On 8/16/13 4:14 PM, glen wrote:
I tend to think of an organization (even if it's a corporation) as
being _more_ stable, more trustworthy, because there are checks and
balances built in.
I'd say stability and trustworthiness are different things. Stability
arises almost necessarily because there are different individuals
competing for power within the organization. An overseer may
technically have authority over others, but if the others form
coalitions, at some point they may be able to vote the overseer off the
island, or at least discredit the overseer in the eyes of his/her
overseer. For this reason, the overseer must be cautious about being
dictatorial or inflexible.
Once a structure like this becomes stable, the the organization can
become immune from the truth. No one in the lower ranks has an
incentive any more to rock the boat -- everything becomes about internal
political signaling. There is no reason to be trustworthy in any
universal sense because the incentives for survival within the
organization follow a different set of rules. For example, almost
everyone can hate Congress, but because a voter is only choosing between
bad and worse, the incumbent just needs to qualify as bad.
In the case of the NSA, a concern is what manager has any incentive to
enforce their supposed no-US-persons rules? If, as a set of upper
level managers, they all come to believe the only important thing is
showing how signals intelligence can catch violent Islamic extremists,
and that will justify a steadily growing budget, then they just need to
design a plausible-but-weak-self-enforcement mechanism that have no real
teeth. They can invent secret best practices that they can wave in
front of Congress, FISA, courts, etc. and have policies that say
Employee may not do X, but have no actual strong technical mechanisms to
be sure that happens. Tabulate some plausible tables about "analyst typo
involving entering in phone numbers (oops)" and "insubordinate
employee", and it's pretty much bulletproof to scrutiny.
Marcus
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