Privacy and the use of cell phones.

[Ross Anderson]

Owen:

> if an intelligence group including a police intelligence group - lies,
> alters collected material or produces bias through its selective use or
> suppression they they negate the very reason for their existence.

Donald:

> Agreed, but the same can be said of intelligence collecting, those same
> people who collect and report may have their own agenda. 

Dave:

> Just because something SHOULD be, does not mean that it IS.


Guys

This kind of confusion arises in many places and the means to resolve
it are fairly well developed.

There is a huge body of literature in `public choice economics' in
which the tools of incentive analysis are used on the behaviour of
politicians and civil servants. The behaviour pariodied in `Yes,
Minister' turns out to be completely rational given the way the system
works. James Buchanan won the Nobel in 1986 for founding this
discipline. It provides neat, and often quantitative, explanations for
all sorts of dubious political and bureaucratic behaviour.

The `national interest' may be nice in theory, but the reality is that
politicians try to get re-elected, while civil servants try to win
promotion, build empires and avoid risk. (Much the same ideas apply to
private sector institutions - that's why stock options became so
popular as a way of aligning personal and institutional goals.)

Anyway, a public choice economist would not be at all surprised to
hear that an intelligence agency had deceived a Whitehall department.
Public choice theory predicts systematic divergence of public actions
from general public interests, and this has been observed in an
enormous range of applications.

Deceptions can become institutionalised and involve coalitions - a
kind of bureaucratic version of logrolling. Why else was it that for
decades the CIA reported that the USSR's GNP was half the USA's,
rather than one quarter, and no-one in the entire Western defence and
intelligence community was motivated to argue the issue with them?

The application of public choice to intelligence is not new. A quick
google search throws up the following gem:

`Thanks to Evan Connell's book, Son of the Morning Star, Custer's "Last
 Stand" can be used in economics classrooms to illustrate public choice
 economics. Perverse economic incentives affected military intelligence
 estimates of the number of Indians waiting at the Little Bighorn. Each
 Indian reservation agent's pay was tied to the census on his
 reservation. Inflated reservation population counts deflated estimates
 of Indians massing at the Little Bighorn.'

However, I expect that a lot more could be done in this field. The
serious articles I found in my rapid search mostly analysed related
topics such as export controls and defence generally

Ross