10 Threats to the Public Interest & Security
Robert David Steele
04.18.06, 6:00 PM ET
Why Secret Intelligence is Bad
Director of National Intelligence [DNI] Covers 17.5%
In the Age of Information, when secret sources are less valuable and open sources are more essential in understanding reality and crafting responsible public policy, what are the ten greatest threats to the United States of America? What ten questions should the reformed and revitalized Director of National Intelligence (DNI) be able to answer for Congress and the public? This challenge has been answered generally by the Report of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, A more secure world, Our shared responsibility (United Nations, 2004), but nothing the DNI is doing today is helpful in actually addressing, in a substantive sustained way, each of these threats.
In the table below, the percentage of the relevant information available from open sources rather than secret sources is provided in the second column, to make the point that spending $50 billion a year on secrets and less than $500 million a year on open sources simply does not make sense and is therefore politically and economically irresponsible.
Clear & Present Danger to the Security & Prosperity of the USA
Threat #1: Poverty 95%
Threat #2: Infectious Disease 99%
Threat #3: Environmental Degradation 90%
Threat #4: Inter-State Conflict 75%
Threat #5 Civil War 80%
Threat #6: Genocide 95%
Threat #7: Other Large-Scale Atrocities 95%
Threat #8: Nuclear, radiological, chemical, biological weapons 75%
Threat #9: Terrorism 80%
Threat #10: Transnational organized crime 80%Average Importance of Open Source Intelligence 82.5%
A proper national intelligence endeavor should be able to define the current and projected extent of the threat in the USA and elsewhere, specify the political, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, and natural-geographic costs and nuances associated with the threat, and recommend or at least benchmark a specific spending plan to eliminate the threat in the USA by 2015 and in the world by 2025. Only the President and the Cabinet can make policy, but they are largely uninformed and are not accountable because the intelligence baseline is not a public intelligence baseline.
U.S. Intelligence, like the Department of Defense, is a dinosaur from the Cold War, a direct outcome of allowing the military-industrial-congressional complex to specify how we spend the taxpayer dollar without regard to reality or proper intelligence. We have a special interests spy world and a special interests heavy-metal military. Both need draconian reform, and the fastest, cheapest way to benchmark public policy and the public budget is by creating an Open Source Agency that serves the public interest, publicly.
To be explicit: the $50 to 70 billion being charged to the U.S. taxpayer for secret intelligence is delivering no more than 20% of the relevant intelligence necessary to address the high-level threats to America and the civilized world. This is unacceptable and requires the generation of public outrage as a first step toward practical and honest intelligence reform. What we have now simply will not do.
An Open Source Agency would provide a national peer-to-peer network with public intelligence that is transparent, shareable, accountable, and sensible. Creating such an organization is one step toward sanity.
permalink | Jock Gill | Intelligence, Politics
Thank you, Jock, for posting. I spent 18 years limiting myself to simply trying to help the secret intelligence world make better use of open sources. That’s behind me. Now my objective is nothing less than capturing the entire $60B a year budget, reducing the secret portion to $20B a year, and redirecting the other $40B a year toward national research and education in a new peer-to-peer open network. Similarly, from the military we need to keep the budget at $500B, but at least $100 billion a year needs to be redirected toward waging peace, which another $150 billion a year are split between homeland security including stopping illegal immigration dead in its tracks, and special operations against both terrorism and organized crime.
I also believe that properly applied, OSINT can help identify $550 billion a year in additional revenues, with four main contributors:
1) Corporations back up to 25% of the federal revenue from taxes (they are now at 6% from a high of 32%)
2) End wasteful subsidies and other frauds including excessive spending on complex military systems and prison systems
3) Attack illicit trade and make it unprofitable, while obtaining added revenues from confiscation of illicit profits
4) Identify tax fraud, such as the $50 billion a year in import-export pricing fraud, an advanced form of money laundering.
The next President needs to have an Open Source Agency as the basis for both wise policy, and engaged informed democracy.
Mr. Steel,
It seems you are attacking more the effects than the root causes, which in my opinion is the inability for any political voices outside the two major parties to have influence in setting policy or making laws. Instead of capturing the $60B and creating shifting the money to new places why not just eliminate the spending or better yet eliminate each of our individual contributions to this tyranny.
April 15th (actually the 17th this year) just passed and with it the stress some Americans felt while trying to fill out their tax forms in a complete and honest manner while at the same time limiting their tax liabilities. For the past 10 years I have used a legal (from a criminal liability standpoint according to Supreme Court rulings) way to circumvent my income-reporting requirement and therefore tax liabilities. I did this by making a minor change to the text just above the signature line of tax forms and asserting my 5th Amendment privilege against self-incrimination on a line-item basis. Before any readers repeat the litany about the necessity of every citizen paying his/her ‘fair share’ (whatever that means) to support governmental activities, jump to conclusions about me being simply a tax cheat and call for my arrest, let me make one thing clear: for me its not about the money, its about political fairness.
Although U.S politicians frequently cite our political system as some paragon of representative democracy, I am unaware of any country since the Civil War adopting our winner-take-all, gerrymandered district, model for election of legislators. Almost all opted for a parliamentary system with proportional representation. Americans and their media decry the corruption, lack of new ideas and lack of statesmen available for elected office but then only consider members of the two major political parties, and their limited ideologies, as possibilities.
I am an independent voter. The rallying cry of American Colonists was “No Taxation Without Representation”. Today, unless you are either Republican or Democrat you are effectively denied representation. Almost no independent candidates are ever elected to U.S. state, not alone federal office, even though in all other democracies many would surely have gotten members of their party seated. People under the voting age in their states that work and pay taxes have no representation. All residents of D.C. have no representative in Congress who can vote. Many convicted felons are denied the vote yet they are expected to pay taxes. Those who are elected by today’s majority are no more the representatives of these independent voters than the Colonial puppets appointed by King George III. If one accepts that the American Colonists were right to refuse to pay taxes to the British Crown until they received representation then why should today’s independent voters, D.C. residents, working minors and felons pay state and federal taxes?
The U.S. Supreme Court is now hearing arguments regarding the legality of redistricting methods. The drawing of district lines has been one of the most contentious political activities in American life since almost the beginning of the nation. But what seems to have been lost in this discussion is the very concept of how citizens elect representatives and the fairness of the process, especially to independent voters.
I promise to restart completely reporting my income when effective measures of proportional representation are implemented at my state and the federal level. Will any independent voters join me in telling Uncle Sam, “Taxation Without Representation is Tyranny”?
Rev. Jonathan Mayhew
131 Cambridge St
Boston, MA 02114
mayhew@safe-mail.net
Skype phone: jonathanmayhew