THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest [Hardcover]

Robert David Steele (Vivas) (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Few have thought as deeply or imaginatively about such questions as a super-smart [now fifty-four]-year old former Marine and intelligence officer named Robert D. Steele... -- Alvin & Heidi Toffler, in War & Anti War

Robert Steele is about 100 times as smart and 10,000 times more dangerous as the best of the hackers, for he is successfully hacking the most challenging of bureaucracies, the U.S. intelligence community, and doing it for the right reasons. -- Bruce Sterling, Hacker Crackdown: Law and Order on the Electronic Frontier

Steele's advocacy and efforts have led the way toward an enlightened and informed public. We all owe him a debt of gratitude for the sacrifices he has made to drag us - kicking and screaming - into the modern information age. --Lieutenant General Patrick Hughes, U.S. Army (Retired)

From the Publisher

This book, while available to the public and especially to those who hope to restore informed democracy by reducing secret back room deals and lies based on secrecy, was actually published in order to distribute 1,000 copies to every Senator, every Representative, every Governor, and every Cabinet Officer, as well as 200 American thought leaders and 200 international thought leaders. We must defeat the attempt by the spies to control Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), and instead have the Open Source Agency as a sister agency to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) under diplomatic auspices. The book provides the road-map for public intelligence in the public interest.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 250 pages
• Publisher: OSS International Press; 1st edition (September 11, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0971566143
• ISBN-13: 978-0971566149
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,800,214 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Towards an Informed Public, August 12, 2007

By 

Retired Reader (New Mexico) - See all my reviews

This review is from: THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest (Hardcover)

This book is really a compilation of the writings of Robert D. Steele that are relevant to the Smart Nation Act. This remarkable piece of legislation was introduced by Congressman Rob Simmons (R, Ct.) in September 2006 and represents an effort to persuade congress to think seriously about the kind of real intelligence reform that Steele has been advocating for close to twenty years. Simmons, like Steele, has a background in intelligence and is a rare informed critic of the U.S. Intelligence System. Needless to say there is neither powerful lobbyist support nor national security establishment support for real intelligence reform. And especially since few voters care one way or the other about such issues, this act will probably go nowhere.

What is commonly forgotten is that intelligence in the CIA sense of the word is simply processed information focused on specific subjects in such a way as to provide unique knowledge of those subjects. Intelligence does not have to be classified. It usually is classified for one of three reasons:1) to protect the sources and methods by which it was produced; 2) to protect bureaucratic turf from rivals; and 3) to prevent the subject(s) of the intelligence from realizing that unauthorized persons are in possession of knowledge about them. Steele correctly maintains that classification hinders the development of real knowledge about a variety of subjects and is largely unnecessary.

The core of the Smart Nation Act and Steele's primary theses is that an Open Source Intelligence Agency based on the free flow of information, the widespread use of outside experts, and the input from everyone including common citizens would provide better and cheaper intelligence than that now obtained from the existing U.S. Intelligence System. This agency would not be the typical hierarchy, but would be organized into semi-autonomous cells of researchers, analysts and experts. Each of the 50 U.S. States would have a local information processing center that would replicate the national Open Source Agency. These local centers would support state level activities requiring intelligence support and provide intelligence information from such sources as first line emergency response teams. Central to this whole concept is that the intelligence accumulated by these agencies would be available to every one so that the U.S. could actually achieve the Jeffersonian dream of an informed public.

So is this so much `pie in the sky' rhetoric and hopelessly impractical? Apparently Representative Simmons doesn't think so and neither does this reviewer.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Table of Contents, September 14, 2006

By 

Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest (Hardcover)

We've tried six times to load useful information to Amazon's site, but for some reason it is not working. Here is the Table of Contents for the book:

Foreword by Congressman Rob Simmons (R-CT-02)
Introduction: Something Congress Can Do For America Without Delay
Part I: Climbing the Policy Curve
CH 1: "The Smart Nation Act," High-Level Documentation (2006)
CH 2: Forbes.com, "Reinventing Intelligence" (2006)
CH 3: Time.com, "The New Craft of Intelligence" (2003)
CH 4: Creating a Smart Nation (1996)
Part II: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest
CH 5: Terms of Reference for 10 Threats, 12 Policies, 8 Challengers
* Threat #1 Poverty
* Threat #2 Infectuous Disease
* Threat #3: Environmental Degradation
* Threat #4: Inter-State Conflict
* Threat #5: Civil War
* Threat #6: Genocide
* Threat #7: Other Atrocities
* Threat #8: Proliferation
* Threat #9: Terrorism
* Threat #10: Transnational Crime
CH 6: The Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) Story, 1988 to date
CH 7: Intelligence Affairs: Evolution, Revolution, or Reactionary Collapse?
CH 8: Intelligence in Denial: Need for an Independent Open Source Agency
CH 9: Open Source Intelligence: The Strategic Value to America
Part III: OSINT Honors & References
CH 10: OSINT Honors: 12 Lifetime Awards, 140 Golden Candle Awards
CH 11: OSINT References: 25,000 Pages, 25,000 Practitioners
CH 12: Briefing on "The Failure of 20th Century Intelligence"
CH 13: Briefing on "Bin Laden, National Intelligence, and How NOT to Spend the Taxpayers' Treasure"
Epilogue: Creating a Smart Nation to Save Ourselves, and the World
Appendix: The Other Four Books

If you do not care to buy the book, please consider looking at my 750+ reviews of books by others, in the aggregate my reviews are both a free book and a useful catalog of the most important non-fiction books about national security and global reality.

God Bless America, and see us through these troubling times.