JOHN PERRY BARLOW

ROBERT DAVID STEELE

CHRISTOPHER DAVID STEELE?

Here part of a piece written by John Perry Barlow, describing how he first got involved with the CIA. By all accounts, Barlow seems to have been a Spook. What are the chances Christopher David Steele and Robert David Steele just happen to share the same two names?

I was introduced to this world by a former spy named Robert Steele, who called me in the fall of 1992 and asked me to speak at a Washington conference that would be "attended primarily by intelligence professionals." Steele seemed interesting, if unsettling. A former Marine intelligence officer, Steele moved to the CIA and served three overseas tours in clandestine intelligence, at least one of them "in a combat environment" in Central America….

…Like the CIA I encountered, Hayden's NSA was also a lot like the Soviet Union; secretive unto itself, sullen, and grossly inefficient. The NSA was also, by his account, as technologically maladroit as its rival in Langley. …

…The entity I envision would be small, highly networked, and generally visible. It would be open to information from all available sources and would classify only information that arrived classified. It would rely heavily on the Internet, public media, the academic press, and an informal worldwide network of volunteers–a kind of global Neighborhood Watch–that would submit on-the-ground reports.

It would use off-the-shelf technology, and use it less for gathering data than for collating and communicating them. Being off-the-shelf, it could deploy tools while they were still state-of-the-art.

I imagine this entity staffed initially with librarians, journalists, linguists, scientists, technologists, philosophers, sociologists, cultural historians, theologians, economists, philosophers, and artists-a lot like the original CIA, the OSS, under "Wild Bill" Donovan. Its budget would be under the direct authority of the President, acting through the National Security Adviser. Congressional oversight would reside in the committees on science and technology (and not under the congressional Joint Committee on Intelligence).

https://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/1007/042_print.html