Every secret police agency must be monitored by an infinite regress of other secret police agencies to prevent infiltration or the aquisition of too much power
”National Security” is a semantic spook, an Empedoclean knot; that the search for national security is the cheif cause of national insecurity and a potent anti-intelligence mechanism: Surveillence leads people to refrain from speaking and acting freely.
Every secret police agency must be monitored by an elite corps or a secret-police-of-the-second-order. This is because (a) infiltration of the secret police, for purposes of subversion, will always be a prime goal of both internal subversives and hostile foreign powers and (b) secret police agencies aquire fantastic capabilities to blackmail and intimidate others, in and out of government. Stalin executed three chiefs of the secret police in a row because of this danger. As Richard NIxon so wistfully said in the watergate transcript: “Well, Hoover performed. He would have fought. That was the point. He would have defied a few people. He would have scared them to death. He had a file on everybody.”
Thus, those who employ secret police agencies must monitor them, to be sure that they are not aquiring too much power. Here a sinister Infinite Regress enters the game. Any elite second order police must be, also, subject to infiltration, or to aquiring “too much power” in the opinion of its masters. And so it too must be monitored by a secret-police-of-the-third-order. In brief, once a goverment has n orders of secret police spying on each other, all are potentially suspect, and to be safe, a secret police of oder n plus 1 must be created. And so on, forever. In practice, of course, this cannot regress to mathematically infinity, but only to the point where every citzen is spying on every other citizen until the funding runs out. National Security, in practice, must always fall short of the logically Empedoclean Infinite Regress it requires for perfect “security.”
In that gap between, as Robert Anton Wilson puts it, “One nation under surveillence with wire taps and urine tests for all,” and the strictly limited real situation of finite rescources and funding, there is ample encouragement for paranoias of all sorts to flourish, both among the citizens and the police: Participation in spying-and-hiding transactions will eventually produce the classic symptonms of clinical paranoia.
References
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Wilson, A., Robert. (1983). Prometheus Rising Chapter 16 The Snafu Principle (Location 2993). Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press.
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Schneier, Bruce. (2015). Data and Goliath The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World CHapter 7. Political Liberty and Justice (115). New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Politics / Privacy / Surveillence Status:☀️