8 June 1998
Date: Sun, 7 Jun 1998 18:57:24 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Cyberwar 2.0
To: jya@jya.com
From: nobody@shinobi.alias.net (Anonymous)
Thursday June 4, 10:57 am Eastern Time
Company Press Release
SOURCE: Open Source Solutions Inc.
New Book on Cyberwar Lays Out National Strategy For Information
Peacekeeping and Intelligence Reform
WASHINGTON, June 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Cyberwar 2.0: Myths, Mysteries, and
Reality is the latest publication of the Armed Forces Communications and
Electronics Association (AFCEA). Released yesterday, it includes among many
provocative chapters one on "Information Peacekeeping: The Purest Form of
War", by former national and defense intelligence officer Robert D.
Steele, now President of OSS Inc. The chapter, available at
www.oss.net/InfoPeace, anticipated the current shortfalls in the ability of
the national and defense intelligence communities to predict the
Indian-Pakistani nuclear bake-off.
First among the chapter's recommended reforms is to provide the Director of
Central Intelligence (DCI) with centralized program management authority
over all classified collection and production programs. As Senator Bob
Kerrey (D-NE), Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee for
Intelligence said yesterday in his press conference, ``the Director of
Central Intelligence needs more statutory authority (to) execute the
budget.''
Intelligence is about trade-offs. These are the trade-offs that the
Director of Central Intelligence could make if given the necessary
statutory authority:
1) Technical versus Human. We process roughly six per cent of our
classified signals collection and roughly ten per cent of our
classified imagery collection. As the House Intelligence Committee
has consistently recommended, we can easily afford to shift funds toward
a mix of much-improved clandestine human collection, mid-career expert
analyst hires, and the creation of an extended national intelligence
community that embraces private sector expertise in a more
institutionalized but open manner.
2) Collection versus Analysis. We spend roughly 95% of our funds on
collection, and a fraction on analysis. Analysis is comprised of
two parts, both severely lacking. Part one is post-collection
processing using advanced information technology. Sadly, the U.S.
Intelligence Community lacks the ability to reach out to the private
sector to acquire the commercial off-the-shelf technologies that are
ready today to de-duplicate, cluster, weight, summarize, translate,
and visualize masses of information so that expert human analysts
can do analysis rather than information triage. Part two is about
people. Until we earmark sufficient funds to attract to the community
mid-career experts who have proven themselves in the private sector,
speak the appropriate languages fluently, and have already established
a global network of overt expert colleagues, we will continue to make
serious mistakes as a matter of routine.
3) Secrecy versus Openness. As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY),
sponsor and Chairman of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing
Government Secrecy noted in his final report we spend roughly $6
billion a year protecting information, most of which is not secret,
at the same time that we seem to be isolating our intelligence analysts
"in an era when open sources make a plenitude of information
available as never before in history." Another Commission, the
Aspin/Brown Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the U.S.
Intelligence Community, found that our intelligence community is
"critically deficient" in its access to open sources, and that this
should be a "top priority" for both funding, and the personal attention
of the Director of Central Intelligence. In a benchmark Special Report
to Defense News Network, Dr. Mark Lowenthal and Mr. Steele have more
recently documented the value of open sources to Department of Defense
policy-makers, acquisition managers, and commanders and itemized an
annual budget-one half of one percent of the existing DoD budget for
open source intelligence. This report is available at
www.defensedaily.com/reports/osint.htm.
Other recommendations in the chapter on information peacekeeping and
intelligence reform deal with the urgent need for dramatically improving
government information operations over-all so as to ensure that both
intelligence producers and intelligence consumers can share unclassified
information received from global sources; the expansion of the National
Intelligence Council to improve focus on critical customer accounts
including foreign policy, law enforcement, and defense; and the
establishment of a proper National Net Assessments Center with four
divisions-one each for traditional defense; special operations and
transnational law enforcement; religious, political, and environmental
factors; and electronic espionage, crime, and warfare.
Admiral David Jerimiah, former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
and recent trouble-shooter on the failure to anticipate Indian nuclear
testing, has summed up most of the long-known deficiencies in U.S.
intelligence that defense authorization and appropriations authorities have
consistently refused to acknowledge. The fact is that we have very talented
people in the U.S. Intelligence Community, under generally good leadership,
but the necessary management system does not exist. The Director of Central
Intelligence is a Director in name only. Until the Secretary of Defense
voluntarily passes over control of all national intelligence programs to
the Director, and strongly supports legislation to provide the Director
with the statutory authority needed to appoint agency heads, control
budgets, attract and retain the best experts, and make trade-offs across
program lines, then America will continue have significant recurring
intelligence failures.
Background: OPEN SOURCE SOLUTIONS Inc. was founded in 1992 to help the U.S.
and other national intelligence communities restore their access to open
sources of information including commercial imagery, while also extending
to the corporate sector the proven methods of intelligence applied only to
legally and ethically available sources of information. Its management team
includes Chairman and CEO John Bohn, recently retired CEO of Moody's
Investors Service and former President of the Export-Import Bank; Mr.
Robert Steele, President of OSS Global and Director of Collection for all
OSS groups; Dr. Mark Lowenthal, President of OSS USA and Director of
Production for all OSS groups, former Staff Director of the House Permanent
Select Committee on Intelligence and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of
State for Intelligence (Functional Analysis); and Mr. Jan Herring,
President of OSS Business and the widely-acknowledged founder of the
business intelligence community in the United States.
Copyright 1998 PRNewswire. All rights reserved.