Forthcoming in Government Information Quarterly (Summer 1996)

CREATING A SMART NATION:Strategy, Policy, Intelligence, & Information

Robert David Steele-Vivas'

Introduction

This paper outlines both the requirement for, and a recommended approach to, thecreation of a National Information Strategy. Despite the fact that we have leaders in both theAdministration and the Legislature who understand the critical importance of information asthe foundation for both national security and national competitiveness at the dawn of the 21stCentury, our leadership has failed to articulate a strategy and a policy with integrates nationalintelligence (spies, satellites), government information, and private sector informationobjectives and resources.

In the Age of Information, the absence of a National Information Strategy istantamount to abdication and surrender--the equivalent of having failed to field an Army inWorld War II, or having failed to establish a nuclear deterrent in the Cold War. This paperis both an orientation for citizens and bureaucrats, and a call to arms for policy makers andlegislators.' It is a fundamental premise of this paper that in the Age of Information, the mostimportant role of government--at the Federal, State, or Local level--will be the nurturing ofthe "information commons"2 National security will be largely a question of protectinginformation infrastructure, intellectual property, and the integrity of data; nationalcompetitiveness will be completely redefined--corporations and individuals are competitive ina global economy--it is the role of nations to be "attractive" to investors. How nation'smanage their information commons will be a critical factor in determining "nationalattractiveness" for investment in the 21st Century. 3 This paper will address and define the

Mr. Robert D. Steele-Vivas, Chairman & CEO of OPEN SOURCE SOLUTIONSGroup, is a veteran of twenty years in national and defense intelligence. Mr. Steele holdsadvanced degrees in international relations and public administration, completed the HarvardExecutive Program (Intelligence Policy), and is a distinguished graduate of the U.S. NavalWar College.

2 Lee Felsenstein of the Interval Research Corporation, is the originator of the term"information commons". He can be reached at (415) 354-0857, or <lee@interval.com>.

3 I am indebted to Ms. Katarina Svensson, Ph. L. of Lund University, who taught methis concept in a comment made while she was attending OSS '95, our forth internationalsymposium on "National Security & National Competitiveness: Open Source Solutions".

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challenge of change; the information commons and information continuum; the theory andpractice of intelligence in the age of information; the ethical, ecological, and evolutionaryimplications of this approach; the need to reinvent and integrate national intelligence (spiesand satellites) into a larger network of distributed intelligence largely accessible to citizens;and finally, the concrete elements which must comprise the National Information Strategy.

The Challenge of Change

As we enter the 21st Century, we are faced with several dramatic challenges,confronted by order of magnitude changes that defy resolution under our existing paradigmsand organizational or policy structures.

The most obvious challenge to government as a whole is the changing nature of thethreat. Since the rise of the nation-state; with its citizenship, taxation, and standing armies;the most fundamental national security issue for governments has been the sanctity of itsborders and the safety of its citizens and property abroad. Physical security maintained bythreat of force was easy to understand and easy to implement. Today, we face a world inwhich transnational criminal gangs have more money, better computers, better information,and vastly more motivation to act and to act ruthlessly, than most states. Perhaps even morefrightening, we face a world in which we are allowing technology and limited policyunderstanding to create very significant masses of dispossessed and alienated populations--including sizeable elements within our own borders; and at the same time we are ignoring ourgovernment's obligations to provide for home defense, for electronic civil defense, in theprivate sector.4

Interestingly, her views are consistent with those of Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, whodefines "U.S. companies" as those that employ U.S. citizens and pay U.S. taxes.

4 "Hackers" are not the threat. As I have noted on many occasions, hackers are anational resource because they are forcing us to acknowledge that "the emperor is naked".Sherry Turkle, in The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Simon & Schuster,1984) examines the origins of "hacking" at MIT, and demonstrates conclusively that thehacker ethic is identical to "the right stuff associated with the early astronauts--both push theedge of the envelope striving for excellence. The actual "threat" to our national informationinfrastructure begins with bad engineering and culminates primarily in authorized users doingunauthorized things. David Icove, Karl Seger, and William Von Storch note in COMPUTERCRIME: A CrimeFighter's Handbook (O'Reilly & Associates, 1995) that economic lossesassociated with computers are attributed as follows: 55% to human error and 20% to physicaldisruption such as natural disasters or power failures (one could say poor computer design);10% to dishonest employees; 9% to disgruntled employees; 4% to viruses; and only 1-3% tooutsider attacks.

