Draft 2.2 dated 17 April 2007

Smart Nation Act = Public Intelligence

  • Protects and enhances role of the Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Open Sources (ADDNI/OS) by legislatively mandating an Open Source Intelligence Program (OSIP) under the complete control of the Director of National Intelligence, directing that no less than 1% of the total National Foreign Intelligence Program (NFIB) be allocated to the collection, processing, and analysis of open sources of information in all languages, which are essential to the mission of the secret intelligence community. To the extent acceptable to the DNI and the ADDNI/OS, recommends that most raw unclassified information be delivered to a central federal processing facility to be located in Southwest Virginia and near the digitization facility across the border in West Virginia, to avoid duplicative collection by others.
  • Creates Congressional Public Intelligence Office (CPIO) in close alliance with the Library of Congress and in direct support of each Committee as well as CRS, CBO, and GAO. This office, to be located on the campus of the University of Maryland, will be focused on helping Congress understand the strategic future costs of decisions and budget allocations today, across all Congressional jurisdictions, while producing tailored Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) for Congressthat may also beshared with the public in order to heighten public understanding of global threatsvalidated by the respective Committees. The CPIO shall not have access to classified information, and shall be supported with raw and processed OSINT by the Open Source Agency (OSA).
  • Creates two-personintelligence sub-committees within each Committee to receive secret intelligence relevant to each jurisdiction, as sought by Representatives Flake (R-AZ-06) and Schiff (D-CA-29). Only Memberswill be provided with classified intelligence relevant to their jurisdictions.
  • Restores the US Information Agency (USIA) as a separate agency with the same arms length status Congress provided for the Broadcasting Board of Governors.
  • Creates an Open Source Agency (OSA), as a sister-agency to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), with the same arms-length independence that Congress wisely mandated to assure journalist independence, but in this case, to assure the integrity of public intelligence. Alternatively, this could be embedded within the restored USIA as a separate Bureau with a separate budget. Consequently, public intelligence can support public diplomacy without taint from the secret world, while making all information within the Open Source Information Network (OSIN) immediately available to the U.S. Intelligence Community by channeling the information, pre-tagged to Intelink standards, to the NIPR and SIPR nets. The small Headquarters could be constructed on the South-Central Campus, adjacent to the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), which could serve as a partner in global information peacekeeping, and easily accessible to the employees of the Department of State and the National Intelligence Council as well as others to be based on this campus to be completed and occupied by all parties no later than 1 January 2008.
  • Broadens the mandate of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) with non-reimbursable funding from the OSA to create an Internet dissemination capability that offers free universal access to all unclassified information acquired by the OSA, with a robust man-machine translation capability that offersfree online education in at least 31 major languagesas an important new foundation for public diplomacy and information peacekeeping.
  • Within the Department of State, establishes, with non-reimbursable funds assigned to Defense Support to Public Diplomacy, an Office of Information Sharing Treaties and Agreements to negotiate no-cost information sharing treaties with Nations, and agreements with non-governmental and private sector organizations including universities world-wide, and establish standards facilitating both sharing and semantic web sense-making across all languages.
  • Within the Department of Defense, establishes an independent Open Source Field Activity with nodes in Florida (USSOCOM),Colorado (USNORTHCOM) and Connecticut (Groton Submarine Base with a training activity at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy when dormitories are available). This technical processing and advanced analytic capability, in partnership with the OSIP under the DNI and the OSIN under the OSA, will be responsible for meeting all DoD needs for OSINT, and for porting all OSIF from the OSA to the high-side of Intelink. It will provide OSINT training for multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, multidomain cadres as a service of common concern.
  • Creates fifty state-based Community Intelligence Centers to be manned by the National Guard, and broad networks that permit citizens to report threats (119) and suspicions (114), while also leveraging a global translation network (below) that can do all languages for the 911 system (and the new 119 and 114 systems) across the Nation. This solves the current lack of a place for bottom-up dots to be collected and analyzed, while providing a channel for distributing global information to all schoolhouses and chambers of commerce as a means of enhancing our national security and global competitiveness at the local level.
  • Expands the concept of the National Virtual Translation Center by establishing a National Virtual Translation Network (NVTN) using commercial open source software now available, to allow all jurisdictions to handle both 911 calls in all languages, and to do critical translations for immigrant constituencies of Congress, as well as 24/7 live remote interactive translation for diplomats and warriors in the field. This open source software system can leverage existing employees, and default to commercial as needed. –o–

Robert David Steele (Vivas), OSINT Evangelist, 703.242.1701,

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