4 th
ecpr General Conference
“Perspective on Intelligence Governance”
Proposed Paper & Presentation
Earth Intelligence Network: The Way Forward
Abstract
The proposed paper will take issue with the fundamental premise underlying the call for paper, to wit that government intelligence should, per se , be secret. While this may have been the case during the Cold War, when the primary interest of government intelligence was the acquisition of information from “denied areas,” or ruthless internal elements that comprise a threat to the state, it is not the case today. Consider these four observations:
"The danger is, you'll become like a moron. You'll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours" [because of your blind faith in the value of your narrow and often incorrect secret information.]
Daniel Ellsberg speaking to Henry Kissinger in the 1970’s, as recounted in Secrets: A
Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (Penguin, 2003). Page 236.
“Everybody who’s a real practitioner, and I’m sure you’re not all naïve in this regard, realizes that there are two uses to which security classification is put: the legitimate desire to protect secrets, and the protection of bureaucratic turf. As a practitioner of the real world, it’s about 90 bureaucratic turf; 10 legitimate protection of secrets as far as I am concerned.”
Rodney McDaniel, then Executive Secretary of the National Security Council, to a
Harvard University seminar, as cited in Thomas P. Croakley (ed), C3I: Issues of
Command and Control (National Defense University, 1991). Page 68.
“In short, the collapse of the communist system in Central Europe has created a new situation for intelligence collectors. I estimate, based in part on my commercial discussions since 1990 in East Germany, Poland, Albania, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, that 80 percent of what is on any intelligence agency’s wish list for this area as of 1991 is now available overtly.
Ted Shackley, SPYMASTER: My Life in the CIA (Potomac, 2006). Page 282
“80% of what I needed to know as CINCENT I got from open sources rather than classified reporting. And within the remaining 20%, if I knew what to look for, I found another 16%. At the end of it all, classified intelligence provided me, at best, with 4% of my command knowledge.”
General Tony Zinni, USMC (Ret), former Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Central Command, as recounted by a senior Colonel to Robert Steele on 4 April 2006, and subsequently published in Robert Steele, T he Smart Nation Act: Public Intelligence in the Public
Interest (OSS, 2006). Page 121.

I emphasize the American experience because they are wasting the most money and doing the most damage, but this view is also inherent in the work of other scholar practitioners such as Michael Herman in Intelligence Power in Peace and War
(Cambridge, 2004) and the varied works of Dr. Loch Johnson.
The other side of the secrecy coin is ethics or the lack thereof. The literature is replete with examples of “cooking the books” on the intelligence side, and of “manipulating the truth” on the policy side. The paper and presentation will outline the emergence of the
Earth Intelligence Network upon the foundation now provided by the Internet, Wikis, and the relationship between transparency and trust.
Robert David Steele-Vivas
CEO, OSS.Net, Inc.
Co-Founder, Earth Intelligence Network
PO Box 369
Oakton, VA 22124
Desk: 703.266.6393
Fax: 703.266.6391