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There is another important change requiring government diligence, and that is thechange in the role of information as the "blood" of every enterprise, every endeavor. Threeaspects of this change merit enumeration: first, each citizen, whether they are conscious ofthis fact or not, is increasingly dependent on accurate and timely information in order to befully functional; second, the "information explosion", like a major climatic change, is makingit difficult for citizens accustomed to slower times and simpler tools to adjust to therequirements of life in the fast lane of the information superhighway; and finally, mostcitizens, stockholders, and business managers do not realize that we have nationaltelecommunications, power, and financial networks that have been designed without regard tosecurity or survivability. 5 It is not safe, today, to work and play in cyber-space, and we donot even have a body of law that requires communications and computing providers to assuretheir customers that their services and products are safe and reliable!6

In brief, we now have an information environment in which every citizen needs to bea collector, producer, and consumer of "intelligence", or decision-support; and at the sametime we have an extraordinarily complex and fragile information infrastructure which can bedestroyed, disrupted, and corrupted by single individuals or small groups now capable ofattaching our information infrastructure nodes through electronic means or simple physicaldestruction--and able to do so anonymously.

Defining The "Information Commons'

The "information commons"can be viewed--as the public commons for grazing sheepwas once viewed in old England--as a shared environment where information is available forpublic exploitation to the common good. There are three major information "industries" thatmust contribute their fair share to the commons if the commons is to be robust and useful.

The first, relatively unknown to most citizens, is the U.S. intelligence community,traditionally associated with spies and satellites. In fact, between 40% and 80% of the raw

5 The seminal work in this area is Winin Schwartau, INFORMATION WARFARE: Chaoson the Electronic Superhighway (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1994. Thoughtful articles on thevulnerability of specific networks include: Maj Gerald R. Hust, "Taking DownTelecommunications", School of Advanced Airpower Studies, 1993; Maj Thomas E. Griffith,Jr., "Strategic Attack of National Electrical Systems", School of Advanced Airpower Studies,October 1994; and H.D. Arnold, J. Hyukill, J. Keeney, and A Cameron, "TargetingFinancial Systems as Centers of Gravity: 'Low Intensity' to 'No Intensity" Conflict", DefenseAnalysis (Vol. 10 No. 2, 1994).

6 One major U.S. government agency, extremely competent in computing, interceptedall communications and computing hardware and software reaching its loading docks for aperiod of one year. It found 500 separate viruses contained in shrink-wrapped productscoming straight from the factory.

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data going into the final products of the intelligence community comes from "open sources",from public information legally available. 7 Unfortunately, this $25 billion dollar a yearcommunity buries its open source acquisitions in the "cement overcoat" of classification, withthe result that most of the useful public information acquired by the intelligence community attaxpayer expenses is not in fact made available to the citizen-taxpayer.

The second, well-known to most citizens as a massive bureaucracy which generatesregulations and imposes taxation, is the government. The government is not, however,known for making information available to the public, and this is an extraordinary failure, forit turns out that the government is not only acquiring enormous stores of information attaxpayer expense, on every imaginable topic, but the government also serves as a magnet forvast quantities of information which it receives "free" from other governments, from thinktanks, lobbyists, universities, and every other purveyor of a viewpoint desiring to influencethe bureaucrats that comprise the government. In the age of information, governments musttransition from the industrial model (vast bureaucracies attempting to deliver goods andservices using a hierarchical structure to control resources) to the "Third Wave" model (smallexpert nodes nurturing distributed centers of information excellence).8 There are somesignificant capabilities within government intended to address this issue, including theNational Technical Information Service (NTIS) in the Department of Commerce and the

-Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) in the Department of Defense, but by andlarge government information is out of control. If the intelligence community is a 25 billiona year industry, then the U.S. government can safely be assumed to be at least a 250 billion ayear industry.

The third "industry" capable of contributing to the information commons is the mostimportant, the most diverse, and the most dynamic--it is the private sector. This hasextraordinary implications for both governance and enterprise in the 21st Century, because offour characteristics of "knowledge battle" in the 21st Century that governments mustrecognize if they are to do their part: first, 90-95% of knowledge is open, not secret--governments that continue to believe in secrecy as the paramount element of executive action

7 The Director of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, Mr. Ward Elcock, hasstated publicly that 80% of the input for finished intelligence products come from opensources; the Canadian service also makes it a point to publish unclassified intelligencereports. Although the U.S. intelligence community only acknowledges 40% as the officialcontribution of open sources, the former Director for Science & Technology has statedpublicly that the figure is actually 70%; it is possible he mis-spoke.

8 Although several authors have addressed reinvention and reengineeering imperatives inrelation to the information age, including Peter Drucker, none have done more to help publicunderstanding than Alvin and Heidi Toffler, with their books PowerShift: Knowledge,Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century (Bantam, 1990), and WAR AND ANTI-WAR: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century (Little Brown, 1993).

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will fail; second, the center of gravity is in the civil sector--governments that continue to relyon their military and their police and exclude from consideration the role of private sectorcapabilities, will fail; third, information today is distributed-governments that persist inrelying upon "central intelligence" structures will fail; and finally, information is multi-lingual--governments that do not invest in analysts and observers able to move easily in multi-lingual environments will fail. If the intelligence community is a $25 billion a year industry,and the U.S. government is a $250 billion a year industry, the private sector can safely beassumed to be a $2.5 trillion a year industry-do we see a pattern here? The nationalinformation community, in short, is comprised of three concentric circles of investment whichare not, at this time, contributing a single datum to the "information commons".

