OPEN SOURCE SOLUTIONS, Inc. International Public Intelligence Clearinghouse 1914 Autumn Chase Court Falls Church, Virginia 22043-1753 Voice: (703) 536-1775 Facsimile: (703) 536-1776 INTERNET: steeler@well.sf.ca.us - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - TRANSCRIPT OF REMARKS Mr. Robert D. Steele, President OPEN SOURCE SOLUTIONS, Inc. Federal Plenary Session, Tuesday 24 August 1993 1st Annual Symposium on Coupling Technology to National Needs "NATIONAL ENGAGEMENT": How to Achieve National Security & National Competitiveness Through a National Knowledge Strategy God Bless Al Gore, but I'm here to tell you we need to go beyond technology--we need a national knowledge strategy. For all its merit, the National Information Infrastructure is "all connectivity and no content". In my brief remarks today I'm going to offer you a larger context, a specific campaign plan for establishing a national knowledge strategy, and a specific means of funding this 1-3 billion dollar a year Federal effort. I admire the progress made by the Vice President and his staff, and especially Mike Nelson. Just this past week, at the INTERNET conference in San Francisco, Mike gave us two memorable quotes: First, he defined the National Information Infrastructure, somewhat tongue in cheek, as "that system which allows any person to convey voice, imagery, and data to any other person at a price that they are happy with". Second, and here he hit the crux of the matter, he talked about how we "have a lot of 1950's policies getting in the way of 1990's technology". Well, Mike is absolutely right. But he is also focused on technology, as are most of you. What I want to do today is outline some specific proposals for going "beyond technology", to create for ourselves a national knowledge strategy that will assure our national security and our national competitiveness in the Age of Information. We need to establish a national knowledge strategy which includes "content, culture, coins, and C4 security". I call this proposed policy of mine a policy of "National Engagement". Let me set the stage by defining the information continuum to which we desire to market our wares. I will focus on the continuum in our nation, but naturally there is an international variation, or a Rubric's Cube if you will. Some of you probably read that wonderful book, "The Nine Regions of North America". Well, when I think about our national "knowledge terrain", a phrase coined by my friend Alvin Toffler, I think about the nine knowledge sectors of North America: K-12, universities, libraries, businesses, private investigators and information brokers, the media, government, the Department of Defense, and the national intelligence community. K-12 LIB PI/IB GOVT INTEL UNIV BUS MEDIA DOD These sectors, every one, is suffering from constraints which have a crippling effect on national security and national competitiveness. There are "iron curtains" between the sectors, "bamboo curtains" between the institutions in each sector, and "plastic curtains" between individuals within institutions. I applaud the Vice-President's modest initiatives to use tele-computing to break down these barriers, but I am never-the- less concerned that the Clinton Administration has abdicated its responsibility for establishing a broader vision, and failed to focus on the importance of: CONTENT: increasing the amount of substantive information available to citizens on line; CULTURE: understanding the importance of accelerating the integration of our ethnic populations and economically impoverished citizens; COIN: establishing control over the multi-billion dollar annual waste in government and private sector spending on information technology research & development; and C4 SECURITY: rapidly addressing the critical security vulnerabilities of our national command & control, communications and computing infrastructure. I voted for Al Gore and I admire his staff. However, I believe they have found the realities of executive government so overwhelming as to have been incapacitated; they are reluctant to take on the intelligence community over the need to unclassify our intelligence technologies for export sales, and they are reluctant to suggest any dramatic realignments of funds from classified to unclassified knowledge projects. Let me provide two comments in this, because I realize that many of you are locked into classified projects and concerned about the future. I think Robert Kohler at TRW, Bill Schneider (our former Undersecretary of State responsible for export controls), and Ken Bass, the first Intelligence Council at the Department of Justice, are absolutely correct when they suggest that the time has come to declassify many of our intelligence technologies. Not only is this the only way to keep the production lines going, but if we don't do it soon commercial technologies are going to out-pace us and we will not have anything to offer. Unfortunately, and this is my second comment, the bureaucrats that comprised the intelligence team supporting the National Performance Review have done a terrible job. The report that went to the Vice President is a disgrace, and if it goes to Congress without significant revision I expect a feeding frenzy among my friends on the Hill. The bureaucrats did what all bureaucrats do: they protected their existing turf and eliminated from consideration any of the really good ideas for reinventing national intelligence. In passing, let me say that I do not hold Jim Wolsey accountable for the failure of the intelligence team--he is being blind-sided by a staff whose brains are in grid-lock. What you are going to hear from me today is a new concept of national intelligence, one with a small "i", one which emphasizes open sources as the source of first resort, and one which relies heavily on an international distributed network of cooperating centers of excellence. In the age of distributed processing, the concept of "central" intelligence is already waist-deep in the tar pit where mammoths go to die. I want to stress that while I believe my concepts are totally in harmony with those of the Vice President and his senior staff, I represent only myself. As an experienced intelligence officer, I think I have found a solution, a way to fund the missing pieces of the broader national program that I believe the Vice President would support if the intelligence