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. 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