The Information Continuum

The "information continuum" for any nation is comprised of the nine majorinformation consuming and information producing sectors of society: schools, universities,libraries, businesses, private investigators and information brokers, media, government,defense, and intelligence.

It is very important to understand three basic aspects of the information continuum:

First, each organization within each sector pays for and controls both experts and datathat could contribute to the information commons. Perhaps most importantly from thetaxpayer and government point of view, these distributed centers of excellence are maintainedat no cost to the government.

Second, it is important to understand that what any one organization publishes for saleor for free, whether in hard-copy or electronically, represents less than 20%--often less than10%--of what they are actually holding in their databases or is known to their employees.

Third, and here we begin to set the stage for why a National Information Strategy isessential, it is essential for both citizens and bureaucrats to realize that across this informationcontinuum there are "iron curtains" between the sectors, "bamboo curtains" betweenorganizations in each sector, and "plastic curtains" between individuals within organizations.

The role of government in the 21st Century is to provide incentives and to facilitatethe sharing and exchange of information between the sectors, the organizations, and theindividuals that comprise the national information continuum--and to work with othergovernments to create an international and transnational information commons.

Schools and universities have both expert faculty and willing student labor as well assignificant electronic storage facilities. They also tend to have a multi-lingual population thatcan do very fine data filtering and data entry work. Two examples: the Monterey Institute ofInternational Studies (MIIS), which uses graduate students fluent in Russian, Korean,Vietnamese, and Arabic to maintain the world's best database on the proliferation of nuclear,

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chemical, and biological weapons; and Mercyhurst College, which uses undergraduatestudents to produce newsletters on narcotics trafficking and other trends on interest to lawenforcement agencies. Universities can also provide technical assistance and projectassistance--one very fine example of this capability, which provides direct support to localgovernment agencies as well as small and medium-sized businesses, in the InfoMalldeveloped by Syracuse University. 9

Libraries represent "distributed knowledge" in the best possible way, and not onlyprovide direct access for citizens, but also skilled librarians who can serve as intermediariesin global discovery and discrimination. Examples of unique contributions in the library arenaare represented by the University of Colorado, which created Uncover Reveal to distributeelectronically the tables of contents of all journals it processes; the Special LibrariesAssociation which brings together corporate and association librarians; and the Library-Oriented List Service developed by Mr. Charles Bailey, Jr.' °

Businesses not only hold significant amounts of data that they generate themselves,including customer preference data that could contribute to aggregate industry studies; butthey also pay for great quantities of data, such as market surveys, which could after a shortpassage of time be eligible for sharing with smaller businesses and universities. One of thechallenges facing nations which desire to be attractive to international investors is that ofcreating "information-rich" environments within which corporations can be globallycompetitive. One way of doing this is by developing information consortia and protocols forreleasing into the information commons such data as might have already been exploited bythe company that collected it or paid for it, but which could now have a residual value for thelarger community."

Private investigators and information brokers are addressed separately because theyplay a unique role in a global economy driven by information, in which information is--asAlvin and Heidi Toffler have noted--a substitute for wealth, violence, labor, and capital. Thecapabilities of organizations dedicated to finding and processing information can beextraordinary, and worth every penny of investment. It is important to note that one of themost significant changes to occur in relation to government information in the past two

9 Points of contact are respectively Dr. Christopher Fitz, at (408) 647-4193, Mr. RobertHeibel at (814) 824-2117, and Dr. Geoffrey Fox, at (315) 443-1722.

10 Points of contact are respectively Ms. Brenda Bailey at (303) 758-3030; Mr DavidBender at (202) 234-4700; and Mr. Charles Bailey, Jr. at (713) 743-9804.

" During an annual conference of middle-aged hackers, popularly known as the LakeTahoe Conference, there was a discussion of what return on investment one received fromvolunteering information into the Internet. The general consensus was that for every piece ofinformation that one contributed to the commons, 100 pieces were received in return, ofwhich 10 were actually useful. Ten to one return on investment--this is instructive.

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decades is that the "information explosion" and the free market economy have led to theestablishment of private sector capabilities which are superior to traditional governmentcollection and processing mechanisms. Examples of "best in class" private sector"intelligence" capabilities include Oxford Analytica, with its global network of human expertsmonitoring political and economic events world-wide; FIND/SVP, able to acquire anydocument anywhere; Kroll Associates, the world's best corporate investigative firm; BurwellEnterprises, publisher of the Burwell Directory of Information Brokers; LEXIS-NEXIS, thepremier "first stop" in commercial online searching; and the Institute of ScientificInformation, publisher of the Science Citation Index and the Social Science Citation Index,both extraordinary means of identifying current and emerging knowledge and the expertsbehind the knowledge.' 2

