Washblog

Dangers of the centralized state. Since I've already mentioned Machiavelli, let's start with this one. Everybody should read The Prince. Niccolo Machiavelli was a diplomat who worked for some nasty people named the Borgias. When he went calling on their neighbors they'd say "The Borgias sent you, eh? Allow us to show you to your special accommodations..." and promptly throw him in the dungeon. I infer that it gave him a certain focus for his pensiveness.

The Prince was written in this regard. One of the threads in The Prince is the comparative virtues of a centralized state (e.g. the Ottoman Empire) versus decentralized federalism (the Italian city-states). The point he makes is that a centralized state is much more vulnerable to coup de etat.

Secret, centralized spying furthers our evolution to a centralized state. Do we want the risk which comes with that, or do we, as a country, prefer to decentralize the risks to democracy?

Having your tools turned against you. Any time you build a weapon, it can be used against you. By creating a centralized database of this sort, we must now protect it from subversion. While I haven't seen any reports that the data has been compromised in this instance, I observe that the reported "loss" of a tape containing armed forces credit card records probably caused some intelligence analysts some sleepless nights. At the present time, the threats against the resource aren't strictly military but commercial: witness the fact that cellphone records have been being sold on the internet for some time now. There is constant pressure to commercialize and monetize (another difficult problem for us as a country).

Men in black.When these things are done in secret, then when the common person sees unusual behavior they don't know whether what they are observing is "official" or something which should be cause for concern. Commercialization and outsourcing blurs this even further.