Here's your think-piece for the solstice weekend
-- a really interesting read, and a blast of enthusiasm from an unlikely source.
Robert Steele, former insider who knows where the
bodies are buried, thinks the revolution is coming and it will be from the
bottom up. Sounds like a man of the people!
Favorite quote:
"Properly educated people always appreciate
holistic approaches to any challenge. This means that they understand both cause
and effect, and intertwined complexities," he said. "A major part of our problem
in the public policy arena is the decline in intelligence with integrity among
key politicians and staff at the same time that think tanks and universities and
non-governmental organisations have also suffered a similar intellectual
diminishment."
Save this one for later if you don't have time
today, but get to it -- you'll be glad you did.
Jude
Robert David Steele, former Marine, CIA case officer, and US co-founder
of the US Marine Corps intelligence activity, is a man on a mission. But it's a
mission that frightens the US intelligence establishment to its
core.
With 18 years experience working across the US intelligence
community, followed by 20 more years in commercial intelligence and training,
Steele's exemplary career has spanned almost all areas of both the clandestine
world.
Steele started off as a Marine Corps infantry and intelligence
officer. After four years on active duty, he joined the CIA for about a decade
before co-founding the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, where he was deputy
director. Widely recognised as the leader of the Open Source Intelligence
(OSINT) paradigm, Steele went on to write the handbooks on OSINT for NATO, the
US Defense Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Special Operations Forces. In
passing, he personally trained 7,500 officers from over 66 countries.
In
1992, despite opposition from the CIA, he obtained Marine Corps permission to
organise a landmark international conference on open source intelligence – the
paradigm of deriving information to support policy decisions not through secret
activities, but from open public sources available to all. The conference was
such a success it brought in over 620 attendees from the intelligence world.
But the CIA wasn't happy, and ensured that Steele was prohibited from
running a second conference.
The clash prompted him to resign from his
position as second-ranking civilian in Marine Corps intelligence, and pursue the
open source paradigm elsewhere. He went on to found and head up the Open Source
Solutions Network Inc. and later the non-profit Earth Intelligence Network which
runs the Public Intelligence Blog.
I first came across Steele when I
discovered his Amazon review of my third book, The War on Truth: 9/11,
Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism. A voracious reader, Steele is the
number 1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction across 98 categories. He also reviewed
my latest book, A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization, but told me I'd
overlooked an important early work – 'A More Secure World: Our Shared
Responsibility, Report of the UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and
Change.'
Last month, Steele presented a startling paper at the Libtech
conference in New York, sponsored by the Internet Society and Reclaim. Drawing
on principles set out in his latest book, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto:
Transparency, Truth and Trust, he told the audience that all the major
preconditions for revolution – set out in his 1976 graduate thesis – were now
present in the United States and Britain.
Steele's book is a must-read,
a powerful yet still pragmatic roadmap to a new civilisational paradigm that
simultaneously offers a trenchant, unrelenting critique of the prevailing global
order. His interdisciplinary 'whole systems' approach dramatically connects up
the increasing corruption, inefficiency and unaccountability of the intelligence
system and its political and financial masters with escalating inequalities and
environmental crises. But he also offers a comprehensive vision of hope that
activist networks like Reclaim are implementing today.
"We are at the end
of a five-thousand-year-plus historical process during which human society grew
in scale while it abandoned the early indigenous wisdom councils and communal
decision-making," he writes in The Open Source Everything Manifesto. "Power was
centralised in the hands of increasingly specialised 'elites' and 'experts' who
not only failed to achieve all they promised but used secrecy and the control of
information to deceive the public into allowing them to retain power over
community resources that they ultimately looted."
Today's capitalism, he
argues, is inherently predatory and destructive:
"Over the course of the
last centuries, the commons was fenced, and everything from agriculture to water
was commoditised without regard to the true cost in non-renewable resources.
Human beings, who had spent centuries evolving away from slavery, were
re-commoditised by the Industrial Era."
Open source everything, in this
context, offers us the chance to build on what we've learned through
industrialisation, to learn from our mistakes, and catalyse the re-opening of
the commons, in the process breaking the grip of defunct power structures and
enabling the possibility of prosperity for all.
"Sharing, not secrecy, is
the means by which we realise such a lofty destiny as well as create infinite
wealth. The wealth of networks, the wealth of knowledge, revolutionary wealth -
all can create a nonzero win-win Earth that works for one hundred percent of
humanity. This is the 'utopia' that Buckminster Fuller foresaw, now within our
reach."