The utility of media information for policy, economic planning, military contingencyplanning, and law enforcement is almost always severely under-estimated. In fact,journalists, and especially investigative journalists, are extraordinarily talented, energetic, andwell-connected individuals who produce very significant and accurate reports which can beintegrated into finished reports on virtually any topic. It also merits comments that mostjournalists only publish roughly ten percent of what they know. James Baker, formerSecretary of State among other important positions, notes in his memoirs that "In terms offine-turning our own work, staying abreast of the press commentary was particularlyimportant."' 3 Colin Powell, in his own book, notes that when he was Military Assistant tothen Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger, he "preferred the Early Bird with itscompendium of newspaper stories", to the "cream of overnight intelligence" which wasdelivered to the Secretary by a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) courier each morning.' 4 Ina direct and practical example, the U.S. Southern Command, working with the Los AlamosNational Laboratory, was able--at very low cost--to exploit Latin American investigativereporting such that tactical interdiction missions could be planned and executed basedprimarily on media reporting." This is not to say that media sources are superior to

12 Points of contact are: for Oxford Analytica, Mr. Robin Porteus at (44 1865) 261-600; at FIND/SVP, Mr. Joseph Cositore at (212) 645-4500; at Kroll Associates, Mr. TomFedorek at (212) 593-1000; at Burwell Enterprises, Ms. Joanne Paolino at (713) 486-3500extension 2353; at LEXIS-NEXIS, Mr. Jeffrey Krattenmaker at (513) 865-1877; and at ISI,Mr. Frank Spieker at (215) 386-0100, extension 1374.

13 James A. Baker, III, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War & Peace, 1989-1992(G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1995), page 154.

14 Colin Powell, My American Journey (Random House, 1995), page 293.

15 This exciting story, by the principal investigator at Los Alamos National Laboratory,is contained in James Holden-Rhodes, SHARING THE SECRETS: Open Source Intelligenceand the War on Drugs (University of New Mexico Press, 1994). The various laboratories ofthe Department of Energy are in fact the Nation's most important open source intelligence

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classified intelligence, only that they cannot be discounted and are especially useful to thosein the private sector and in much of government who are not authorized access to classifiedinformation.

Finally we have the government, including state and local governments and theirinformation holdings, the Department of Defense, and the intelligence community. Thesewill not be examined in detail. However, it bears mention that in the absence of a policysupportive of information archiving and public dissemination--and the means forimplementing that policy--vast stores of information reaching the U.S. government, includinginformation collected and processed by contractors to the U.S. government, are being"buried" each day, needlessly depriving the public of significant information resources. Forthose in government who are overwhelmed by their own internal "information explosion",and at a loss for how to handle their archiving, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests,and the complex issues of copyright, there is a solution: NTIS.' 6

Intelligence in the Age of Information

Now, having explored in general terms the elements of the information commons andthe information continuum, we must focus on the specifics of intelligence in the age ofinformation. 7 Among the core concepts that government and private sector informationmanagers must adopt and promulgate:

-- Espionage, whether by governments or corporations, is less cost-effective thatintelligent exploitation of open sources. Unfortunately, most intelligence communities are

asset, and a very important example of why we can no longer afford to compartmentclassified intelligence from "rest of government" information.

16 NTIS (National Technical Information Service) is a self-sustaining organization underthe oversight of the Department of Commerce which plays a significant role in helping thefederal government increase the dissemination of unclassified information to the privatesector. The existing and easily-scalable global multi-media dissemination capability,including an innovative partnership with Kinko's, is the first step in bringing 21st Centurystandards of accountability and accessibility to government records created at taxpayerexpense. The National Technical Information Service is a critical player in helping allelements of the federal government, on a voluntary basis, establish accessible and accountableelectronic records; embed bibliographic structure in their records; establish an online presencethrough FedWorld; and dramatically increase public access to useful information.

7 My keynote speech to the Association for Global Strategic Information (AGSI)contained many of these operational concepts, and has been reprinted as "ACCESS: thetheory and practice of Competitor Intelligence", Journal of AGSI (July 1994). My mostdeveloped work in this area, funded by the French government, is my white paper, ACCESS:Theory and Practice of Intelligence in the Age of Informnnation (26 October 1993).

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trained, equipped, and organized to do secrets, and they are not well-positioned to collect andintegrate open sources--public information--into their analysis and production processes. Thisneeds to be changed and is addressed at the conclusion of this article.

-- The best target for the application of intelligence methods (requirements analysis,collection management, analytical fusion, forecasting, visualization of information) is not acompetitor organization, but rather the customer and the environment.

-- Decision-support (intelligence) is the ultimate objective of all informationprocesses. One must carefully distinguish between data, which is the raw text, signal, orimage; information, which is collated data of generic interest; and intelligence, which isinformation that has been tailored to support a specific decision by a specific person about aspecific question at a specific time and place. Most government information and so-calledintelligence products are so generic as to be relatively useless in directing action. Only wheninformation serves as the foundation for intelligence, can its cost be justified.

-- Distributed information is more valuable and yet less expensive than centralizedinformation. The art of information governance is the 21st Century will focus on harnessingdistributed centers of excellence rather than on creating centralized repositories ofinformation.

