In case it's not already obvious, Steele has a clue. I heard him speak at H2K last year. He's either the world's greatest liar, or has a tremendous background and authority on how the goverment handles secret and subversive activities. Although the financial arguments (below) are compelling in themselves, he has a whole other series of arguments that basically point out how incredibly incompetent the government agencies are at dealing with secret data. -- Greg On Wed, Jun 20, 2001 at 03:00:51PM -0500, Aimee Farr wrote:
http://www.oss.net/Papers/white/TheNewCraftofIntelligence.doc The New Craft of Intelligence Robert David Steele REVIEW Draft
Select quotes: -------------- o "We are wasting today at least $10 billion a year on secret technical intelligence collection systems whose fruits cannot be harvested, and we are about to waste $60 billion over ten years recapitalizing these same secret technical collection systems, so that we might collect 100 times more information, and process still less of it."
o "The center of gravity for both national security and national prosperity lie now in the private sector and its intellectual property as well as its accumulated knowledge. The concepts of noosphere (Pierre Tielhard de Chardin) and "world brain" (H.G. Wells) are now an imminent reality, and the World Intelligence Center envisioned by Quincy Wright is achievable."
o "Eighth, the President must eliminate export restrictions on encryption and recognize that the greatest opportunity of all faces us. We can raise the Internet's security level to where it can handle Presidential communications. The moment we do that, we embrace the world and make it possible for an extraordinary variety of multilateral relationships to bloom in cyberspace."
-[]-
~Aimee