The utter inefficiency of secrecy
Apr. 14th, 2015 02:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethOne thousand words on the topic of…
So we have a secret organisation, like SHIELD. Or Torchwood, though there’s only so many compartmentalised secrets you can have with all of five people. Jack and Ianto managed it, but still. The organisation is secret, and as I pointed out yesterday that severely restricts their data flow. But then the data that goes in goes up, only, and only orders come down.
There are some serious weaknesses built in to this model.
Most of all, there’s no feedback possible. Dude at the top says an order, everyone else either jumps or doesn’t jump.
If they don’t jump they’re out, with possible serious repercussions. Torchwood has retcon, but SHIELD… only reprogrammed that handful of people for their own good… so possibly SHIELD also has retcon equivalents. Huh. But if they’re not going to let people leave with secrets, they’re either not going to let people leave or they’re going to have to reclaim the contents of their head. Kind of a problem.
If they know there’s a nice tidy retirement package waiting for them, or some kind of procedure for giving notice and getting gone, then they can risk being fired for not following orders that make no sense to them. If they instead know that there’s no one outside who knows what they know, ergo they’re never getting out, then they’ll only refuse orders if death is an okay alternative. Or if they don’t believe consequences apply to them. Kind of extreme cases.
If they can evaluate orders and give feedback with impunity, then sometimes they’ll say something doesn’t seem right. It doesn’t make sense to them. Why are they doing it this way?
If the answer is ‘that’s classified’, eventually people are going to stop asking. And that means they’ll follow bad orders under the assumption that somebody somewhere knows something that makes them good.
Honestly, that setup only benefits HYDRA. It’s a situation beloved of paranoid control freaks, since it keeps the data in a minimum of minds, and the control centralised. But it allows all kinds of shenanigans once someone gains the power to give orders, licit or otherwise.
How long did it take Fury to notice that some things were done on his signed order but not his personal say so? How would word get back to him? Would people stop him to ask about the latest? Or would they just assume that he’s just being Fury and the pieces come together somewhere higher up, maybe only in his head?
It also means they’re wasting the minds of most of their people. If they’re not giving them good data to work with and they’re just expected to trust the system and do their tiny slice of the job? You get drones with very limited responsibilities. And then you have to promote some of them. And it’s kind of difficult to make them broader in order for them to be that all seeing eye the system needs at the center, because they’ve been trained to blind trust. Plus the system treats them as such tiny cogs that people can decide individual agents are disposable, because it’s not like their time, effort, experience and unique perspective is irreplaceable, when they knew so little anyway. Which is idiotic. And it gives the people who level up a false sense of their own omniscience, since they’re keeping those below them so very much in the dark.
Coulson was all ‘trust the system’ and it was pretty creepy, and makes me wonder if it’s part of that Tahiti thing or if Fury could actually think of him as his good eye when he’s working so much in ignorance. Bad plan, to trust without checking. I mean, I always check I’ve got my tickets home, and I’m not going somewhere so very dangerous as SHIELD.
Plus, according to the shorts, people below Coulson thought he was a Level 6. And they thought that because as far as they knew there was no Level 7. So it’s cool and shiny inviting the audience in to Level 7 as the series kicks off, but seriously, 6 levels of SHIELD agent that don’t even know enough to know how deep the rabbit hole they actually work in goes? And if gods and monsters are the Level 7 stuff then what are the other six even doing?
It’s like on Doctor Who when everyone wants to get promoted to the gold plated levels but the only way that happens is if they don’t really ask questions or think about things too much. And of course if they do get noticed they turn out to be meat for the beast. Or as Stark puts is “An intelligence agency that fears intelligence? Historically, not awesome.” If asking questions and poking around is a problem, promotion comes from being channelled into a particular mould. Always the case, but amplified.
If asking questions that you’re not cleared to know the answers to can convince your coworkers you’re HYDRA and lead them to shoot you, your team, and the plane you rode in on? Curiousity really severely kills the cat.
So people are supposed to sit down, shut up, and listen, then go out there and kill who they’re sent after? Severely limiting. There’s effectively one intelligence driving the whole thing. Which is precisely how HYDRA and their AI Zola wants it, but it ought to occur to Fury that it’s a hell of a waste of smarts and overstretches him.
