"
No, ministers – more surveillance will not make us safer" by Cory Doctorow (my emphasis in red):
"We live in a post-evidence-based-policy world. As Ben Goldacre’s latest collection
documents, what governments say they want to do and what they actually
do are bizarrely decoupled. Whether the strategic goal is catching
terrorists, educating children, or improving health outcomes, the
tactics that government deploys are only glancingly related to what the
evidence suggests it should be doing.
Instead, in every domain, over and over, the policies that prevail
are those with business-models. Policies that create a large pool of
wealth for a small number of players, enough money in few enough hands
that there’s some left over to lobby for the continuation of that
policy."
and:
"Historically, the CIA
was a Humint (“human intelligence”) agency, which conducted its work by
sending spies in fancy dress to go and talk to people in the field.
Now, it’s basically become another NSA, a Sigint (“signals
intelligence”) agency, hoovering up data and trying to make sense of it.
Why does the US now have two Sigint agencies and a greatly diminished
Humint capacity? After all, it would be tactically useful for the US to
know who it has killed.
I think it’s because Sigint has a business model. There are
procurements for Sigint. And where there are procurements, there are
lunches at well-funded thinktanks and lobbyists’ offices for Senate
Intelligence Committee staffers to talk about how those procurements are
the most sensible thing for government. Procurements attract junkets.
Procurements produce private-sector jobs. Procurements are laundered
back into lawmaking through campaign contributions.
There’s not a lot of pork in Humint. Apart from the odd airplane
ticket and putty chin, Humint is basically about hiring people to go and
nose around. It may involve bribing officials and other informants, but
that’s not the sort of government spending that generates a lot of
lobbyist activities on the Hill or in Westminster.
I think that we’ve tacitly acknowledged this in policy circles for
years – if you have something you think would be good for society, you
need to figure out how it will make a small group of people rich, so
they will fight to keep it going. It’s how we got carbon trading! And
carbon trading is a great cautionary tale for activists thinking of
harnessing policy business models to attain their objectives: the people
you make rich will fight for a version of your policy that makes them
as rich as possible, even if it means subverting the underlying social
good that your policy is supposed to attain."
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