community had been forthcoming with him about the availability of now-classified funds which could be realigned to unclassified activities. I call on the Members of the Senate and House intelligence committees to examine this proposal in close consultation with the Members of the committees concerned with commerce, science & technology, finance, energy, and the fiscal health of our Nation. The benefit to all of us is that the more we unclassify our technologies and the more we rely on open sources, the more options we have in terms of selling these sources and methods over and over again, to a much broader consumer base, rather than being trapped with a single client. We don't want to go down with a sinking ship. I am pleased to report that Congressman Calvert of California has taken under consideration, and is circulating for comment in Washington, a bill I drafted which would establish a National Knowledge Foundation as the "content" portion of the Vice President's National Information Infrastructure. The purpose of this foundation, to be funded with a $1-3 billion a year transfer from the National Foreign Intelligence Program to the Vice President's program, would be to provide matching grants to libraries, universities, businesses, and newspapers agreeing to participate in a national program to rapidly establish a robust multi-media, multi-lingual digital data base--an "information commons" accessible to every citizen, not only of the U.S., but of the world--included would be funding for small schools and businesses lacking current access to the global tele-computing grid known as INTERNET. I want to emphasize that the purpose of this foundation is to nurture distributed and cooperating centers of excellence throughout the Nation, and not on establishing a central information repository such as is represented by the Library of Congress. I also want to stress that the Foundation, under the direct auspices of the Vice President, would be divorced from intelligence community management and oversight. That is the only conceivable way in which we could get the academic community and the broader business community, as well as international knowledge centers, to support this initiative. Now let me address the question that is on everyone's mind: "why am I targeting the National Foreign Intelligence Program" for a multi-billion dollar cut?" The reason is simple: the unclassified portion of the Federal budget is so committed to entitlements and other enduring programs, that the Vice President has little room to maneuver when seeking funding for new programs. The intelligence community, by contrast, has over the years built up a $30 billion annual budget which has not been subject to the same scrutiny and public control as the unclassified budget, and which is now being called into question as "open sources" (publicly available information) repeatedly demonstrate their superiority to classified intelligence. Under my concept, the Vice President would be the Chief Information Officer for the Nation, and would exercise direct authority over both the Director of Central Intelligence, and the Director of the National Knowledge Foundation. This will not only reassure the public as to the virtue of the Foundation, but it will also give the Vice President the authority to manage our entire national information budget, moving money between Departments and between classified and unclassified programs. Now let me answer the second question that is on everyone's mind, which is "Who am I to state with such authority that classified intelligence is inferior to open sources most of the time?" The short answer is, I'm the guy who jump-started the policy discussion in the first place. When I stood up the Marine Corps Intelligence Center in 1988, working for Col Walt Breede, we earmarked $10 million over five years for our Top Secret information handling system, and accepted without question the implicit assumption that this was what we should do, as the newest national intelligence production facility. Well it was a great shock to me--and to all of our analysts --when we turned the system on and discovered that nobody has been doing what we call the "data fill" all these years, on anything other than the Soviet Union. The data bases were literally empty. I turned around and began a sequence of events that led to, among other things, the DCI Task Force on Open Sources, and an international symposium on open sources at which Admiral Studeman and Paul Strassmann and Dennis Clift joined Jay Keyworth, Bob Kahn, Steve Andriole, and other great minds in discussing this important topic. To summarize my experience on this, let me just point out that for over forty years the intelligence community has devoted itself largely to sources and methods focused on the Soviet nuclear and conventional military threat, and that these sources and methods do not lend themselves to being reoriented to the more subtle and complex issues surrounding Third World economic, demographic, and cultural challenges, nor does this capability lend itself to supporting domestic policy-making and national competitiveness. Based on my practical experience helping to run a national intelligence production facility, and on my participation in two Department of the Navy wargames scrubbing Space and Electronic Warfare, I can tell you with fair certainty that "OSCINT" is superior to classified intelligence 80% of the time, and at one quarter of the cost. OSCINT is also superior to classified intelligence because it can be obtained faster, and can be disseminated without restriction to Congress, the press, and the business community. If you want to test this for yourself, do some benchmarking. At my suggestion many people have. And here is what they are finding: In many cases, classified information simply is not available, nor are informed judgements, because the issue has not been a traditional area of concern for the intelligence community. In other cases, the intelligence community is coming back with an answer in two days that is classified, while the electronic librarian is coming back in forty five minutes, on the same day, with the same answer, and it is unclassified. There is another element which supports the need to move money from classified to unclassified activities, and that is the fact that the intelligence community has abdicated its role as the principal focal point for informing policy-makers, because it has forced its analysts to concentrate on the limited classified materials available to them, and made it virtually impossible for analysts to interact directly with the vast quantities of open source information available around the globe. 