The goal, he concludes, is to reject:
"... concentrated
illicitly aggregated and largely phantom wealth in favor of community wealth
defined by community knowledge, community sharing of information, and community
definition of truth derived in transparency and authenticity, the latter being
the ultimate arbiter of shared wealth."
Despite this unabashedly radical
vision, Steele is hugely respected by senior military intelligence experts
across the world. As a researcher at the US Army War College's Strategic Studies
Institute, he has authored several monographs advocating the need for open
source methods to transform the craft of intelligence. He has lectured to the US
State Department and Department of Homeland Security as well as National
Security Councils in various countries, and his new book has received accolades
from senior intelligence officials across multiple countries including France
and Turkey.
Yet he remains an outspoken critic of US intelligence practices and
what he sees as their integral role in aggravating rather than ameliorating the
world's greatest threats and challenges.
This week, I had the good
fortune of being able to touch base with Steele to dig deeper into his recent
analysis of the future of US politics in the context of our accelerating
environmental challenges. The first thing I asked him was where he sees things
going over the next decade, given his holistic take.
"Properly educated
people always appreciate holistic approaches to any challenge. This means that
they understand both cause and effect, and intertwined complexities," he said.
"A major part of our problem in the public policy arena is the decline in
intelligence with integrity among key politicians and staff at the same time
that think tanks and universities and non-governmental organisations have also
suffered a similar intellectual diminishment.
"My early graduate
education was in the 1970's when Limits to Growth and World Federalism were the
rage. Both sought to achieve an over-view of systemic challenges, but both also
suffered from the myth of top-down hubris. What was clear in the 1970s, that has
been obscured by political and financial treason in the past half-century, is
that everything is connected – what we do in the way of paving over wetlands, or
in poisoning ground water 'inadvertently' because of our reliance on pesticides
and fertilisers that are not subject to the integrity of the 'Precautionary
Principle,' ultimately leads to climate catastrophes that are acts of man, not
acts of god."
He points me to his tremendous collection of reviews of
books on climate change, disease, environmental degradation, peak oil, and water
scarcity. "I see five major overlapping threats on the immediate horizon," he
continues. "They are all related: the collapse of complex societies, the
acceleration of the Earth's demise with changes that used to take 10,000 years
now taking three or less, predatory or shock capitalism and financial crime out
of the City of London and Wall Street, and political corruption at scale, to
include the west supporting 42 of 44 dictators. We are close to multiple mass
catastrophes."
What about the claim that the US is on the brink of
revolution? "Revolution is overthrow – the complete reversal of the status quo
ante. We are at the end of centuries of what Lionel Tiger calls 'The Manufacture
of Evil,' in which merchant banks led by the City of London have conspired with
captive governments to concentrate wealth and commoditise everything including
humans. What revolution means in practical terms is that balance has been lost
and the status quo ante is unsustainable. There are two 'stops' on greed to the
nth degree: the first is the carrying capacity of Earth, and the second is human
sensibility. We are now at a point where both stops are
activating."
[Open link for former CIA officer's matrix on the
preconditions for revolution]
It's not just the US, he adds. "The
preconditions of revolution exist in the UK, and most western countries. The
number of active pre-conditions is quite stunning, from elite isolation to
concentrated wealth to inadequate socialisation and education, to concentrated
land holdings to loss of authority to repression of new technologies especially
in relation to energy, to the atrophy of the public sector and spread of
corruption, to media dishonesty, to mass unemployment of young men and on and on
and on."
So why isn't it happening yet?
"Preconditions are not the
same as precipitants. We are waiting for our Tunisian fruit seller. The public
will endure great repression, especially when most media outlets and schools are
actively aiding the repressive meme of 'you are helpless, this is the order of
things.' When we have a scandal so powerful that it cannot be ignored by the
average Briton or American, we will have a revolution that overturns the corrupt
political systems in both countries, and perhaps puts many banks out of
business. Vaclav Havel calls this 'The Power of the Powerless.' One spark, one
massive fire."
But we need more than revolution, in the sense of
overthrow, to effect change, surely. How does your manifesto for 'open source
everything' fit into this? "The west has pursued an industrialisation path that
allows for the privatisation of wealth from the commons, along with the
criminalisation of commons rights of the public, as well as the externalisation
of all true costs. Never mind that fracking produces earthquakes and poisons
aquifers – corrupt politicians at local, state or province, and national levels
are all too happy to take money for looking the other way. Our entire
commercial, diplomatic, and informational systems are now cancerous. When trade
treaties have secret sections – or are entirely secret – one can be certain the
public is being screwed and the secrecy is an attempt to avoid accountability.
