User:Robert David Steele

The account of this former contributor was not re-activated after the server upgrade of March 2022. Mr. Robert David Steele Vivas is the author of

ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (AFCEA, 2000, Foreword by Senator David Boren (D-OK)),

The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political (OSS, 2002, Foreword by Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS));

INFORMATION OPERATIONS: All Information, All Languages, All the Time (OSS, 2005, Foreword by Congressman Rob Simmons (R-CT-02))

THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest (OSS, 11 September 2006, Foreword by Congressman Rob Simmons (R-CT-02), Sponsor of The Smart Nation Act); and he is the editor as well as publisher of:

PEACEKEEPING INTELLIGENCE: Emerging Concepts for the Future (OSS, 2003, Foreword by Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, UK). Contributing editor with Ben de Jong and Wies Platje.

He is the founder and CEO of OSS.Net, a Global Intelligence Partnership and network that excels at both teaching and performing legal ethical intelligence collection, processing, and analysis. He is the Chief Open Source Intelligence ((OSINT) Evangelist, and the pioneer of information peacekeeping and of lifting the poor through free online education in all languages. He is the leading international proponent for what the Swedes call Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information Sharing (M4IS), and the first to identify and evaluate the eight tribes of intelligence capable of creating a World Brain: government, military, law enforcement, business, academia, non-governmental organizations, media, and civil societies including citizen advocacy groups, labor unions, and religions. He knows how to substitute intelligence for time, space, capital, and labor, and how to study and alter belief systems, and is the originator of the “four forces after next,” in the 1990’s, proposing in 1992 that we cut the heavy metal military in half, increase special operations and gendarme forces to $75B a year, redirect $100 billion a year to waging peace, and increase homeland security including educational investments to $75 billion a year. Had the USA done all that he and General Al Gray, then Commandant of the Marine Corps, recommended in “Global Intelligence Challenges of the 1990’s” as published in the American Intelligence Journal (Winter 1988-1989), in all probability public intelligence would have detected radical Wahabbism and mobilized a non-violent American strategy for countering this threat.

He and his company are featured in The Year in Computers (2000), he has been twice named to the Microtimes 100 list of “industry leaders and unsung heroes who…helped create the future”, and is featured in the chapter on “The Future of the Spy” in Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s WAR AND ANTI-WAR: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century, among other publications.

Over the past decade he has managed over 15 international conferences training over 5,500 intelligence professionals in the practice of open source intelligence (OSINT), and consulted to 19 governments (2,000 additional individuals) on the open source contribution to all-source intelligence reform.

He is one of two primary authors of the new NATO Open Source Intelligence Handbook (SACLANT, December 2001) and one of two primary editors of the companion NATO Open Source Intelligence Reader (January 2002).

He reads broadly and is the #1 Amazon reviewer of non-fiction pertaining to national security and global issues (#54 over-all). He has written widely in the areas of information strategy, intelligence reform (including why 9-11 was not prevented), open source intelligence, and asymmetric warfare including the urgency for striking a better balance among all the instruments of national power by revitalizing diplomacy, intelligence, economic assistance, and cultural outreach.

He was a founder and partner in the creation of the original information warfare conference, InfoWarCon, with Winn Schwartau, author of Information Warfare: Chaos on the Electronic Superhighway.

In the course of a twenty-five year national security career, Mr. Steele has served as a Marine Corps infantry officer and service-level plans officer; fulfilled clandestine, covert action, and technical collection duties; been responsible for programming funds for overhead reconnaissance capabilities, contributed to strategic signals intelligence operations, managed an offensive counterintelligence program, initiated an advanced information technology project; and been the senior civilian responsible for founding a new national intelligence production facility, the Marine Corps Intelligence Command.

He was one of the first clandestine officers assigned the terrorist target on a full-time basis in the 1980's, and the first person, also in the 1980's, to devise advanced information technology applications relevant to clandestine operations.

As a government employee, he was a founding member of the Advanced Information Processing and Analysis Steering Group, a member of the Information Handling Committee, and a member of the Foreign Intelligence Capabilities and Priorities Committee, among others.

Mr. Steele, a political scientist liberally educated at Muhlenberg College, holds graduate degrees in international relations (Lehigh University) as well as public administration (University of Oklahoma), and certificates in intelligence policy (Harvard University) and defense studies (Naval War College).

He is an elected member of Pi Alpha Alpha, the honor society for public administration, and has received the Meritorious Honor Award (Group) from the U.S. Department of State; Certificates of Exceptional and Special Achievement from the Central Intelligence Agency (Operational), and a Certificate of Achievement from the Department of Defense.

Mr. Steele is also an elected member of the Silicon Valley Hackers Conference founded by Stewart Brand and including such modern intellects as Larry Page, co-founder of Google, and Phil Zimmerman, inventor of Pretty Good Privacy. He is in addition a member and regular speaker to Hackers on Planet Earth, and of Hack-tic in Europe. In all three cases, he is recognized for hacking the U.S. Intelligence Community, based on the following from Bruce Sterling as written in Hacker Crackdown: “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 U.S. intelligence community, and doing it for the right reasons.”

Mr. Steele is a conceptualizer who has been described as a holistic thinker. He “connects the dots” across disciplines, cultures, continents, and timeframes (past to future). History documents that he tends to be 20 years ahead of the pack in understanding emerging threats and iconoclastic solutions.

He speaks fluent Spanish, of a Colombian mother, with twelve of his twenty years overseas having been spent in Central & Latin America, the remainder across Asia and the Pacific. Born in New York, he has held the highest security clearances from 1976 to 2006. Today he does not hold clearances and focuses on out-doing the spies with only legal and ethical information.