Thursday, January 23, 2014
Parkinson fails once
I'm always using Parkinson's Laws to explain the action of bureaucracies like NSA. I just now realized that part of the NSA scenario violates Parkinson.
NSA's mission, like all other bureaucracies, is to expand its power and budget and workforce. It has accomplished its mission beautifully for 60 years. Magnificent success.
But what about the competing bureaucracies? The agencies that could be getting more of the overall intel budget if NSA weren't so successful? Why haven't they been fighting NSA? Surely they know better than anyone else how useless NSA's product is.
CIA and Dept of State and the military intel branches run real spies who take real risks and die real deaths to acquire real information about real enemies. CIA does engage in internal spying, but most of its work is immensely valuable and entirely proper for a powerful nation.
NSA takes no risks at all; it expands technology and consumes vast amounts of money and electricity and land and water to acquire exactly zero real information about real enemies. It acquires nearly infinite amounts of raw data about our own people, which it presumably uses for blackmail.
And that one word is probably the answer to this puzzling question.
¶ 8:41 AM 