Secrecy enables corruption. So also does an inattentive public enable
corruption."
Is this a crisis of capitalism, then? Does capitalism need
to end for us to resolve these problems? And if so, how? "Predatory capitalism
is based on the privatisation of profit and the externalisation of cost. It is
an extension of the fencing of the commons, of enclosures, along with the
criminalisation of prior common customs and rights. What we need is a system
that fully accounts for all costs. Whether we call that capitalism or not is
irrelevant to me. But doing so would fundamentally transform the dynamic of
present day capitalism, by making capital open source. For example, and as
calculated by my colleague JZ Liszkiewicz, a white cotton T-shirt contains
roughly 570 gallons of water, 11 to 29 gallons of fuel, and a number of toxins
and emissions including pesticides, diesel exhaust, and heavy metals and other
volatile compounds – it also generally includes child labor. Accounting for
those costs and their real social, human and environmental impacts has totally
different implications for how we should organise production and consumption
than current predatory capitalism."
So what exactly do you mean by open
source everything? "We have over 5 billion human brains that are the one
infinite resource available to us going forward. Crowd-sourcing and cognitive
surplus are two terms of art for the changing power dynamic between those at the
top that are ignorant and corrupt, and those across the bottom that are
attentive and ethical. The open source ecology is made up of a wide range of
opens – open farm technology, open source software, open hardware, open
networks, open money, open small business technology, open patents – to name
just a few. The key point is that they must all develop together, otherwise the
existing system will isolate them into ineffectiveness. Open data is largely
worthless unless you have open hardware and open software. Open government
demands open cloud and open spectrum, or money will dominate feeds and
speeds."
[Open link for Robert Steele's vision for open source systems
]
On 1st May, Steele sent an open letter to US vice president Joe Biden
requesting him to consider establishing an Open Source Agency that would
transform the operation of the intelligence community, dramatically reduce
costs, increasing oversight and accountability, while increasing access to the
best possible information to support holistic policy-making. To date, he has
received no response.
I'm not particularly surprised. Open source
everything pretty much undermines everything the national security state stands
for. Why bother even asking vice president Biden to consider it? "The national
security state is rooted in secrecy as a means of avoiding accountability. My
first book, On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World – which by the
way had a foreword from Senator David Boren, the immediate past chairman of the
Senate Select Committee for Intelligence - made it quite clear that the national
security state is an expensive, ineffective monstrosity that is simply not fit
for purpose. In that sense, the national security state is it's own worst enemy
– it's bound to fail."
Given his standing as an intelligence expert,
Steele's criticisms of US intelligence excesses are beyond scathing – they are
damning. "Most of what is produced through secret methods is not actually
intelligence at all. It is simply secret information that is, most of the time,
rather generic and therefore not actually very useful for making critical
decisions at a government level. The National Security Agency (NSA) has not
prevented any terrorist incidents. CIA cannot even get the population of Syria
correct and provides no intelligence - decision-support - to most cabinet
secretaries, assistant secretaries, and department heads. Indeed General Tony
Zinni, when he was commander in chief of the US Central Command as it was at
war, is on record as saying that he received, 'at best,' a meagre 4% of what he
needed to know from secret sources and methods."
So does open source mean
you are calling for abolition of intelligence agencies as we know them, I ask.
"I'm a former spy and I believe we still need spies and secrecy, but we need to
redirect the vast majority of the funds now spent on secrecy toward savings and
narrowly focused endeavors at home. For instance, utterly ruthless
counterintelligence against corruption, or horrendous evils like
paedophilia.
"Believe it or not, 95% of what we need for ethical
evidence-based decision support cannot be obtained through the secret methods of
standard intelligence practices. But it can be obtained quite openly and cheaply
from academics, civil society, commerce, governments, law enforcement
organisations, the media, all militaries, and non-governmental organisations. An
Open Source Agency, as I've proposed it, would not just meet 95% of our
intelligence requirements, it would do the same at all levels of government and
carry over by enriching education, commerce, and research – it would create what
I called in 1995 a 'Smart Nation.'