Plus the data can be poisoned without HYDRA even really exerting themselves. People gather their small piece of data. They’re looking for threat, they find something that’s maybe a threat, they pass it on. Someone gathers it all together, but their job is about finding threats fast, so they’re not so much looking for alternate innocent explanations. Something trips their threshold of danger, a team gets sent to deal with it. Teams don’t ask many questions. Team is primed to expect threat, goes in and deals with it as if a threat, and if they don’t find threat, well, trust the system. The whole thing tilts to over reacting heavy handed violence without any extra ideological filters at all. And with HYDRA around to provide those filters? Seriously poisoned data stream.
Smartest thing Tony did was go public as Iron Man, and he may not have even known it. Secrets would put him in SHIELD’s control, and the system would have done its level best to swallow him and redistribute the good bits.
For the agency to be using all of the brains it technically holds? They need data. They need to be a bunch of curious and interested people. They need to know that exonerating people will still get them promoted. And they need to know they can refuse orders, change things around in the field, or plain old fuck up and still survive it. Without all that they system skews to keeping decisions and therefore risks small, and nobody is giving their best work.
Makes you wonder how Hawkeye, who made another call, who was starting to root for the other guy, managed to survive and thrive in the paranoid and HYDRA inflected SHIELD. How long he managed it and how. Cause if Hand was the boss of him she’d have shot him long before we met him, HYDRA would know they didn’t own him so likewise, and pretty much only Coulson of the people we met would have even put up with him. Must have been more and different going on than we saw. Or Hawkeye was just that lucky or that good.
So we have a secret organisation, like SHIELD. Or Torchwood, though there’s only so many compartmentalised secrets you can have with all of five people. Jack and Ianto managed it, but still. The organisation is secret, and as I pointed out yesterday that severely restricts their data flow. But then the data that goes in goes up, only, and only orders come down.
There are some serious weaknesses built in to this model.
Most of all, there’s no feedback possible. Dude at the top says an order, everyone else either jumps or doesn’t jump.
If they don’t jump they’re out, with possible serious repercussions. Torchwood has retcon, but SHIELD… only reprogrammed that handful of people for their own good… so possibly SHIELD also has retcon equivalents. Huh. But if they’re not going to let people leave with secrets, they’re either not going to let people leave or they’re going to have to reclaim the contents of their head. Kind of a problem.
If they know there’s a nice tidy retirement package waiting for them, or some kind of procedure for giving notice and getting gone, then they can risk being fired for not following orders that make no sense to them. If they instead know that there’s no one outside who knows what they know, ergo they’re never getting out, then they’ll only refuse orders if death is an okay alternative. Or if they don’t believe consequences apply to them. Kind of extreme cases.
If they can evaluate orders and give feedback with impunity, then sometimes they’ll say something doesn’t seem right. It doesn’t make sense to them. Why are they doing it this way?
If the answer is ‘that’s classified’, eventually people are going to stop asking. And that means they’ll follow bad orders under the assumption that somebody somewhere knows something that makes them good.
Honestly, that setup only benefits HYDRA. It’s a situation beloved of paranoid control freaks, since it keeps the data in a minimum of minds, and the control centralised. But it allows all kinds of shenanigans once someone gains the power to give orders, licit or otherwise.
How long did it take Fury to notice that some things were done on his signed order but not his personal say so? How would word get back to him? Would people stop him to ask about the latest? Or would they just assume that he’s just being Fury and the pieces come together somewhere higher up, maybe only in his head?
It also means they’re wasting the minds of most of their people. If they’re not giving them good data to work with and they’re just expected to trust the system and do their tiny slice of the job? You get drones with very limited responsibilities. And then you have to promote some of them. And it’s kind of difficult to make them broader in order for them to be that all seeing eye the system needs at the center, because they’ve been trained to blind trust. Plus the system treats them as such tiny cogs that people can decide individual agents are disposable, because it’s not like their time, effort, experience and unique perspective is irreplaceable, when they knew so little anyway. Which is idiotic. And it gives the people who level up a false sense of their own omniscience, since they’re keeping those below them so very much in the dark.