-- "Just in time" information collection and intelligence production is far lessexpensive and far more useful to the consumer of intelligence than "just in case" collectionand archiving. '1

-- The value of information is a combination of its content, the context within whichit is being used, and the timeliness with which it is obtained and exploited. This means thatinformation which has been used by an organization declines in value when taken out ofcontext and after time has passed. This in turn means that there is every reason for anorganization to barter, share, or sell information (e.g. market research) once it's "prime"value point has passed....this is especially important to an organization as a means ofincreasing its acquisition of new information which--in its own context and time--has greatervalue than when it was lying fallow in the information commons.

-- The new paradigm for information acquisition is the "diamond paradigm", inwhich the consumer, analyst, collector, and source are all able to communicate directly withone another. The old paradigm, the "linear paradigm" in which the consumer went to theanalyst who went to the collector who went to the source, and back up the chain it went, isnot only too slow, but it is not workable when you have a fast-moving topic with manynuances that are difficult to communicate. Today and in the future, the information

'8 Paul Evan Peters, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information , isthe originator of this concept. He can be reached at (202) 296-5098.

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manager's greatest moment is going to be when a consumer can be put in direct touch withexactly the right source who can answer the question directly; at low cost, by creating newknowledge tailored to the needs of the consumer, at that exact moment.

-- The most important information resource is the employee. Every employee mustbe a collector, producer, and consumer of information and intelligence. This is called the"corporate hive"' 9 model, and is the foundation for a creating "smart nation". If everypersonnel description does not list as task number one: "collect and report information usefulto the organization", and if organizations do not provide a vehicle (e.g. Lotus Notes) and aprotocol for sharing information among employees, then by definition the organization is"dumb".

-- Published knowledge is old knowledge. The art of intelligence in the 21st Centurywill be less concerned with integrating old knowledge, and more concerned with usingpublished knowledge as a path to exactly the right source or sources who can create newknowledge tailored to a new situation, in real-time.2

-- The threat (or the answer) changes depending on the level of analysis. The mostfundamental flaw in both intelligence and information today is the failure to establish, foreach question, the desired level of analysis. There are four levels of analysis: strategic,operational, tactical, and technical. These are in turn influenced by the three major contextsof inquiry: civil, military, and geographic.21 A simple example from the military sphere will

19 Kevin Kelly, OUT OF CONTROL: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization (Addison-Wesley, 1994), provides a brilliant exposition of why, in a very complex global systemdriven by information, organic self-healing and relatively autonomous elements must beaccepted and nurtured--it is impossible to control complexity in a centralized pre-plannedfashion. Those concerned about the fragility of our information infrastructure would do wellto read Kelly's work, as well as one pre-dating him by ten years, Charles Perrow's NORMALACCIDENTS: Living with High-Risk Technologies (Basic Books, 1984). Simple systems havesingle points of failure easy to diagnose. Complex systems have multiple points of failuredifficult to diagnose. Today we have a constellation of very complex information systems.

20 We keep forgetting that books were generally written as dissertations or startedroughly ten years before finally appearing in print; articles are generally ten months or soold; and even newspaper stories are at least a day if not 3-10 days old. Within academiccircles, it is well-known that if one is not receiving the drafts of works in progress and thepre-prints, it is simply not possible to be a serious competitor in the field.

21 At the strategic level, civil allies, geographic location, and military sustainability arecritical. At the operational level, civil instability, geographic resources, and militaryavailability are important. At the tactical level, civil psychology, geographic terrain, andmilitary reliability determine outcomes. At the technical level, civil infrastructure,geographic atmosphere, and military lethality are the foundation for planning and

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illustrate the importance of this issue. Examining the capability of specific Middle Easterncountry in the mission area of tank warfare, it was found that while the initial threatassessment (by someone unfamiliar with the levels of analysis approach) was very highbecause this country had a great many modern tanks, in fact the threat varied significantlydepending on the level of analysis. Only at the technical level (lethality) was the threat high.At the tactical level (reliability) the threat was in fact very low because the crews were nottrained and had poor morale, and the tanks were generally in storage and not beingmaintained. At the operational level (availability) the threat increased to medium becausethere were large numbers of tanks widely scattered over the country. At the strategic level(sustainability) the threat dropped again to low because it would be almost impossible for thiscountry to carry out extended tank warfare operations, even on its own terrain. Thisapproach can and should be applied to every question for which intelligence--tailoredinformation--is to be provided.

