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Robert David Steele Vivas (b. July 16 1952 New York City), is a former Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer for twenty years and was the second-ranking civilian (GS-15) in U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence from 1988-1992. Steele is a former clandestine services case officer Central Intelligence Agency. Agee, Philip. Inside the Company: CIA Diary. Penguin Books, 1975. ISBN 0-14-004007-2 p. 528 He is the founder and CEO of OSS.Net, Inc. as well as the Golden Candle Society. US Intelligence Upside Down and Inside Out, Less Than 20% Effective Steele also was a member of the Adjunct Faculty of Marine Corps University in the mid-1990's.

Career

He spent his early years, two decades, resident in Latin America and Asia as the son of an oil company executive. Steele has an AB in Political Science; an MA in International Relations; and an MBA in Public Administration. He resigned from the military in 1993.

He is commonly associated with the Open source intelligence (OSINT) movement and coined the terms "virtual intelligence" and "information peacekeeping." He argues that U.S. intelligence reform is needed, and that the private sector can perform a high percentage of U.S. open-source intelligence needs and reduce cost to the U.S. Government. He advocates for "collective intelligence" or "the wisdom of the crowd" (what Howard Rheingold calls "smart mobs") and for hackers as a national resource.

Steele, an international proponent of OSINT, argues that both reports, while recent, still ignore decades of advocacy for a proper national focus on OSINT from 1988 to date. He further argues that the Central Intelligence Agency has refused to take open source information seriously for decades, and shouldn't be charged with developing new capabilities that are totally outside its existing culture of secrecy. Many in the OSINT field credit Steele's early advocacy and his establishment of the first open source conference as having put OSINT on the map during the early 1990s.

OSINT Process

The process of secret intelligence can be applied to legal and ethical open sources of information in order to produce OSINT. Steele defines the processes in his The New Craft of Intelligence, to include:

  • Requirements Definition
  • Collection Management
  • Source Discovery and Validation
  • Multi-Source Fusion
  • Analytic Tradecraft
  • Compelling Timely Actionable Presentation

Communities of Interest

Steele defines in his INFORMATION OPERATIONS: All Information, All Languages, All the Time that there are eight OSINT "tribes" or communities of interest that share information very poorly, not only among the varied tribes, but within the tribes. At its best, OSINT provides a digitally-enhanced means of sharing historical, cultural, current, and estimative intelligence to achieve common ends. The tribes are:

Quotes

The reality is that wealth can be translated into information power, and that the apathy of the people is allowing private wealth to control public information. We are very, very close to private tyranny.

Never send a spy where a school-boy can go.

Books

  • On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (2000) OSS International Press, ISBN 0971566100
  • The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political (Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Ignorance) (2002) OSS International Press, ISBN 0971566119
  • Information Operations: All Information, All Languages, All the Time (2006) OSS International Press, ISBN 0971566135

References

External links

News articles

1952 births | Living people | People of the Central Intelligence Agency | Spies | OSINT

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Robert David Steele".

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