Customer Reviews

INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainaabilty

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Be forewarned this is not a normal review. I have ordered this book from Amazon, but this review is based on my reading of it online something I normally don't do.
First I would note that although I admire Steele as an original and perceptive thinker I don't think this book particularly lends itself to being read online. This because Steele's approach to the issues associated with creating a Global Public Intelligence Program is actually quit complicated and, at least for this reader, will require a good deal of underlining, pondering, going back to, and researching to follow the treads of his approach. It is ponderous to do this with an online book.
So what of the online version of the book? Well first it is in many ways a distillation of ideas on collecting, processing and disseminating intelligence that Steele has been kicking around for years and has written about is his other books such "On Intelligence" and "Information Operations." Yet in other ways it presents the culmination of a complex process of analysis and research that has been probably going on for the last twenty years as Steele himself has evolved in his thinking.
The book contends that given the threat environment of the 21st Century, the security of the world transcends that of individual nation states. In Steele's view the parochial and obsessively secret approach to intelligence by individual, isolated nation states is inadequate for the challenges presented by global threats to a global population. In the most radical (and controversial) sections of his book, Steele argues for a public global intelligence system based on worldwide contributions from all people, everywhere, at all times. He envisions humans everywhere using the global intelligence system to integrate their individual cognitive processes into a single "human world brain" which would be capable of surmounting the sorts of threats to humanity that he sees as inevitable.
The reader does not have to agree with Steele's concept of the future to derive a good deal of benefit from this book. It is in point of fact another serious and important meditation by Steele on the sort of strategic thinking needed to produce intelligence that is actually relevant to the real world.

Robert Steele is just plain wired differently, which is a wonderful thing for those with open minds--but an irritant for organization men (and women). I've read Steele's work for longer than I've known him professionally, and I've known him long enough to be bewildered by the intelligence community's determination to shut out the most creative thinker in the discipline. Part of the problem is that Steele's a fighter, not a sycophant. Had he subdued his one-man crusade for intelligence reform and, now, for the embrace of revolutionary approaches to information in humanity's interest, he easily could have become wealthy in the defense-industry sector by prostituting his ideas. He did not do so, which is a good thing for the rest of us, but has condemned Steele to an outsider status imposed by those who fear the threat his originality and integrity poses to the "Washington way of doing things." Certainly, Steele doesn't get everything right. None of us do. But his track record of foreseeing and understanding the way information has already and will continue to change the way we live, think, fight, work and even mate has no peer. Over the years, his focus has evolved and enlarged, from fighting for the moribund intelligence community to accept that a high classification does not necessarily confer value on an information product--and that open-source material may, indeed, be more valuable than satellite images or intercepts--to his present concern with the pressing need to think not only at the level of the nation-state, but in terms of a world community (not some polarizing "new world order") in which we can all "cooperate and graduate," or continue to muddle through--often bloodily. Do I always agree with Steele? No. Do I always admire his courage, fortitude, integrity, passion and unique vision? Absolutely. I recommend this book--and each of his preceding volumes--to those who prefer challenging ideas to pandering reinforcement of their prejudices. Whether or not you ultimately embrace Steele's global vision, the point is that he's the rare man who actually has a global vision. This is a book for the best among us, but definitely not for the dogmatic, the careerist or the cynic.

Updated 20 June 2010 to provide contact information for the author:
UN-related matters: last name at un.org [UN Bookstore has two cases of the book in hand; I will be visiting HQ 15-16 Jul 10]
Personal & other: Robert.David.Steele.Vivas at gmail.com

As with all books published by Earth Intelligence Network (EIN), a 501c3 dedicated to the proposition that public intelligence in the public interest would yield a prosperous world at peace instead of the corrupt mess that existing government, corporations, and non-governmental organizations have created (50% waste and overhead, one billion rich, five billion poor), this book is free online at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Network.

HOWEVER, it is a joy to hold in hard-copy, and I respectfully recommend that the reader consider buying the hard-copy which is priced at cost (Amazon keeps 55% of the retail price) and will be a collector's item. Only 1000 have been printed, after which we switch the book to Amazon's "on demand" soft cover program. Then, after reading and markign the book in hard-copy, the free soft-copy, a single pdf, will be very easy to use for its intended purpose, exploring the works of over 1,500 authors whose applied intelligence over the years are represented in this book, which is a portal to past knowledge and a portal to a future in which the World Brain represents We the People as one humanity, and we put fraud, waste, and abuse into the dustbin of history.

This book is a companion and sequel to the edited work with 55 contributing authors,
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

Other books from EIN, which inherited all the books published by its angel OSS.Net, Inc. are offered both here at Amazon in hard-copy, and free online at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog.
2000 On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World
2002 The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political--Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
2003 Peacekeeping Intelligence: Emerging Concepts for the Future
2006 Information Operations: All Information, All Languages, All the Time
2006 THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest
2008 Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Substance of Governance; Legitimate Grievances; Candidates on the Issues; Balanced Budget 101; Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them; Annotated Bibliography)

Also recommended:
2009 Reflections on Evolutionary Activism: Essays, poems and prayers from an emerging field of sacred social change
2005 The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Revised and Updated 5th Anniversary Edition: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits
2001 Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

Thank you for considering this book, which is the capstone work representing thirty years of reading and thinking about how to create, as Buckminster Fuller visualized, a world that works for all.