Ethics, Ecology, & Evolution

Our "industrial age" concept of intelligence and information has relied heavily on acentralized, top-down "command and control" model in which the question virtuallydetermined the answer, and the compartmentation of knowledge--its restriction to an elitefew--has been a dominant feature of information operations. This article suggests that thetrue value of "intelligence" lies in its informative value, a value which increases withdissemination. The emphasis within our government, therefore, should be on optimizing ourexploitation of open sources, increasing the exchange of information between the intelligencecommunity, the rest of government, and the private sector; and the production of unclassifiedintelligence. This could be called the "open books" approach to national intelligence.2

As we prepare to enter the 21st Century, we must ask ourselves some fundamentalquestions. How do we define national security? Who is the customer for nationalintelligence? What is our objective? There appears to be every reason to discard oldconcepts of national security and national intelligence, and to focus on developing integratednation-wide information and intelligence networks which recognize that national securitydepends on a solid economy and a stable environment; that the center of gravity for progress

employment. This is an original analysis model developed by the author while serving as theDeputy Director and senior civilian at the new Marine Corps Intelligence Center in Quantico,Virginia. At the time, examining all products from the Central Intelligence Agency and theDefense Intelligence Agency then in hand, the author discovered that none of the productssupported a specific decision, and that none of the products was related to any specific levelof analysis. Everything was generic, topical, a "snapshot", virtually useless to a policy-maker or commander.

2 This section draws on a full-length article, "E3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution, andIntelligence", published in the Whole Earth Review (Fall, 1992).

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in the future is the citizen, not the bureaucrat; and that our objective must be to enableinformed governance and informed citizenship, not simply to monitor conventional andnuclear threats.

I am convinced that the "ethics" of national intelligence requires a dramatic reductionin government secrecy as well as corporate secrecy. After twenty years as an intelligenceprofessional, I am certain that secrets are inherently pathological, undermining reasonedjudgement and open discussion." Secrets are also abused, used to protect bureaucraticinterests rather than genuine equities. Consider the following statement by Mr. Rodley B.McDaniel, then Executive Secretary of the National Security Council:

"Everybody who's a real practitioner, and I'm sure you're not all naivein this regard, realizes that there are two uses to which security classification isput: the legitimate desire to protect secrets, and protection of bureaucratic turf.As a practitioner of the real world, it's about 90 bureaucratic turf; 10legitimate protection of secrets as far as I'm concerned."24

A wise man once said "A nation's best defense is an educated citizenry." 1 firmlybelieve that in the age of information, national intelligence--unclassified national intelligence--

: must be embedded in every decision, every process, every organization. The "ethics" ofopenness need to apply to the private sector as well as to the government. Universitiesshould not be allowed to hold copyrights or patents if they are not able or willing todisseminate knowledge or commercialize technology. Corporations should be allowed tomonopolize patents solely to protect archaic production processes.

The environment in which we live, in which we hope to prosper and secure thecommon defense, is our most important intelligence target, and our most neglectedintelligence target. Both our traditional intelligence community, and our more conventionalgovernment information community, both appear reluctant to take on the hard issues ofhonestly evaluating the larger context within which we export munitions, keep the price of

23 Although Alvin and Heidi Toffler have called me "the greatest enemy of secrecy" inthe United States (in their book on WAR AND ANTI-WAR, supra note 7), that is not quitecorrect. I am an enemy of unnecessary secrecy because it costs a great deal--not only indollars but also in terms of opportunities. My complete views are set forth in my Testimonyand Comments on Executive Order 12356, "National Security Information", provided byinvitation to the Presidential Inter-Agency Task Force on National Security Information,Department of Justice, 9 June 1993. I believe that we should all be strong advocates of "noclassification without justification".

24 He was speaking in 1990 to a group of government employees selected for increasedresponsibility and attending a Harvard Executive Program. Cited in Thomas P. Coakley(ed.), CI: Issues of Command and Control (National Defense University, 1991), page 68.

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gasoline under two dollars a gallon, permit unfettered gang warfare and exploitation withinour immigrant communities, and so on. At what point are we going to establish anarchitecture for integrating federal, state, and local data about the natural environment, andfor producing useful strategic analyses about specific political, economic, and cultural issues?The following paraphrased observation by Ms. Ellen Seidman, Special Assistant to thePresident on the National Economic Council, is instructive:

CIA reports only focus on foreign economic conditions. They don't dodomestic economic conditions and so I cannot get a strategic analysis thatcompares and contrasts strengths and weaknesses of the industries I amresponsible for. On the other hand, Treasury, Commerce, and the Fed areterrible at the business of intelligence--they don't know how to produceintelligence."

Taken in combination, what we do out of ignorance to our environment each daythrough our existing energy, trade, defense, housing, transportation, and education policies isfar worse than a whole series of Chernobyls.

Finally, if the Nation is to evolve, if it is to "harness the distributed intelligence of theNation", as Vice President Al Gore has taken to saying in his many speeches on the NationalInformation Infrastructure, then we must come to grips with the fact that we are "losing ourmind" as a Nation, and that education is the "boot camp" for national intelligence. We mustcatalyze our educational system, including corporate training and continuing educationprograms, and realize that openness is a powerful catalyst for bringing to bear the combinedintelligence of every citizen and resident--instead of "National Intelligence" (spies andsatellites) bearing the burden for informing policy, we should rely upon "nationalintelligence" (smart people), and use our distributed network of educated scholars, workers,information brokers, journalists, civil servants, and soldiers as the foundation for smartpolicy. Upon such a foundation, spies and satellites can add a decisive value--without such afoundation, spies and satellites are irrelevant.