Coulson was all ‘trust the system’ and it was pretty creepy, and makes me wonder if it’s part of that Tahiti thing or if Fury could actually think of him as his good eye when he’s working so much in ignorance. Bad plan, to trust without checking. I mean, I always check I’ve got my tickets home, and I’m not going somewhere so very dangerous as SHIELD.
Plus, according to the shorts, people below Coulson thought he was a Level 6. And they thought that because as far as they knew there was no Level 7. So it’s cool and shiny inviting the audience in to Level 7 as the series kicks off, but seriously, 6 levels of SHIELD agent that don’t even know enough to know how deep the rabbit hole they actually work in goes? And if gods and monsters are the Level 7 stuff then what are the other six even doing?
It’s like on Doctor Who when everyone wants to get promoted to the gold plated levels but the only way that happens is if they don’t really ask questions or think about things too much. And of course if they do get noticed they turn out to be meat for the beast. Or as Stark puts is “An intelligence agency that fears intelligence? Historically, not awesome.” If asking questions and poking around is a problem, promotion comes from being channelled into a particular mould. Always the case, but amplified.
If asking questions that you’re not cleared to know the answers to can convince your coworkers you’re HYDRA and lead them to shoot you, your team, and the plane you rode in on? Curiousity really severely kills the cat.
So people are supposed to sit down, shut up, and listen, then go out there and kill who they’re sent after? Severely limiting. There’s effectively one intelligence driving the whole thing. Which is precisely how HYDRA and their AI Zola wants it, but it ought to occur to Fury that it’s a hell of a waste of smarts and overstretches him.
Plus the data can be poisoned without HYDRA even really exerting themselves. People gather their small piece of data. They’re looking for threat, they find something that’s maybe a threat, they pass it on. Someone gathers it all together, but their job is about finding threats fast, so they’re not so much looking for alternate innocent explanations. Something trips their threshold of danger, a team gets sent to deal with it. Teams don’t ask many questions. Team is primed to expect threat, goes in and deals with it as if a threat, and if they don’t find threat, well, trust the system. The whole thing tilts to over reacting heavy handed violence without any extra ideological filters at all. And with HYDRA around to provide those filters? Seriously poisoned data stream.
Smartest thing Tony did was go public as Iron Man, and he may not have even known it. Secrets would put him in SHIELD’s control, and the system would have done its level best to swallow him and redistribute the good bits.
For the agency to be using all of the brains it technically holds? They need data. They need to be a bunch of curious and interested people. They need to know that exonerating people will still get them promoted. And they need to know they can refuse orders, change things around in the field, or plain old fuck up and still survive it. Without all that they system skews to keeping decisions and therefore risks small, and nobody is giving their best work.
Makes you wonder how Hawkeye, who made another call, who was starting to root for the other guy, managed to survive and thrive in the paranoid and HYDRA inflected SHIELD. How long he managed it and how. Cause if Hand was the boss of him she’d have shot him long before we met him, HYDRA would know they didn’t own him so likewise, and pretty much only Coulson of the people we met would have even put up with him. Must have been more and different going on than we saw. Or Hawkeye was just that lucky or that good.
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no subject
Date: 2015-04-15 11:20 pm (UTC)Makes you wonder how Hawkeye, who made another call, who was starting to root for the other guy, managed to survive and thrive in the paranoid and HYDRA inflected SHIELD. ... pretty much only Coulson of the people we met would have even put up with him.
I also wonder if SHIELD was as secretive and focused before extra-terrestrial threats were confirmed. I mean, back in Iron Man, they seem more government-sanctioned-secret-force but after Thor... I suspect there's a psychological difference between SHEILD staff working black-ops/secret service (where the general public's aware these organisations exist and everyone sees spy movies/TV and has an idea of what they do) and it suddenly being ET stuff that no-one else is supposed to know about. Keeping details confidential but knowing the general society is aware of the broad strokes would feel more secure than trying to hide aliens and dealing with gods. (And possibly Level 7 was only created post Thor, a further classification of sensitive data, but unfortunately had that splintering effect of isolating parts of SHIELD within SHIELD, and shifting the culture from "have faith in the organisation" to "don't ask, follow orders blindly".)
no subject
Date: 2015-04-16 09:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-17 06:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-14 02:57 pm (UTC)Which draws more and more attention to the Machine and creates more and more violent responses.