A “Decentral” Intelligence Agency … provides a way to master the flood of multimedia, multilingual, multichannel information collected, analyzed, and disseminated by millions of autonomous sources each day … the federal government must empower all of its people to gain access to the kind of distributed intelligence that is impossible to create within a single “Central” Intelligence Agency. The supporting elements of this new vision include connectivity, content, and coordination, among others. Connectivity is well along, because it is a tangible “thing” that most bureaucrats and private-sector profiteers can understand … We citizens must instruct our government in the basic truths of the Age of Information.
Predictor: Steele, Robert
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article for Wired magazine, Robert Steele, an 18-year veteran of the U.S. intelligence community, writes: ”Revolution is finally taking shape in the form of draft legislation that would require the President of the United States to submit annually to Congress a National Knowledge Strategy, just as he now must submit a National Security Strategy. A national knowledge strategy is essential to national security and to national competitiveness. The proposed legislation has two major elements and five supporting elements. The major elements: 1) Someone within the federal government must be responsible for nurturing citizen access to intelligence. A chief information officer of the United States of America is appointed for this purpose. 2) It is not possible to centralize information management. The only way to nurture knowledge is to support a distributed approach to knowledge. The proposed legislation tackles these two points. It establishes a ‘Decentral’ Intelligence Agency that provides a way to master the flood of multimedia, multilingual, multichannel information collected, analyzed, and disseminated by millions of autonomous sources each day. In brief, the federal government must empower all of its people to gain access to the kind of distributed intelligence that is impossible to create within a single ‘Central’ Intelligence Agency. The supporting elements of this new vision include connectivity, content, and coordination, among others. Connectivity is well along, because it is a tangible ‘thing’ that most bureaucrats and private-sector profiteers can understand. The Center for Civic Networking, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit organization, has done a good job of ensuring that the concept of universal access has been fully integrated into the NII blueprints, but the other four elements have been completely overlooked by the Clinton administration. As Noam Chomsky points out, we citizens must instruct our government in the basic truths of the Age of Information.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Is National Intelligence an Oxymoron?
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.04/idees.fortes2_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney