Dedication & Publisher's Preface

Dedication

To Tom Atlee and George Pór,

without whose efforts

this book would not have been possible.

To Doug Engelbart and Stewart Brand,

for pointing the way.

To Alvin & Heidi Toffler, for their sustained ethical and intellectual leadership.

Publisher's Preface

Robert Steele

Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is converging with Collective or Co-Intelligence, Peace Intelligence, and Commercial Intelligence.1 This book signals, but does not itself represent, the emergence of the discipline of Collective Intelligence. This book is the first of three books-each an edited work bringing together best in class authors-being published in 2008, with another three under consideration for 2009. In order to show my intentions as the publisher, I list the titles below as a form of overview.

2008

COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

PEACE INTELLIGENCE: Assuring a Good Life for All

COMMERCIAL INTELLIGENCE: From Moral Green to Golden Peace

2009 (Subject to Redirection)

GIFT INTELLIGENCE: Optimizing & Orchestrating Global Charity

CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE: Faith, Ideology, & the Five Minds

GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE: EarthGame™ for All

Each of these books will be printed in limited editions for sale via Amazon, while also being offered free online, with each chapter having all active links stabilized within a PDF file. In 2008, I will also publish my own new work, WAR & PEACE: The Seventh Generation, which will outline a plan for all of us to wage peace henceforth. It too will be free online.

Right up front I want to honor Mark Tovey, as well as make mention of several Canadians who have played an important role in nurturing my individual efforts.

I met Mark Tovey through a brilliant poster that he had composed, and which was put on display at Wikimania 2006. I obtained the file and replicated the poster for my office, where it has been a daily inspiration.

It was not until recently, when I was obliged to cancel a conference on Multinational Decision Support (it was a year too soon for those new to the world of Public Intelligence) that money was freed up to do three books. I started by getting in touch with Tom Atlee, founder of the Co-Intelligence Institute and author of the Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World that Works for All. Tom had created an informal network of individuals, including Mark. With his encouragement, I was able to attract a sufficient number of authoritative and relevant chapters to know that the book was viable.

This is when Mark came in, after I invited him to consider being the editor in order to ensure the book met academic as well as professional standards. I must affirm in the strongest possible terms the extraordinary contributions Mark has made as the editor. The structuring of the book is his, as well as the recruitment of a number of additional papers I would simply not have been able to identify or acquire. This book is a magnificent manifestation of the level of personal understanding, diligence, and good intention of Mark Tovey.

Several other Canadians have helped me. Brigadier General James Cox, then the Deputy N-2 for Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), invited me to brief the 70-odd military intelligence chiefs for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Partnership for Peace, and the Mediterranean Dialog nations. While I made no impression at all on most of them (but am pleased to see so many OSINT centers in Eastern Europe today), he and the N-2 Actual were sufficiently engaged to task the intelligence unit at Supreme Allied Command, Atlantic, where another Canadian, then Lieutenant Commander Andrew Chester personally organized and guided me in developing the NATO Open Source Intelligence Handbook, the NATO Open Source Intelligence Reader, and himself the author, Intelligence Exploitation of the Internet.

Chief Warrant Officer Rick Gill, Canadian Army, was an early enthusiast, and my understanding is that Canada has a worthwhile defense OSINT capability because he threw himself into the task. Similarly, within the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Ms. L. Schnittker worked very hard with minimal resources, to create a law enforcement application of this discipline.

The Honorable Louise Frechette, then Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations (UN), formerly Deputy Minister of Defense, has never met me and probably does not know I exist, but her attempts to establish a proper process of decision support in the UN were reported to me, and in combination with the interest of MajGen Patrick Cammaert, RN NL (Retired), then on his way to be the Military Advisor to the Secretary General, I published the book, the first of its kind, on PEACEKEEPING INTELLIGENCE: Emerging Concepts for the Future. The UN is long overdue for an Assistant Secretary General for Decision Support as well as a diplomatic Office for Information Sharing Treaties and Agreements, and the US has offered informally to fund both. I can do no more for the UN until “it” decides to become “smart.”

With this book I end my almost twenty-year long effort to help governments get a grip on the 94% of the information they do not have to steal,2 and turn my attention to creating the World Brain as an EarthGame™ in which every person is afforded access to all information in all languages all the time, and democracy is not just revitalized, but transformed. The Earth Intelligence Network, a non-profit with a 501c3 application pending, will seek to facilitate and nurture all collective public efforts to create co-intelligence, collective intelligence, and “smart” organizations.

My intention is to create an open, legal, ethical process by which the United Nations and non-governmental organizations such as Doctors without Borders, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and Foundations responsible for charitable giving, can receive multinational decision-support helpful to their decisions about their respective strategic mandates, operational campaign plans, tactical interventions, and technical choices. War as we know it between nations is over. The Chinese have focused on electronic war more deeply than we have, and in bringing Dick Cheney's aircraft down over Singapore, have demonstrated they can fry any weapons or mobility system. There will still be armed conflicts, but at the national level, we have no alternative but to get serious about waging peace.3

My path has been an unusual one, but I now see my 30 years of government service in the secret world as a necessary preamble to ensuring that public intelligence in the public interest becomes a reality. There is plenty of money to restore and preserve Earth while affording every person on the planet a life of dignity, justice, liberty, and prosperity. Where we have gone wrong is in allowing governments to misrepresent us, while also allowing corporations to bribe key government officials so as to loot the commonwealths of our own Republic as well as the lesser developed nations.4 I believe that within three to five years the public will be able to put a stop to secret earmarks in government budgets and bribes in corporate budgets, at the same time that “true cost” information on every product and service becomes available to the consumer at the point of sale, via cell phone photo of the barcode, and ScanBack to the World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility (WISER). Using localized credit cards, such as are offered by the Interra Project, entire communities can shut out those entities that persist in externalizing the true cost of their offerings.

At root, such a revolution in the group mind of the human collective is the only means by which we can create infinite stabilizing wealth that enables the assurance of a good life for all. Corruption, crime, and corporate misbehavior can be reduced through the non-violent acquisition and sharing of legal, ethical, open information that is discriminated, distilled, and disseminated on a “just enough, just in time, just right basis.” Connecting the poor with cell phones will have a huge impact.

Below is a technical diagram to put collective intelligence in context.

Figure 1: Four Quadrants of Evolutionary Intelligence

I put the above diagram together in the early 1990's as I struggled with the contradiction between how much money the US Government was spending on information technology across all agencies, and on stealing information within the secret world, in both cases, having little to show and no sense-making.

Business Intelligence is generally used as a term for internal data mining viewed through digital dashboard and is firmly entrenched in Quadrant I. Completive Intelligence, as represented by the members of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP), focuses primarily on the market space and competitors in that market space, rather than on the needs of existing and unknown customers, and the realities of the external world. This group is based in Quadrant II with a narrow focus within Quadrant III. OSS.Net, now a subsidiary of a much larger company, has been in this quadrant for fifteen years. Using a global network of road-runners, retired attaches, graduate students, and locationally well-positioned observers, we have been able to tap into all information in all languages all the time.

Neither of these two is the equal of Commercial Intelligence, which fully integrates customers, externalities, exactly the right combination of experts on demand, the right automated sense-making tools, and the customized decision-support, getting the right information to the right person at the right time.

It is in Quadrant IV where I believe we can simultaneously achieve Harold L. Wilensky's vision for Organizational Intelligence (1967) and the complementary visions of each of the authors represented in this book.

It is my hope that this three book series will lead to what the Swedes call M4IS: Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information Sharing, and that the emergent collective intelligence community will move toward Quadrant IV at the same time that we bring as many of the five billion poor as possible into Quadrant II.

I envision 100 million volunteers, among them covering all 183 languages with full access to the Internet and using Skype, able to educate the five billion poor “one cell call at a time.”

I envision a United Nations Assistant Secretary General for Decision Support, using a Multinational Decision Support Center funded by the US Government, able to issue an annual strategic plan useful to all of the Foundations, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO)s, governments, and corporations considering their own autonomous mix of charitable giving and direct foreign assistance.

I envision a Multinational Peace Corps built around the new U.S. Army Civil Affairs Brigade, whose Colonel Commanding, Ferd Irizarry, is the Hal Moore of our generation. He gets it. He understands that a small unit can sweep through an area, handing out cell phones and calling in targets for precision assistance, e.g. an “in and out” helicopter-delivered well-digging team.

I envision the EarthGame™ being used, along with WISER, to connect individual donors with individuals in need all over the world, allowing for precision micro-giving.

I have three sons, 18, 15, and 12. I want all of us to come together to give our children, and the next seven generations, the gift of a prosperous world at peace. On the next page is my strategic vision for getting us there.5

As context, I wish to share the poem that brought me to the side of the angels in the early 1980's:

PEACE

Our words go slowly out

and the sun burns

them before they

can speak. It is

as though the earth

were tired of our talk

and wanted peace, an end

to promises, perhaps an

end to us.

Philip Levine, 7 Years from Somewhere: Poems (Athenium, 1979)

On the next and final page is the strategic vision with integrated values that the twenty-four co-founders of the Earth Intelligence Network have adopted.

In my own two contributions to this book, and at two websites, www.oss.net, and www.earth-intelligence.net, can be found twenty years of original thinking by over 750 well-intentioned minds. With this book, we begin the process of embracing the distributed intelligence of the Whole Earth.

I salute the editor, Mark Tovey; the contributors; and you, the reader, to whom I offer this collection as a token of what is possible if we create a World Brain as H. G. Wells proposed in his 1930's book by that title. St.

1 One reason we are discarding OSINT as a term is because of its largely deliberate subordination to a support role for secret sources and methods. In the USA, the recent issuance of an unprofessional and incomplete Congressional Research Service (CRS) report, and my own personal substantive rebuttal as communicated to each Senator and Representative, are the final nail in OSINT's coffin. Public Intelligence, in many flavors, is how we will eradicate the threats to Humanity and save our Earth. Both of the documents are online at http://www.oss.net/HILL, at the end of that page.

2 These five links are the essence of the past that will now power the future: www.oss.net/BASIC, www.oss.net/LIBRARY, www.oss.net/OSINT-S, www.oss.net/OSINT-O, www.oss.net/CCC, Also Transitioner Global Challenges Wiki.

3 In 2007 the US Government, acting “in our name” authorized, appropriated, and obligated $30 billion for diplomacy and $975 billion more or less, for war. This is lunacy. For what we have spent on the Iraq war, I could have given every one of the five billion poor a free cell phone for life, and instantly helped them connect and create additional wealth-when you make $1 a day, getting to $3 a day is a really big deal.

4 Under the Bush-Cheney regime, Failed States have risen to 177 from 75 in 2005.

5 Learn more at www.earth-intelligence.net. A ten-page brochure is easily viewable or downloadable with all details, including snapshots of the twenty-four co-founders.

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