Comments on CRS Report Open Source Intelligence (OSINT): Issues for Congress 1

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Comments on CRS Report Open Source Intelligence (OSINT): Issues for Congress[1]

Member Abstract:

CRS Report on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is incomplete, deceptive, unprofessional, and fails to inform Members of the immediately available opportunity to create a Defense Open Source Program and a diplomatic Open Source Agency, both of which would empower every Member with legal ethical OSINT pertinent to every jurisdiction of Congress.

·  OSINT can be shared with the media and the public, and virtually guarantees Member time on the air and in the print media.

·  This will equalize the balance of power between Congress and the Executive by leveling the intelligence playing field, and protecting Congress from Executive lies alleging secret knowledge.

·  Cabinet Departments do not “do” intelligence; they focus on protecting budget share. Only Congress, using OSINT as decision-support, can make the trade-offs decisions among competing program needs.

·  The report must be withdrawn and properly developed in partnership with the CSIS OSINT Working Group under the leadership of Arnaud de Borchgrave.

Staff Abstract:

In the near-term, incumbents upon whom staff depend for jobs can be protected from the November 2008 backlash against Dick Cheney’s lies and the elective war on Iraq that has created 75,000 amputees visible across America, by passing an Electoral Reform Act and a National Security Reform Act.

Work with this and remain employed. Ignore it and watch Congress turnover in 2008.

On a professional level, since the secret world does not provide intelligence support to any of the Committees with authorization authority over the varied jurisdictions, this initiative not only answers the earnest demands of the House and Senate for intelligence support, but negates the artificial value of secrets.

It will over the next eight years give Members every reason to redirect 80% of the secret budget toward education and communications infrastructure needs in every District.

As the national and defense OSINT capabilities mature, they will enable Members to shift no less than $100 billion away from military hardware toward Waging Peace, and a second $100 billion a year away from military hardware toward homeland security and the intangibles of homeland security: stopping illegal immigration, mandating national service and English for all who would be citizens, and eliminating tax and insurance fraud at all levels while reducing Medicare costs to 1% of the false future obligations that assume the government cannot negotiate prices and will not mandate quality health care.[2]

Compelling Sound Bites:

Eventually NSA may secretly achieve the ultimate in quickness, compatibility, and efficiency—a computer with petaflop and higher speeds shrunk into a container about a liter in size, and powered by only about ten watts of power: the human brain.[3]

80% of what I needed to know as CINCENT I got from open sources rather than classified reporting. And within the remaining 20%, if I knew what to look for, I found another 16%. At the end of it all, classified intelligence provided me, at best, with 4% of my command knowledge.[4]

Everybody who’s a real practitioner, and I’m sure you’re not all naïve in this regard, realizes that there are two uses to which security classification is put: the legitimate desire to protect secrets, and the protection of bureaucratic turf. As a practitioner of the real world, it’s about 90 bureaucratic turf; 10 legitimate protection of secrets as far as I am concerned.[5]

In short, the collapse of the communist system in Central Europe has created a new situation for intelligence collectors. I estimate, based in part on my commercial discussions since 1990 in East Germany, Poland, Albania, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, that 80 percent of what is on any intelligence agency’s wish list for this area as of 1991 is now available overtly.[6]

The danger is, you’ll become like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours” [because of your blind faith in the value of your narrow and often incorrect secret information].[7]

The Marine Corps Intelligence Center (today a Command) discovered that 80% or more of what it needed to do policy, acquisition, and operations intelligence support was not secret, not in English, not online, and not known to anyone in Washington, D.C. That is still true today.[8]

Today, U.S. “intelligence” is upside down and inside out. It is upside down because it relies on satellites in outer space rather than human eyes on the ground. It is inside out because it tries to divine intelligence unilaterally, without first asking anyone else what information they might provide.

CRS, Normally Superb, Sends Congress a Lemon

The report is severely deficient and for all practical purposes, useless to the Members and Committees of Congress. It validates a failing status quo rather than alerting Members to the enormous low-cost possibilities for enhancing direct open source intelligence support to each jurisdiction that does not receive classified intelligence support.

