Intelligence collection

[Nicholas Bohm]

I am sure Owen Lewis speaks of intelligence matters from experience, and so
it does his character great credit that he has nevertheless retained such
remarkable innocence.

His view that intelligence gatherers do not distort what they collect
because it would defeat their sole purpose of serving the truth to their
customers is analogous to the argument that free markets protect customers
from suppliers and regulation is unnecessary.  But human societies have
long found a need for the enforcement of laws against food adulteration
(certainly known in mediaeval England), and there have been competition
authorities in the US for over 100 years and in the UK for over 50 whose
job it is to work against the imperfections of unregulated free markets.

Returning to Whitehall, my own modest experience of acting for Government
departments and other public sector bodies, and for other clients involved
with them, confirmed the unsurprising truth that Whitehall consists of
fiefdoms within principalities within kingdoms within empires, with the
usual concomitant alliances, trading and warfare.  The question of who the
customers of intelligence gathering really are, and who it really serves,
is therefore far from simple.

My own impression is that, except in time of a major war, GCHQ's main enemy
is HM Treasury.  What GCHQ needs is intelligence that supports its budget
case.  The same is true of the MoD.  Below this level there are no doubt
countless layers of smaller, self-similar patterns of interest.  

Of course it may be that down on the seabed, the gathering process is
untouched by ther storms raging on the surface; but I doubt it, and in any
event I am sure that on its way from collection through interpretation to
summary to digest, the conflicting interests put in their oars (if this
metaphor is not yet adequately mixed).

So while there is undoubtedly value to be had from efforts at preserving
the purity of collected material through applied cryptography, I doubt
whether such techniques are uniquly of value to the evidence-collecting
function rather than the intelligence-gathering one.

Regards

Nicholas

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