Appears to be an excerpt from a Barlow book . . .
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.
After nearly two decades of service in the shadows, Steele emerged with a lust for light and a belief in what he calls, in characteristic spook-speak, OSINT, or open source intelligence. Open source intelligence is assembled from what is publicly available, in media, public documents, the Net, wherever. It's a given that such materials--and the technological tools for analyzing them--are growing exponentially these days. But while OSINT may be a timely notion, it's not popular in a culture where the phrase "information is power" means something brutally concrete and where sources are "owned."
Good find. Notice that name again Steele!