Forming opinion

Another circular today about a new process which involves the completion of a complex form to get basic things done. It reminded me something I wrote about 18 months ago but didn't publish here at the time.

The generic process I refer to is the type that when asking part of your organisation to do one of the jobs they exist to do, draws the response -

"We have a new process for dealing with communications with our department. In order to deal with your request we require you to complete the new process change form, so that xxx can pick up this change and so it’s clear what changes are needed."

You mean like the details I've just sent which you have copied to xxx in the email you responded with asking me to fill in your form... a form which, when you click on the supplied link, is not designed for the circumstances.

The thing about these processes is that they are completely inviolable and immune from critical scrutiny. Budgets must be managed. Accountability and transparency are sacrosanct. The new process is essential and nobody ever considers doing a cost benefit analysis of it.

We have hundreds of thousands, probably millions of these processes in education, the NHS, social services, the criminal justice system and all other public services.

The question that is never asked is how much specifically do the processes we choose to use to "manage" budgets cost? How much will it cost the organisation, in staff time and other resources, for a member of staff to fill out and submit another complex form, requesting some administrative silo engages in its routine activities? How much will it cost to have it processed, considered by the department, a decision made and returned to the form filler? Plus costs of subsequent clarifications or queries or rejections of requests etc.

When you split organisations up into departmental silos, demanding they all meet ludicrous simplistic targets with much reduced operational budgets, it leads to internecine warfare between organisational units. The first thing to be sacrificed is the 95% of activities that the department used to do that constituted services to the rest of the organisation.

Need to save 15% costs - cut 15% that involves doing something for someone else that does not count in our target metrics.

And anyone requiring any useful activity out of any of these silos, remotely resembling the services they previously provided, is obliged to fall in line with keeping their internal administration tidy and filling out their forms. There's nothing more modern and efficient than getting your 'customers' to do your administration, preferably via the internet. The real costs are offloaded by the silo, magically and invisibly distributed as economic externalities and the organisation sinks a bit more under the strain.

What are the opportunity costs of this?

Nobody asks.

Nobody considers that when you dissect a living organism into its constituent atoms, in a futile attempt to control the atoms, you kill the organism (and the organisation).

The public sector has made an art form out of choking on the gigantic invisible costs of our internal accountability bureaucracy.

 Yet quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

So.

I'm considering designing a Permission to Request Ray Fill Your Form Out Form when dealing with all public services including the day job.

It will require lots of spurious hard to find data, on multiple incompatible systems, including data I hold exclusive access to. It will not be submittable unless all fields are completed in the appropriate number of acceptable characters, within a closed and secretly specified set. Every time an attempt is made to submit an invalidly completed form, all fields will be cleared and the bureaucrat wanting me to fill out a form will be informed, in classic patronising & disapproving management-speak that they have to start from scratch.

It will require the approval of at least 5 layers of senior management in their organisation, and at least two external referees prepared to certify the worthiness of the bureaucrat to ask me to complete a form. It will round off with a minimum of 10,000 words of small print relating to the principles of section 11 (p28-33) of General Interference with Organizations and Production of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual

Additionally, it will require the head of the applicant bureaucrat's department and the organisation's executive board to submit themselves to border control, criminal records and qualifications checks and processes, and have their names entered permanently on a 'requester that Ray fill out a form' offenders register.

Finally, it will commit the requisite bureaucrat and departmental and organisation chiefs to an irrevocable agreement that they resign their commission and never darken the organisation's door again. Also in the small print is the assurance that the request that I fill out their form will be rejected in all circumstances.

I'll soon be wandering the streets of Oxford, Quasimodo-like, chanting "The Forms! The Forms! Economic Externalities! Economic Externalities"

That Form Rings a Bell.

Thoughts on Eric King interview with Bill Binney & SIA bureaucracies

Eric King, Director of Don't Spy on Us and Deputy Director of Privacy International, recently interviewed former Technical Director at the NSA, Bill Binney, following the latter's testimony before the Joint Committee on the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill.

The interview is available in 3 parts on YouTube and embedded below.







Binney is very clear in his belief that mass surveillance costs lives. He is also clear on the need for targeted, judicially supervised, necessary and proportionate surveillance.

The thing that strikes you about Binney and other life long intelligence careerists turned whistleblowers like Thomas Drake, is the absolute commitment they had to their craft, preserving, protecting and defending the US Constitution. Binney spent over 30 years with the NSA. Drake had a long career in military intelligence, the CIA, private contractor intelligence and finally the NSA.

Now there are discussions to be had about the activities, efficacy and adherence to constitutional, ethical and/or other nominal constraints of their respective employers during their careers. Both men, however, believed themselves to be working for institutions concerned fundamentally with operating within and protecting the Constitution.

We know that large organisations are subject to regime change. Regime change can and repeatedly does put even the core structural principles and values of any institution in jeopardy. Institutional memory fades and anything can be sacrificed to the agenda of the realpolitik of the new crew at top table.

Binney and Drake will have seen many internal organisational regime changes during their lives. They absorbed the associated slings and arrows and, it seems, for most of that period maintained the capacity to do their jobs to their own satisfaction. Around the turn of the century, though and after the 9/11 attacks, that changed. Both consider the power brokers within the NSA and other agencies took advantage of the times to throw off any and all historic constitutional leashes and committed their agencies wholesale to mass surveillance.

