Date: Sat, Mar 13, 1993  (14:34)
From: Robert David Steele <steeler@WELL.SF.CA.US>
Subject: File 9--Bridging the Gaps w/Law Enforcement (View 2)

Let me give you a couple of specific examples where the
intelligence
community, the rest of government, and the private sector
(corporate,
academic, and free) could do some work together:

1)  A national "inventory" of unclassified multi-media,
multi-lingual
unclassified sources of data, and a national dialogue over what
"gaps"
need to be filled to make our nation and all its sub-elements
competitive in thinking, producing, and providing services.

2)  Provide Vice-President Gore with budgetary control over the
billions of dollars spent by various U.S. government agencies on
inventing incompatible non-interoperable data handling systems, and
move toward a national generic information handling architecture
with
mandated openness and standards--for instance, a legislative
proscription, implemented over five years, which ultimately
prohibits
government purchase of ANY information technology which is not
fully
open.

3)  Establish a "transition plan" in which 1 billion dollars a
year,
beginning in this coming fiscal year which starts this coming 1
October, is transferred from the intelligence community to
NREN/NPN.
Down-size the intelligence community in the following four ways:

a)  Eliminate one quarter of its budget (from which comes the
funding
for NREN/NPN)

b)  Privatize one quarter of its capabilities, both by
transitioning
things like the Foreign Broadcast Information Service into the
private
sector (keeping an eye out for low cost to public), and by not
doing
so many  things (like being three days ahead of the news) which are
not truly vital to ANY definition of national security.

c)  Distribute most (not all) of the analysts to a far broader
consumer base, allowing them to apply their methodological skills
to
unclassified information (which has great biases of its own)--stop
PRODUCING classified intelligence for the sake of elitism, and
focus
on THINKING as well as unclassified production that is disseminable
to
Congress, the press, and the public.

d)  Put a much-reduced intelligence community back in the business
of
true SECRETS, narrowly focused, with Vice-Presidential
participation
in advising the President what can be done with open sources vice
classified.  Do nothing classified that can be done adequately with
unclassified.

------------------------------

From: Jon <jrc@well.sf.ca.us>

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