Robert David Steele Quotes

I realized in 1988 that my life as a spy specializing in secrets was not only unproductive, it was in sharp opposition to what we actually need: full access to true information, and consequently, the ability to create Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT).

I am not alone in the conviction that real, lasting national security can best be obtained through complete transparency of government, business, and other facets of society, and this includes open access to all of the many available types of information.

Liberation technology creates wealth, and open-source technology creates wealth. In both instances the 'center of gravity' for dramatic change toward resilience and sustainability is the human brain mass of five billion poor--the one billion rich have failed to 'scale.' The human brain is the one unlimited resource we have on Earth.

I will say that again in a different way: the persistent unethical and ignorant emphasis on secrecy and on making decisions for partisan advantage or to pay off campaign contributors and select insiders is not sustainable. We the People have an opportunity to embrace this manifesto of Open-Source Everything and bury 'rule of secrecy.' This is why I am optimistic about the future.

Here's the bottom line: The secret world of intelligence--at least in the United States of America--represents everything wrong with the government, the industrial era, our financial-economic system, and our ethics.

As our technological capacities continue to increase and our environment becomes ever more fragile and endangered, we find that changes to the Earth that used to take ten thousand years now take a fraction of that.

This lack of accurate, trustworthy information about the true cost of any given policy, product, service, or behavior is paralyzing all action.

No one wants to be poor. In my view, and the view of many authors who have focused on poverty and practical solutions to it, we need to move beyond the industrial-era paradigm of giving them fish, or even the information-era paradigm of teaching them how to fish, and instead move closer to the cosmic paradigm of giving them the tools with which to create their own ingenious means of addressing their problems in their cultural context and their time, while drawing--at their convenience, not ours--on our dispersed knowledge.