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.