Reinventing National Intelligence

Now we can finally turn to the reinvention of the national intelligence community astraditionally defined, for in reinventing this community, we can inspire the reinvention ofgovernment information and the establishment of a national information commons.26

" Ms. Seidman was speaking to the Open Source Lunch Club on 11 January 1994. Herobservations were subsequently reported in OSS NOTICES 94-001 dated 21 February 1994.

6 Among my many speeches and publications in this area, the following are especiallypertinent: "National Intelligence Strategy--Needed Initiatives", speech to the NationalDefense University Foundation/National Industrial Security Association Symposium on The

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By and large, the elements of the national intelligence community--the CentralIntelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the NationalReconnaissance Office (NRO), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Federal Bureau ofInvestigation (FBI), have all performed to expectations. Where we have gone awry was withour expectations. We focused this community on Soviet secrets, and we funded thiscommunity to collect and process Soviet secrets. Everything else was secondary, and by andlarge, everything else received--no surprise--virtually no attention.

Unfortunately, the national intelligence community, in developing approaches to"denied area" collection requirements, became obsessed with technology, and ultimatelyended up substituting technology for thinking. At the low end, an exclusive reliance on thepolygraph machine destroyed the art and craft of counter-intelligence. At the high end, thebillions of dollars spent on satellites capable of collecting images and signals led to cost-cutting in other critical areas, with the most unfortunate loser being analysis. The communityfailed to invest in processing technologies, such that less than ten percent of the images andsignals collected by this technology are actually processed, and the community went short onanalytical expertise, hiring young people just out of college because they were cheap, ratherthan investing modestly (say, one percent of what is being spent yearly on satellites) in orderto hire true experts who have proven themselves in the private sector over time.

What is to be done? The following are but a few of the major initiatives that could beconsidered, those most pertinent to government information managers a body.

First, we must accelerate the tentative program established by the Director of CentralIntelligence (DCI) to increase intelligence community exploitation of open sources. TheCommunity Open Source Program Office (COSPO) is under fine leadership and moving inthe right direction, but much more could be done, and done quickly. The National ForeignIntelligence Board has stated for the record that 40% of the all-source intelligence product(products integrating clandestine human intelligence reports, classified imagery, and classifiedsignals intercepts) comes from open sources at a cost of 1 % of the National ForeignIntelligence Program budget. This is an extraordinary admission. The intelligencecommunity should not become a collector of public information--it should instead develop

Global Information Explosion: A Threat to National Security?, 16 May 1995 (with AlvinToffler, Bo Cutter, Emmett Paige, Robert Johnson, and Bill Studeman); "NationalIntelligence--The Community Tomorrow?", speech to the Security Affairs SupportAssociation Spring Symposium, National Security Agency, 20 April 1995; "PrivateEnterprise Intelligence: Its Potential Contribution to National Security", paper presented tothe Canadian Intelligence Community Conference on Intelligence Analysis and Assessment,29 October 1994; and "A Critical Evaluation of U.S. National Intelligence Capabilities",International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence (Summer 1993. I have alsoprovided invited testimony to the Commission on Intelligence and the House PermanentSelect Committee on Intelligence.

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capabilities for exploiting the vast resources of unclassified information available to the restof the government, and at the same time develop a well-funded and well-managed capabilityfor purchasing from the private sector those open sources and services most pertinent to theintelligence requirements it is expected to satisfy. Open sources are a foundation for the all-source product, they are not a substitute for spies and satellites. We should not be sendingspys where schoolboys can go, and we must at the same time overcome the problem withspys today, that they only know secrets and cannot validate or evaluate their secrets in thelarger context provided by full access to public information.

Second, we must revitalize the CIA by restoring its core competence, strategicanalysis, and stripping away from this organizations the extraneous functions that havedepleted its analytic reserves. The existing Directorate of Intelligence should have transferredto it the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) now resident in the Directorate ofScience and Technology; and the National Collection Division (NCD) now resident in theDirectorate of Operations. The National Intelligence Council should be significantlyexpanded to include a National Intelligence Officer assigned to each of the departments andprincipal agencies of the government, as well as Assistant National Intelligence Officers forthe traditional intelligence topical areas. COSPO should be integrated into the DDI as itsmanagement arm, and should assume operational authority over all intelligence communityopen source collection capabilities and contracts. The Directorate of Operations should bespun off from CIA to become a separate Clandestine Service Agency (CSA), and all of itscase officers and other personnel gradually withdrawn from our Embassies and placed undercompletely non-official cover. In their place in the Embassies we should put small inter-agency teams of analysts, as well as open source collection and collection managementspecialists, to provide the DDI with a tactical collection and a tactical analysis team in directsupport of the Ambassador and his Country Team. The Directorates of Science andTechnology and Administration should also be spun off from CIA, but upgraded to the Officeof the Director of Central Intelligence, and charged with managing their respective domainsfor all agencies, not just the CIA. Now cleansed of its non-analytic elements, CIA can andshould be renamed the National Intelligence Agency (N1A).

