The rarely restful mind of 30-year Intelligence Community (IC) veteran Robert David Steele (who, among his varied IC missions served as a CIA clandestine services case officer, co-founded the Marine Corps Intelligence Center and is the undisputed, tireless champion of open source intelligence, (OSINT) is filled with futurist concepts for IC reformation, restructuring and rethinking that are inspired, brilliant … and soaked with common sense.

At least that’s according to not just a few past and present admiring, progressive in their own right IC vets who extol Steele’s visions and who agree with his more often than not incendiary bomb-throwing notions about why the post-9/11 reformation of the IC is far from complete in so far as meeting 21st Century intelligence requirements and decision-level support from the President to the beat cop on the street.

Within the context of having watched and studied the machinations of the Intelligence Community for decades - with six books to show for it - Steele’s vision of how intelligence collection and dissemination - from the spy satellite in the sky to a citizen on a street corner with a camera cell phone – should operate in the 21st Century is either wildly enlightened, according to his champions … wildly entertaining and near lunatic, by his detractors ... or wildly and completely out of touch by his stodgy old school contemporaries.

“Robert is one of the most influential and visionary people in the world of intelligence today. His ideas are truly awe inspiring and revolutionary. Robert's message of open source intelligence is so simple that it’s almost mind-boggling to conceive that we don't actively practice this today. His ideas to bring change to human civilization through open ideas and communication are what we need to become a better society,” said Douglas S. Simar, a communications technology specialist.

Not just a few notable past and present IC members and, especially, IC reformists themselves, have commented that Steele’s myriad expositions on intelligence ought to be required reading among the rank and file from the appointed, hired and elected top echelon policy and acquisition decision-makers to entry level practitioners. But more than that, his intellectual tenacity to envision the intelligence schema for the future ought to be taken advantage of by the current politically beholden-appointed chieftains and congressional overseers of America’s intelligence combine.

But the why behind why that isn't happening cuts to the crux of some of the historical bureaucratic hindrances that have deeply rooted themselves into the IC's foundation that Steele - and others - rail against, and has prevented the forward momentum of reform and restructuring as recommended by the 9/11 Commission, and intended by the post-9/11 congressional restructuring of the IC.

Insiders candidly told HSToday.us that those who sidestep Steele as though he is made of kryptonite stems from the fact that his progressive thinking is, well, is beyond the pale. It’s just much too deep for either the politically appointed intelligence custodians or the benefactors who appointed them, or their legislative minders. In other words, it’s all beyond the cognitive capabilities of all these folks’ mental gymnastic abilities of reasoning and understanding, as a number of Steele’s admirers said – on background, of course.

Indeed. Steele’s thinking poses a distinct threat to the status quo whose status quo repeatedly has been identified as being the principal impediment to the creation of a 21st Century Intelligence Community in scores of government and congressional blue-ribbon and NGO commissions, not the least of which was the 9/11 Commission itself, important elements of which still haven’t been taken seriously by Congress because it would require certain committees, subcommittees and their respective chairs to give up their power over appropriations. It's a lot like the multitide of congressional committees that - despite the 9/11 Commission's recommendations for leaner oversight - insist on overseeing the Department of Homeland Security.

Steele’s steely vision of what needs to be done pre- and post-9/11 – which he’d been proselytizing long before any of these distinguished empanelments came to many of the same conclusions – are considered too volatile to be allowed within the sacrosanct corridors of this still stove-piped and turf protecting status quo.

Hence Steele’s familiarly combustible sort of observation: “We are a dumb nation with an idiot government, and every time I see another good old boy getting to the top, I think to myself, ‘in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king - especially if he does blow jobs on demand.’”

“Robert Steele is about 100 times as smart and 10,000 times as dangerous as the best of the hackers, for he is successfully hacking the most challenging of bureaucracies, the US Intelligence Community, and doing it for the right reasons,” observed noted futurist technology author, Bruce Sterling, writing in Hacker Crackdown: Law and Order on the Electronic Frontier."

“Few have thought as deeply or imaginatively about such questions as [this] super-smart former Marine and intelligence officer named Robert D. Steele …,” said the noted futurist writing team of Alvin and Heidi Toffler, who featured Steele in the chapter, “The Future of the Spy,” in their seminal 1993 book, “War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century.”

Take, for instance, Steele’s “no duh” reality check on value-added intelligence analysis versus secret sources:

“The all-source analysts can no longer rest their conclusions and their reputation on the two percent of the information they deal with, most of it from secret sources. In an era when over 90 percent—some would say over 95 percent—of the relevant information is readily available to anyone in the private sector, and especially in the absence of processing and translation capabilities available to the mainstream profit-making institutions, it is analytic tradecraft—a truly superior ability to create value-added insights through superior analytical knowledge (including historical knowledge) and technique—that distinguishes and gives value to the new craft of analysis.”

“We still need spies and secrecy, but only as the ten percent special element of all-source intelligence, which is itself nothing more than ten percent of Information Operations (IO),” Steele believes.

Wow!

For the more than a decade that I’ve known Steele, he’s advocated more and better use of OSINT, which historically has supposed to be part of the “all-source intelligence collection” process, but which in fact has been relegated to virtual obscurity because the established IC mindset has been that the only truly important intelligence is that which comes from the dark dominion of classified intelligence collection processes.

“And open sources (CIA insiders call it ‘Open Sores’) do not generate the outrageous overhead and profit bonanzas for contractors who today consume 70 percent of the total secret world’s budget,” Steele candidly stated.

Steele has long forcefully argued that that just ain’t so. Steele wrote nearly three years ago in Forbes ASAP that “US intelligence is upside down and inside out. It is upside down because it relies on satellites in outer space rather than human eyes on the ground. It is inside out because it tries to divine intelligence unilaterally, without first asking anyone else what information they might provide.”