CIA caught with pants down, by spiral notebook

Organizations breed both bureaucracy and incompetence. I’m tempted to ask Trish to tell me why this is–I’m sure it’s something well known in her field, but it sure seems to be empirical fact: you create an organization and certain institutional pressures necessarily lead to behaviours that are rational at the individual level, but which result in startling incompetence at the organizational level.

I’m thinking about this now after reading about ex-Senator (and ex-Governor) Bob Graham, and how his little notebooks blew some holes in the CIA’s stories about torture briefings.

You can read about it over at The Quantified Self.

This, for my money, is the golden line:

First, it’s worth noting that one man’s spiral bound notebooks were able to accumulate enough credibility to defeat the records of an organization whose very reason for existence is to collect information, communicate it to trusted members of government, and keep records of these communications.

I’m actually very happy that this particular institution seems to have a hearty dose of institutional incompetence, since I’m quite sure that from my perspective the way they chose to achieve their putative goals is something I’d rather have executed incompetently.