Steele has done counter-intelligence. Steele has done a lot. (See his full bio at the website of Strategic Studies Institute, United States Army War College.)
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| Robert D. Steele photo credit: Unknown |
(I do not agree with everything that Steele says. For example, in the video below he accuses Walmart of "killing jobs" within a 200-mile radius of their stores. A two-block radius would be with the realm of credulity, but 200 miles? I'd love to see the documentation for that, but I don't want to make this into a post about Walmart. My point is that Steele says some things that are believable and some that are questionable. Even so, he's a bright guy who cannot be ignored.)
"Bloggers.... you grab onto an issue or something, and you are part of structured citizen journalism blogging thing that lets no evil-doing thing go unnoticed, and that rules. I think we're at a turning point," said Steele, "I think we're at the very beginning of a historic title shift of power restoring the Constitution." Another factor on the side of the people, said Steele, is that the government is actually too disorganized to effectively spy on its own citizenry.
Interestingly, Steele refers to bloggers, or citizen journalists, as "hackers." It's not what you might think, as we see in an excerpt from a PBS interview of Steele while he was attending the "Hackers in the Twenty-first Century" conference in 2000:
PBS: Your view of hackers will come as a surprise, I think, to a lot of viewers, who view them as greasy-haired, goth louts who are spending too much time in front of a computer screen.
Steele: Well, I myself have participated in a very well attended debate on whether hackers were a national resource--which is my position--or whether they are pathological scum. I would say to you that it is the media's fault that hackers are seen in this light. And it is the fault of the US Secret Service, and it is the fault of certain governments around the world who chose to treat hackers as a threat because they didn't understand hackers; they didn't understand the electronic environment that that hackers were addressing. The bottom line is that hackers are the pioneers in this electronic frontier. They are way out in front of the rest of the world. They are seeing the dangers, the vulnerabilities, the shoddy, unethical, inappropriate business behavior by communications and computing companies. They're basically saying, "Hey, look what we found." And everyone wants to shoot the messenger.Back to the Gnomedex speech. "The reality is," said Steele to his audience, "the federal government is broken in every possible way, and it's going to be localized bottom-up resilience networks that will save us. That's where you guys come in."
So, in Steele's estimation, the people he refers to as "hackers" just may be the salvation of democracy and constitutional government in the U.S.
In the second video here, Steele says, "I think we can have a peaceful, non-violent, legal revolution. The one vulnerability that both corporations and the U.S. government have is the power of the people to vote. Not only on election day, but with recall movements, and by removing their money from the stock market - which I expect to crash again - and from refusing to buy products." Now that's food for thought and the beginning of a plan of action.
“A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victim, and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the plague” — Tullius Cicero
Related:
- Interview: Robert D. Steele PBS Frontline
- Who’s Who in Collective Intelligence: Robert David STEELE Vivas Public Intelligence Blog
- Controlled Opposition – How to spot a fake leader Truth In 7 Minutes blog