9-11 Commission Recommended an Open Source Agency

The report fails to address the urgent need and broad consensus outside the U.S. Intelligence Community that an Open Source Agency (OSA), as recommended by the 9-11 Commission on Page 413,[9] is needed, but as a sister agency to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), so as to have a diplomatic cachet and be an acceptable beneficiary of information from the 96% of the world that does not like the U.S. Government to begin with, and hates the secret and military worlds with a passion.

Office of Information Sharing Treaties and Agreements Will Empower Congress & Public

A diplomatic Office of Information Sharing Treaties and Agreements, long accepted by knowledgeable leaders in the Executive as an essential means of legitimizing and enabling full access to all information in all languages all the time, was briefed to the authors but they mis-served Congress in failing to illuminate all of the options for helping the Members themselves gain access to tailored decision-support for each jurisdiction that could be legally and ethically shared with the media and with constituencies.

CRS Authors Disrespect the Good Work of Congressman Rob Simmons

Congressman Rob Simmons (R-CT-02) developed an outline of needed legislation he intended to introduce in this session, before failing to be re-elected to a fourth term by 80 votes.[10]

The latter possibility is of extraordinary importance to Congress, in as much as it can

·  help break down partisan barriers by providing objective shared information, and it

·  contradict and balance the Executive’s abuse of secret information or claims of access to secret information, that have led to elective wars justified on the basis of mass deception and high crimes and misdemeanors;[11]

·  help Congress balance the power of the Executive and be responsible to the sovereign People, respecting Article 1 of the Constitution ignored by Congress since 2000.

Huge Homeland Security Implications Ignored by CRS Report

At a strategic level, an Open Source Agency should include

·  A Homeland Intelligence Network with fifty Community Intelligence Centers manned by the National Guard in support of Governors, Mayors, and precinct level law enforcement ($30 million per state at Full Operational Capability, $1.5 billion total).

·  Supported by the Joint Reserve Intelligence Centers (JRIC), this being the fastest way to create a Smart Nation without imposing costs of secrecy on state & local levels.

CRS Report is Grievously Misrepresentative

From the first sentence in the summary, the report misrepresents the full spectrum of open sources so as to accommodate the existing failed strategy of treating open sources as something that can be acquired on the Internet from cubicles in Reston and other comfortable domestic locations.

Fully 75% of OSINT is not digital, not in English, and not available to anyone in the USA. It is indigenous and it includes “gray literature,” limited editions of locally-available materials that can be obtained legally—a university yearbook, for example, providing the only known photograph of an international terrorist—as well as commercial imagery, Russian 1:50,000 combat charts with contour lines covering the Third World where the US does not have such maps on the shelf, as well all other sources of geospatial data.

An example of a “best in class” OSINT program of objectives has been created by Arno Reuser.[12]

CRS Report Fails to Address Needs of Members’ Jurisdictions and Constituencies

The report is completely contradictory to the needs of the Members in that it focuses exclusively on the role that OSINT can play in support of the secret collection disciplines, and it neglects to inform and empower Members by pointing out that for less than 5% of the existing National Intelligence Budget (NIB), an OSA could fully satisfy 96% of the intelligence needs of Members and Governors and Mayors as well as the Cabinet Departments that do not receive classified intelligence support.

Such an agency could also internationalize education in America, a long-sought objective of Senator David Boren (D-OK), and essential if America is to be competitive in the “Long War.”[13]

CRS Reports Fails to Honestly or Fully Evaluate the Failures of the Existing Initiatives

The report is severely flawed in its emphasis on technology. The Open Source Center (OSC) has already committed a grievous error in awarding a $100 million contract to L-3 communications, to build something that already exists, namely Deep Web Technologies combined with Telelanguage and SILOBREAKER. The OSC has also failed to harness the $65 million awarded to SOS International by the U.S. Strategic Command, and producing nothing of value to the broader federal or state and local community leaderships.

Open Source Center Is Barely Able to Support CIA

The OSC should be reduced to supporting CIA, something it does not do well today, but if narrowly focused and empowered by an OSINT fire-hose from Tampa, it might yet be able to handle.

Authors Were Briefed, and Chose to Ignore, Possible Defense Initiatives

The report is severely flawed in not pointing out for Members both the availability of non-reimbursable funding from the Department of Defense for

·  an Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations for Decision Support, to help harness and exploit all international open source information in all languages and mediums and to create a global network of 100 million volunteer “OSINT Minutemen” covering among them 183 languages;

·  a modest Office of Information Sharing Treaties and Agreements within the Department of State, ideally a direct report to the Deputy Secretary of State;

·  conversion of a brand-new fully-furnished facility being vacated by the Coalition Coordination Center (CCC) in Tampa, Florida, immediately available to create a Multinational Decision Support Center to support the Africa Command, Stabilization & Reconstruction, Humanitarian Assistance, and Disaster Relief operations by all Nations;

·  the ability to trade unclassified ABLE DANGER sense-making to the contributing organizations, in return for free digitization of multiagency, multidisciplinary, multidomain information in host country hubs, that can be received electronically for open shareable exploitation, and

·  the imminent value of being able to simultaneously pump all the unclassified information to the high side (SIPR) via electronic loading docks pioneered by the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) for the long-standing contract with OSS.[14]

$3 Billion a Year is Good Number for a National/Homeland Security OSINT Network

Under Dr. Stephen Cambone, who understood the need for universal coverage at a neighborhood level of granularity, $2 billion a year at Final Operating Capability was offered to USSOCOM but refused because they did not understand at the leadership level that OSINT is fundamental to winning the Long War. I supported Col Vincent Stewart, USMC, then the investigator for Dr. Cambone on what was needed,now in Iraq, and recommend him for promotion and assignment as the first Director of the Defense Open Source Program Office, which needs to be created, ideally as a Field Activity under ASD SOLIC (Irregular Warfare/Civil Affairs), but also fully responsive, via ASD SOLIC, to diplomatic, commercial, and intelligence requirements for OSINT support. Congressman Simmons and I discussed the need for $1.5 billion for national OSINT, and $1.5 billion for homeland security OSINT.

CRS Report Fails to Provide Context or History

The report fails to note that the Commandant of the Marine Corps attempted to nurture more attention to OSINT in 1988, in his article, “Intelligence Challenges for the 1990’s,” in American Intelligence Journal (Winter 1988-1989), an article that emphasized—in 1988—the urgent need for redirecting secret intelligence toward terrorism, insurgency, and transnational crime, and toward open sources of information in all languages not then—and not now—being accessed by the secret world.

A second article, published by the undersigned in 1992, “E3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution and Intelligence: An Alternative Paradigm,” (Whole Earth Review, Fall 1992), led to the statement on the 7th floor at CIA, “This confirms Steele’s place on the lunatic fringe.” In fact we know the obverse is true, and still is. The DNI is a good man, trapped in a bad system, which is wasting $60 billion a year on the 4% we can steal. Online articles, “The New Craft of Intelligence: Making the Most of Open Private Sector Knowledge” in TIME Magazine and “Reinventing Intelligence: Open Source Intelligence” in Forbes ASAP, make it clear that the US Intelligence Community is inside out and upside down, and the public now knows this.

The report completely avoids addressing the long-standing recommendations of every Commission since 1947, on the urgent need to improve national access for foreign-language open sources, along with improved foreign language capabilities for our diplomats, spies, and warriors as well as our commercial attaches and Peace Corps.

The Time Has Come for Congress to Begin Redirecting Secret Funding

The undersigned recommends to Congress that a new National Security Reform Act provide for the redirection of 20% of the secret intelligence budget toward national education and global connectivity (which creates stabilizing wealth that fosters peace), redirecting an additional 20% of the original high number each year for three more years, until the secret world is reduced to 20% of its existing budget, or $12 billion dollars, which is more than ample for spies, eavesdropping, and a sufficiency of analysts that should be mid-career hires with proven knowledge, rather than young people with no real-world experience.