Admiral Poindexter, as the Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Awareness Office (IAO), brought his Total Information Awareness programme to Congress where even the congress-critters eventually rejected it. Yet the intelligence agencies went ahead and essentially built and operated the infrastructure of mass surveillance in secret anyway.

When the NSA, both considered, ditched the Constitution and engaged in waste, fraud and crime on an industrial scale, to a degree neither could stomach any longer, Binney retired in 2001 and Drake resigned in 2008. Drake went on record in 2011 to suggest the agencies' activities had outstripped the criminality of former president Richard Nixon.  Both were subsequently pursued by federal authorities with criminal investigations relating to their whistleblowing. Binney wasn't charged but Drake faced a long stretch in prison before all the serious charges against him were finally dropped in 2011.

When asked why the agencies and the UK's GCHQ insist that bulk collection of communications data is so essential to their operations, Binney has a simple answer - power, control and money. Eric King puts to him that the military industrial complex is perhaps not so well established in the UK as the US, so it seems reasonable to ask why GCHQ would be so insistent about the importance of their continuance of bulk communications data collection and retention for target development.

Without bulk collection, the argument goes, they can't find new threats. Binney insists this is "absolutely false." They never start with an empty slate. If they take a targeted approach instead, they can define rules of association round social networks and associated zones of suspicion.

General Alexander of the NSA said we want to "collect it all". So he commits the agencies to gathering more and more data every year and therefore the government to the non-audited and unlimited ongoing funding of same. It means an ever increasing budget for any agency involved in such activities, including for GCHQ. So that, asserts Binney, is their motive for mass surveillance.

It's hard to believe any ethical institution would behave in a way - e.g. using mass instead of targeted surveillance - that jeopardises its core functions - e.g. preventing terrorist attacks - and instead devote its energies to protecting and growing the institution.

Yet you don't need to be an expert in management or organisational behaviour, in the writings of Geoffrey Vickers, Russell Ackoff or other systems experts, to know that this is exactly how both public and private sector bureaucracies do behave.

The driving forces in the DNA of every bureaucracy are the twin desires for survival and growth.

When you divide complex, deeply interconnected and interdependent public service systems up into competing quasi-autonomous silos - some bigger and more glamorous than others - and then instruct the leaders of those silos they will be evaluated on the basis of single figure simplistic targets or metrics - e.g. A&E waiting times or police response times - you cannot be surprised when the silos focus on those metrics at the expense of everything else; including the effective operation of the individual silo.

Some bureaucracies are prepared to shrink temporarily if that's what it takes to survive. An IT department, under scrutiny, can cut a third of its employees, thereby cutting nominal costs. But if simultaneously cuts 90% of the services it used to provide to the institution and declines to deal with complex problems because they undermine their "success rate", then the rest of the institution suffers. The IT department might "fix" most of the 10% of simple problems they are prepared to deal with, apparently faster and cheaper than ever before, but the real costs are absorbed by everyone else.

The intelligence agencies are a special kind of bureaucracy, not subject to the same level of scrutiny as other government agencies; and sometimes with a shared interest, with political overseers, in expanding the perceived level of threat. Home Secretaries don't get headlines by claiming all is calm, all is bright. And intelligence agencies don't get money for SIGINT, HUMINT and other activities, effective or not, by reporting we live in the safest era in the history of the west.

There is a lot of political kudos and media exposure to be gained from spreading fear and declaring toughness in the face of it. There is a lot of political kudos in being seen to be "doing something" involving spending a lot of money on security services. It would be naive to think that senior career bureaucrats in the security and intelligence agencies would not be inclined to take advantage of that psychology.

Time and again in the wake of terrorist attacks since and including 9/11, Madrid, 7/7, the murder of Lee Rigby and attacks in Paris last year, we learn of intelligence failures relating to known suspects getting lost in the morass of data and limited front line resources of the agencies. Time and again the "answer" is more extensive powers and more expansive investment in more mass communications surveillance. As Binney says, the agencies have been engaged in mass surveillance since 9/11 and it doesn't work.

In the case of GCHQ, I'm not sure I entirely accept his critique of their motivation being all about power, control and money. But I can see how they would be caught in the perennial affliction of bureaucracies through the ages, relating to survival and growth.

The current Home Secretary is absolutely determined to get the Investigatory Powers Bill on the statute books, thereby codifying most of the SIAs' ongoing communications surveillance activities into law. It would, therefore, be uncharacteristically remiss of the suits in the agencies not to take advantage of the prevailing political winds, to maximise their current and future survival and growth capital. Whether the Investigatory Powers Act, as it will become, will enhance their capability to counter threats to national security is another question entirely, one Mr Binney would presumably answer in the negative.

It does beg the further question, though, what is a 20, 30 or more years career veteran of a hugely valued public service institution to do, when said institution rejects and ejects the fundamental values and principles which underpinned its operations from inception?

Binney and Drake resigned and went public, at significant personal cost. Martin Luther King Jr might have approved, as he noted -

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter"

So, whether you stay and fight for what's important, lay low until you can tap the next regime change for a re-establishment of the foundational values (though when bad institutional behaviour becomes normalised it is notoriously difficult to change) or accept the institution is irrevocably damaged and depart for more productive shores, don't be silent.