Customer Reviews

THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.