at risk as America, and all countries and organizations have every reason to take intelligence reforms as seriously as I do. 

      We must arouse the people, by informing the people, through public intelligence.   

      In the 21st Century, as Carol Dumaine from Global Futures Partnership has noted, the lines among the various intelligence constituencies—I call them tribes—are blurring, and we are becoming, very slowly, a very large, informal, global network of professionals whose personal brand names matter more than our citizenship or specific responsibilities.  We are, possibly, the first layer of what may become the World Brain.   

      The question of “when” to intervene will be answered by the people once they become “smart mobs” within a World Brain architecture that contains eight integrated web-based elements open to all tribes and all individuals, as listed in the figure below, together with web-enabled means for tracking political and economic decisions at every level (local through global), for communicating with policy-makers, and for dismissing rascals who fail to listen. 

Figure 8: Changing How the World Views Intelligence 

      In my view, in the next five years, we have the following objectives: 

      First, to nurture and advance each of the seven tribes within each Nation.  Every Nation should manage an annual conference that brings the seven tribes together.  I would be glad if each Nation sent a delegation of seven, one person from each tribe, to the annual OSS conference, and held their own national conferences two weeks later, as the Swedes do.  Logically, there should be national security conferences at the local and provincial levels as well, and annual national and international meetings of each of the seven tribes. 

      Second, to devise generic solutions to those intelligence challenges that are of common concern to the seven tribes and to all Nations.  The Americans have the money—other nations underestimate their power to influence American spending, at least in this minor area for which there is no competing domestic constituency.  If these issues are raised at the Ministerial level, eventually there will be a Global Intelligence Council—including all seven tribes, not only the national tribe—able to make decisions on coordinated standards and investments.  There can be Regional Intelligence Centers.  There can be ISO standards for every aspect of the intelligence profession.21  There can be a generic analytic toolkit and a global program to ensure all information in all languages is available to every analyst.  There can be a global grid that links sources, experts, citizens, and policymakers in an interactive structured credible manner not now available through the Internet. 

      Third, to support the establishment as soon as possible of the United Nations Open Decision Information Network, UNODIN. The Secretary General announced in late September that humanitarian affairs and public information were the two areas where he wishes to achieve substantial reform.  There is much resistance to the Secretary General’s desire to migrate from an archipelago of seventy-seven libraries and introspective research centers, to a global network that is capable of collecting, processing, and analyzing multi-media information “on the fly” in order to provide actionable intelligence—decision-support to the United Nations leadership.  Right now the United Nations relies for its intelligence on American secrets and academic processing of open sources—this is the worst of all possible worlds.  Each Nation’s delegation to the United Nations must be educated about this situation, and must work together to sponsor a proper plan for using funding from both the Member nations and from benefactors like George Soros and Ted Turner, to create a World Intelligence Center, a global web-based UNODIN, and independent United Nations collection capabilities, perhaps developed in partnership with the emerging European intelligence community.  We must not allow American mistakes and mind-sets cripple or corrupt the future intelligence architecture of the community of nations. 

      Fourth, and last, to serve the citizen public.  Policymakers will come and go—and often be corrupt—but the people are forever—and often ignorant.  What we do is honorable, but we are in our infancy.  We have a very long road ahead of us.  If we evolve intelligently, by the end of this decade we will see a public intelligence network that empowers the citizens to the point that they will establish more balanced allocations of money across the varied instruments of national power; they will improve our responsiveness to early warning; and they will insist that we have the necessary investments in a global multi-cultural network capable of providing 24/7 intelligence support to diplomatic operations, to law enforcement operations, to ethical business operations, to academic and cultural outreach operations, and to humanitarian as well as environmental sustainability operations.  

      Only by earnestly supporting and educating the people, and by establishing international standards, can the profession of intelligence achieve its full potential. 

      The new craft of intelligence is the best hope for achieving global stability and prosperity though informed decision-making at every level of society, within each of the seven tribes that comprise the “brains” of any nation.  Millions more will die before we get it right.  There is no time to waste; we must start now. St. 
 
 
 
 

About the Author 

Mr. Robert David Steele (Vivas) is an Intelligence Coach and sponsor of the annual Global Information Forum that brings together representatives from the seven intelligence tribes.  Over the course of ten years he has trained over 6,000 professionals from over 40 countries.  His company also provides open source intelligence (OSINT) support to governments and corporations, in partnership with InfoSphere SA.  He spent his early years, two decades, resident in Latin America and Asia as the son of an oil company executive.  This included four years and ten coups d’etat in South Viet-Nam.  His professional experience includes four years active duty as an infantry officer in company grade command and staff positions; ten years as a clandestine service case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency, serving in three deep cover clandestine tours overseas, including one in a combat zone and one focused on terrorism, followed by three headquarters tours including responsibilities for counterintelligence, satellite programming, and advanced information technology programming; ten years concurrent years as a field grade reserve intelligence officer for the U.S. Marine Corps, specializing in national and service-level intelligence planning; five years as the senior civilian responsible for creating the Marine Corps Intelligence Command and for programming General Defense Intelligence Program funds; and—since resigning from the government in 1993—ten years as the foremost international proponent for open source intelligence (OSINT) and more recently, for intelligence reform oriented toward the standardization of open transparent standards that permit the creation of “Smart Nations.”  In passing, he co-founded the Information Warfare Conference (InfoWarCon) and has spent time on asymmetric warfare issues and related strategic and tactical concepts.  Mr. Steele holds an AB in Political Science with a thesis on multinational corporation operations and home-host country issues; an MA in International Relations with a thesis on predicting revolution; and an MBA in Public Administration with a thesis on strategic and tactical information management for national security.  He is a distinguished graduate of the Naval War College, and has earned a certificate in Intelligence Policy  from Harvard University.  Among his honors are inclusion in Year in Computers 2000, being twice listed in the Microtimes 100 list of industry leaders and unsung heroes creating the future, and awards or certificates of accomplishment from the Department of State, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Department of Defense.  He is an elected member of Pi Alpha Alpha, the national honor society for public administration, and of the Hackers, a group founded by Stewart Brand to bring together the top cybernauts responsible for creating the digital virtual world.  Mr. Steele is the author of ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (AFCEA, 2000 and OSS, 2002) and THE NEW CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE: Personal, Public, & Political—Citizen’s Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption (OSS, 2002) as well as many monographs, chapters, and articles on information and intelligence strategy and operations.  He has books in progress or planning on each of the remaining six intelligence tribes, as well as a final book on The Ethics of Intelligence: God, Man, Spies, Terrorists, & Carpetbaggers.  He is the ranking reviewer on Amazon for non-fiction books about national security, information, intelligence, and related ethical issues.

 

Endnotes