OSINT

Interview: Former CIA Officer Robert Steele Discusses Why We Need an Open Source Revolution

The CIA is a bureaucracy. The normal U.S. ‘secret world’ mentality is that of a little gray man, who “goes along to get along.” In fact, the primary mission of a corporate organization like the CIA is to keep the money moving and grow the budget.

My class in 1979 was the first modern class where they changed the profile to recruit entrepreneurial self-starters who could think for themselves. And we were a disaster. Half my class quit within five years, I lasted nine. We simply could not tolerate or go along with toxic leadership and stupid procedures that did nothing to actually produce intelligence (decision-support).

The emphasis in the secret world is on spending as much money as possible, which translates into spending mostly on technical collection that is not processed– while neglecting human and open source collection as well as deep analysis that includes historical and cultural context.