Bureaucratic capture

[proff@iq.org]

> Irrespective of the truth or otherwise of these allegations, I do believe
> that this well illustrates the extreme dangers of allowing powerful forces
> in society to operate in extreme secrecy and with very little in the way of
> accountability for (or publicly accountable scrutiny of) what they do.
> 
>      Brian Gladman
> 

I've had some involvement with setting up of outside (but government
appointed) over-seer or review committees (i.e parliamentary
sub-committees). Provided the selection process isn't tainted,
these committees usually start out quite well, but invariably become
captured by the very bureaucrats they were designed to control
(west-minster style ministers are of course the sorry instance of
an over-seer committee of one).

I've had the same experience in courts. The more highly specialised
the court is the more it looses it's objectivity. In the case of
courts/appeal tribunals/panels of review that have been legislated
into existence to judge upon the actions and decisions of a particular
government department this is a serious problem. Day in and day
out the judges and magistrates of these courts see differing
plaintiffs with differing circumstances and views - but the defence
(the government department which the court was essentially constructed
to review decisions of) remains constant and with the same tilted
world view. Tilt all the furniture in a room 20 degrees and pretty
soon you too will believe that "up" is actually 70 degrees to the
horizontal.

It is this consistent exposure to *one consistent voice* of
interpretation (even if there are many voices) that inevitably
draws committees and specialist courts (and even specialist sections
of an otherwise generalist Ombudsman's office) into the one-world-view
of the very departments they were designed to police.

Frequent rotation of reviewing members sounds like a good idea,
but often actually makes the review panel even less effective. New
members (and ministers) often rely excessively on existing members,
department honchos and technocrats because they are ignorant about
the technical environment and bureaucratic structure of the department
they are meant to be policing. During this babe-in-the wood
phase new members are incredibly vulnerable to what can only be called
bureaucratic predation. Readers of this list might like to ponder
what aspects bureaucratic predation of novice ministers is involved in
the current shifts in the crypto policy of New Labour. 

Ordinary specialist government review committees as outlined above
have a hard enough time of keeping their independence. When you
push that model into a world of classified, secret briefings, which
can't be discussed with anyone half-way objective, and enrolment
into the secret enclave of the boys own spy adventure - a rather
exciting and aren't-we-special experience for members of the UK
labour party who most UK IC guys wouldn't otherwise touch with a
ten-foot pole - in an area with no voter discipline (e.g the Health
Department can give you all the secret briefings it desires, if
you screw up, the voting public - or by proxy your political party's
pre-selection endorsement system will spank you - the same can not
be said for intelligence, which the voting public doesn't care
about and which the intelligence community ensure's will never care
about - even to the extent of hiding the level of public funds
being syphoning off to feed them) bureaucratic capture is inevitable
and absolute.

Cheers,
Julian.