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Excellency,
The purpose of this letter is to appraise all elements of your government, through your good offices, of the status of legislation for an Open Source (Intelligence) Agency in the United States of America, and the coincident emergence of global Public Intelligence Networks addressing each of the ten global threats identified by the High Level Threat Panel of the United Nations, where I am proud to note the service of LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft as the US representative.
There are two competing legislative proposals. One elevates the OpenSourceCenter of the Central Intelligence Agency, a cosmetic renaming of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, and puts the Open Source Agency under the direct oversight of the Director of National Intelligence. This proposal is fatally flawed and should not succeed. The more sensible proposal, supported by Dr. Joseph Markowitz (the only director of the Community Open Source Program Office until it was destroyed by the secret intelligence mafia) and myself, seeks to create an Open Source Agency that is a sister agency to the Broadcasting Board of Governors that oversees public diplomacy. In this way, public intelligence will support public diplomacy, without any obstacles to full and open sharing. We have also proposed a diplomatic Office of Information Sharing Treaties and Agreements. Hearings will be held in September under the auspices of the House Homeland Security Committee (Sub-Committee on Intelligence, Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk Assessment). We cannot say with certainty when the two competing proposals will meet in conference, but we have nominated Dr. James Billington, Librarian of Congress, to be the first Director of this new agency, and are hopeful that the legislation will be voted on prior to the Congressional recess on 6 October. I earnestly ask for your support in communicating to the U.S. Government via all appropriate channels your support for a diplomatic and public agency, rather than an agency subordinate to the secret intelligence mind-sets and protocols that prevent full and proper sharing of information. When fully funded, I expect this agency to dispose of US$3 billion a year, half for nurturing global public intelligence networks focused on the ten global threats that are not now adequately addressed, if addressed at all, by secret intelligence agencies; and half to fund open source software solutions for state and local government, non-governmental organizations, and national governments, so that they can have full access to available open sources of intelligence, and also contribute local knowledge where they desire to do so, without having to buy expensive proprietary software. The STRONG ANGEL program funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is our model, and we believe that Google.org and Amazon will prove to be decisive contributors as well.
I believe it is important to stress that in this context intelligence refers to decision support. For too long, the word intelligence has had connotations of spying and covert action. The Brahimi Report, the good efforts of MajGen Patrick Cammaert, then Military Advisor to the Secretary General, and my own publication of the book PEACEKEEPING INTELLIGENCE: Emerging Concepts for the Future (on display at 1 UN Plaza in the lobby) have finally cleansed the word. As the Secretary General now understands, and as most countries are beginning to understand, we have too many spies and not enough intelligence qua decision support. I solicit your active engagement in supporting this vision.
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Our web site, is in the process of being reconfigured to provide a hub for sharing intelligence about each of the ten threats. This is strictly an interim measure, intended in part to show Congress in September how foolish it is to be spending $60 billion a year on secrets that are often incomplete, late, or inaccurate, and virtually nothing at all on eight of the ten threats identified by the High Level Threat Panel as being of truly global importance.
I believe that C. K. Prahalad, in his book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, correctly has identified the lever with which to move the world. If we can create a global open source or public intelligence network that makes the following eight functions available free online for anyone with access to an Internet kiosk or even a mobile telephone, I believe we can unleash the entrepreneurial spirit of the poor, at the same time that citizen observers can begin the process of reducing immoral capitalism and corruption among elites who choose to sacrifice the public good for private gain.
Last year many of you accepted my invitation to send a member of your staff to our conference at the Sheraton Premiere. This year I wish to again extend one waiver of the conference fee, a value of over US$1,000 for the single person your government selects to represent its interests at the forthcoming January 2007 conference on Information Operations, Open Source Intelligence, and Peacekeeping Intelligence (IOP), to be held at the Hyatt Fair Lakes just beyond Tysons Corner, Vienna, and Oakton in Northern Virginia. We expect 250 international participants. It would be helpful if your government’s OSINT representative registered prior to 1 October 2006, at which time this waiver of the conference fee will no longer be offered. There is no limit to funded participants—some governments send three (one civilian, one military, one law enforcement) or more. The enclosed form can be used for both purposes.
Should you or your staff desire a personal briefing on OSINT and why it matters to all government departments not receiving secret intelligence support, and to the leaders of provinces and cities interested in using decision support to lower their risks and costs while increasing their tax revenues, and to your many small businesses (90% of most countries gross domestic production) that cannot afford expensive commercial intelligence, I would welcome an invitation to visit your Embassy for an interactive dialog.
Very respectfully,
Robert David Steele (Vivas)
Chief Executive Officer