90% of what a policy-maker or consumer of intelligence actually reads and listens to is both unclassified, and unanalyzed, i.e. not subject to the kinds of validation and cross-checking at which intelligence community analysts excel. Think about that for a second: when you add up the Congressional input, foreign leaders, lobbyists, think tanks, bureaucrats, the media, and so on, you realize that classified intelligence is not only a drop in the bucket from the consumers point of view, but it is also a real hassle to use it. If you desire additional details, I commend to your attention my most recently published article, "A Critical Appraisal of U.S. National Intelligence Capabilities", which appears in the most recent issue of the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. Now let me just address my concern about waste in information technology research & development. I was until the 1st of April the Marine Corps' representative to the Advanced Information Processing and Analysis Steering Group of the intelligence community, and the Information Handling Committee. It is my view--and I stress that I represent only myself as a citizen in this speech--that at least $100 million a year is wasted each year by the intelligence community because of redundant uncoordinated efforts by various intelligence organizations to build their own private version of "the ultimate workstation". If you extrapolate this to the other sectors of the information continuum, I believe that the Nation as a whole is wasting at least one billion and possibly two billion dollars a year in uncoordinated redundant and counter-productive research and development in this one limited area. In addition to the National Knowledge Foundation which I described earlier, I hope that the Vice President will be moved to establish a National Information Council, to include related Councils for each sector, to integrate our national research & development efforts in the area of information technology. Many of you are familiar with how vulnerable our C4 systems are, but for those that are not I want to outline the imminence of a "Pearl Harbor" in cyberspace. I liken our Nation's present circumstances to that of a homeowner whose three story house has been constructed over a sink-hole. Just last week it was my privilege to give the Superintendent's Guest Lecture at the Naval Postgraduate School. I chose as my topic "War and Peace in the Age of Information". I worked hard on that speech, because we are at a critical juncture in our Nation's history. We are grossly over-capitalized in things that move and shoot, and we are grossly under-capitalized in things that think and communicate. We need to change that balance, and we need to do it quickly. With a little help from my friend Peter Black, who wrote about this in WIRED magazine, and from my friend Winn Schwartau, whose forthcoming book on "Information Warfare: How to Wage and Win War in Cyberspace", I outlined for the faculty and students my concept of the C4I "pyramid of vulnerability", with intelligence at the top, then military, then civil, and then geographic. Hypothetically speaking, we took out the Barking Sands time antenna in Hawaii, causing computers world-wide (and precision munitions systems) to start screaming for the correct time--with a side effect on the telephone system, as every System Operator in the world starting calling around for accurate time. We used anti-tank rockets on the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and National Reconnaissance Office down-link antennas, and got some of my hacker friends to do soft kills on the Culpepper switch in Virginia which handles most of the Federal communications, and on a couple of power grid control stations. A couple of other teams used an electromagnetic pulse bomb to wipe out Wall Street financial records, including the backup disks stored in the same building, and all 911 calls around the country we diverted to "Dial a Prayer". For grins a mega-virus was put on the INTERNET, and a teams across the country robbed ATM machines using PIN numbers they had previously collected while parked near-by over a period of weeks. In the geographic arena we popped the Alaska pipeline which carries 10% of America's oil, destroyed seven bridges across the Mississippi, dropped a freighter in the outer way of Charleston channel so our strategic sealift could not sortie, and destroyed two of the locks in the Panama Canal. We are not ready for this kind of calculated unconventional terrorism. I recommend the Vice President immediately establish a National Information Security Coordinating Committee, to include representatives from all sectors of the information continuum. It causes me great distress that the Vice President and the Director of Central Intelligence are not availing themselves of the enormous talent pool we have in this country for thinking. I particularly commend to their attention my friends Alvin Toffler, author of PowerShift and of the forthcoming War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century; Paul Strassmann, former Director of Defense Information and author of Information PayOff, among other books; Howard Rheingold, author of Tools for Thought and the forthcoming book on Virtual Communities; and two individuals I don't know personally but whose work I admire: Harlan Cleveland, author of The Knowledge Executive, and Robert Carkhuff, author of The Exemplar: the Exemplary Performer in the Age of Productivity. I could pull people like this together and in 90 days have a worthwhile national knowledge strategy meriting Congressional consideration. Let me conclude my remarks by expressing my continued support for the Vice President and the National Information Infrastructure, by endorsing the need for continuing to host this annual conference on coupling technology to national needs, and by encouraging all of you to place your technical campaign plans within the larger context of a national knowledge strategy, a strategy of "National Engagement", which integrates content, culture, coins, and C4 security. .