Other initiatives need not be stressed here, but would include the establishment of aNational Imagery & Mapping Agency (NIMA) charged with fully exploiting commercialimagery before assigning scarce and expensive classified imagery assets; the expansion NSA'scharter to explicitly include monitoring of unclassified communications in cyberspace; theestablishment of a new Electronic Security & Counterintelligence Program under theoversight of the FBI and with the private sector as its primary beneficiary; and the integrationof all military intelligence capabilities under a Joint National Military Intelligence Command.

Having thus put its own house in order, the traditional national intelligence communityof the United States would be ready to serve as a full partner with the rest of government andthe private sector in making America the first "smart nation" in the 21st Century. Thiswould, however, require a National Information Strategy, and that is where we conclude.

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National Information Strategy

The National Information Infrastructure (Nil) provides the vital element ofconnectivity--including civic networking--without which no program to improve our nationalcompetitiveness could succeed.

However, there is a larger vision, a larger program, where Executive leadership mustplay a vital role: we as a people require a National Information Strategy. Our nationalcompetitiveness, and indeed our national security in the information age, require a depth andbreadth of commitment to information as a commodity; to information as a substitute fortime, space, capital, and labor. Information--applied information--is vital to both our defenseand our prosperity.

Connectivity is but one of the four major elements of what must soon become aNational Information Strategy. For those counseling the incremental approach, "connectivitytoday, content tomorrow", one must say: it will be too late. The fragility of our position inthe world, in terms of "brain drain", budget deficit, and electronic security, all require thatwe establish a four point integrated program immediately, outlined below.

Connectivity. Such a strategy should build upon the Nil as its technical foundation,but provide for three additional elements:

Content. Existing government programs, under the auspices of a National InformationFoundation within The White House, should provide incentives for all elements of theinformation continuum (K-12, universities, libraries, businesses, information brokers, media,government, defense, and intelligence) to put content online; only in this way can weestablish a robust national "information commons" and give Robert Reich's symbolic analystssomething other than a starvation diet. It is vital that we establish means of nurturingdistributed centers of excellence throughout our Nation, in all topical areas, providing allsectors with incentives to place encyclopedic information into the "information commons" andthus stimulate productivity. Just $1 billion a year invested in this program could yieldenormous productivity and competitiveness gains across our entire private sector. Withingovernment, we should dramatically acclerate NTIS involvement in structuring and digitizinginformation now in the possession of the government but not available to the public.

Coordination. Using a body similar to those now orchestrating Nil technical issues,focus on resource management across government and private sector boundaries in bothtechnical and non-technical (content) arenas. There is no good reason why hundreds of majororganizations should be wasting approximately $2 billion a year creating hundreds ofvariations of a basic multi-media analysis workstations. There is no good reason whyhundreds of corporations and other organizations should be wasting enormous sums collectingand processing the same encyclopedic information about foreign countries, companies, andcapabilities. Presidential leadership will make a difference and save the Nation billions ofdollars annually, not only within government, but across the private sector.

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Communications & Computer Security. We have a house built over a sinkhole! Thevulnerabilities of our national telecommunications infrastructure to interruption of services aswell as destruction, degradation, and theft of data are such that experts feel comfortable inpredicting that--unless we are able to establish a major Presidential program in this arena--wewill see a series of enormously costly electronic attacks on our major financial and industrialorganizations, generally undertaken by individuals who stand to benefit financially fromdegraded or interrupted performance. The current generation of systems engineers was notraised in an environment where security was a necessary element of design. At every level,through every node, we are wide open--and in a networked environment, one open housecontaminates the next.

Such an integrated program could be established using existing resources. The costsavings from the elimination of redundant and counterproductive investments in informationcollection and information technology across government departments and into the privatesector can also make a substantive difference against the deficit. '

Conclusion

We are a smart people today, but a dumb Nation. Our national security and ournational attractiveness as a site for international investment which permits our citizens toprosper are both at risk. We have no alternative but to completely redefine the role ofgovernment to emphasize its responsibility for the nurturing of our national informationcommons, and to redefine national intelligence so as to create a Virtual IntelligenceCommunity in which every citizen is a collector, producer, and consumer of intelligence--todo this, we must have a National Information Strategy.

27 One authority, Mr. Paul Strassmann, estimates that $22 billion over seven years couldbe saved in information housekeeping costs alone. This is apart from policy savings derivedfrom improved intelligence support. Mr. Strassmann has been Director of DefenseInformation and Chief Information Officer of the Xerox Corporation and other majorcompanies. His books, including The Politics of Information Management, The BusinessValue of Computers and Information PayOff are all exceptional.

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OSS '95: THE CONFERENCE Proceedings, 1995 Volume II Fourth International

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