"The whole point of Open Source
Everything is to restore public agency. Open Source is the only form of
information and information technology that is affordable to the majority,
interoperable across all boundaries, and rapidly scalable from local to global
without the curse of overhead that proprietary corporations
impose."
[Open link for Robert Steele's graphic on open source systems
thinking]
It's clear to me that when Steele talks about ntelligence as
'decision-support,' he really does intend that we grasp "all information in all
languages all the time" – that we do multidisciplinary research spanning
centuries into the past as well as into the future. His most intriguing premise
is that the 1% are simply not as powerful as they, and we, assume them to be.
"The collective buying power of the five billion poor is four times that of the
one billion rich according to the late Harvard business thinker Prof C. K.
Prahalad – open source everything is about the five billion poor coming together
to reclaim their collective wealth and mobilise it to transform their lives.
There is zero chance of the revolution being put down. Public agency is
emergent, and the ability of the public to literally put any bank or corporation
out of business overnight is looming. To paraphrase Abe Lincoln, you cannot
screw all of the people all of the time. We're there. All we lack is a major
precipitant – our Tunisian fruit seller. When it happens the revolution will be
deep and lasting."
The Arab spring analogy has its negatives. So far,
there really isn't much to root for. I want to know what's to stop this
revolution from turning into a violent, destructive mess. Steele is
characteristically optimistic. "I have struggled with this question. What I see
happening is an end to national dictat and the emergence of bottom-up clarity,
diversity, integrity, and sustainability. Individual towns across the USA are
now nullifying federal and state regulations - for example gag laws on animal
cruelty, blanket permissions for fracking. Those such as my colleague Parag
Khanna that speak to a new era of city-states are correct in my view. Top down
power has failed in a most spectacular manner, and bottom-up consensus power is
emergent. 'Not in my neighborhood' is beginning to trump 'Because I say so.'
The one unlimited resource we have on the planet is the human brain –
the current strategy of 1% capitalism is failing because it is killing the
Golden Goose at multiple levels. Unfortunately, the gap between those with money
and power and those who actually know what they are talking about has grown
catastrophic. The rich are surrounded by sycophants and pretenders whose
continued employment demands that they not question the premises. As Larry
Summers lectured Elizabeth Warren, 'insiders do not criticise
insiders.'"
But how can activists actually start moving toward the open
source vision now? "For starters, there are eight 'tribes' that among them can
bring together all relevant information: academia, civil society including labor
unions and religions, commerce especially small business, government especially
local, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government/non-profit. At every
level from local to global, across every mission area, we need to create
stewardship councils integrating personalities and information from all eight
tribes. We don't need to wait around for someone else to get started. All of us
who recognise the vitality of this possibility can begin creating these new
grassroots structures from the bottom-up, right now."
So how does open
source everything have the potential to 're-engineer the Earth'? For me, this is
the most important question, and Steele's answer is inspiring. "Open Source
Everything overturns top-down 'because I say so at the point of a gun' power.
Open Source Everything makes truth rather than violence the currency of power.
Open Source Everything demands that true cost economics and the indigenous
concept of 'seventh generation thinking' – how will this affect society 200
years ahead – become central. Most of our problems today can be traced to the
ascendance of unilateral militarism, virtual colonialism, and predatory
capitalism, all based on force and lies and encroachment on the commons. The
national security state works for the City of London and Wall Street – both are
about to be toppled by a combination of Eastern alternative banking and
alternative international development capabilities, and individuals who
recognise that they have the power to pull their money out of the banks and not
buy the consumer goods that subsidise corruption and the concentration of
wealth. The opportunity to take back the commons for the benefit of humanity as
a whole is open – here and now."
For Steele, the open source revolution
is inevitable, simply because the demise of the system presided over by the 1%
cannot be stopped – and because the alternatives to reclaiming the commons are
too dismal to contemplate. We have no choice but to step up.
"My motto, a
play on the CIA motto that is disgraced every day, is 'the truth at any cost
lowers all other costs'", he tells me. "Others wiser than I have pointed out
that nature bats last. We are at the end of an era in which lies can be used to
steal from the public and the commons. We are at the beginning of an era in
which truth in public service can restore us all to a state of grace."
++
Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an international security journalist and
academic. He is the author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And
How to Save It, and the forthcoming science fiction thriller, ZERO POINT. ZERO
POINT is set in a near future following a Fourth Iraq War.
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love
will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is
stronger than evil triumphant.”
~ The Reverend Martin Luther
King
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