Back in the spring, CSIS Director Jim Judd was in the news after giving a speech in which, among other things, he lamented the erosion of public trust and confidence in agencies such as the one he runs. I don't have a link to any of the news stories that reported it, but I can send you to the speech itself. And here's the relevant portion:
The last several decades have seen a steady increase in what some have referred to as the "deference deficit" vis-à-vis institutions - public, private, and voluntary. Public trust and confidence in these has been steadily in decline and the intelligence community has certainly not been exempt from this trend.
In fact, it may be that the intelligence community has been more subject to this trend than many other public institutions. It is, after all, according to one of my former foreign colleagues, a business that is too often better known for its failures than its successes.
Or it may be that people don't trust CSIS because CSIS itself no longer defers to, you know, the law.
Canada's spy agency is taping conversations between men held as terrorism suspects and their defence lawyers, according to a Federal Court Judge, who suggests state agents cease such wiretaps and delete the tapes.
Madame Justice Carolyn Layden-Stevenson's written summary of secret evidence released Thursday left defence lawyers saying they were "apoplectic" with rage that hundreds of their conversations had been snooped on, and that one of the most basic and fundamental legal protections, solicitor-client privilege, is being flouted by the government.
The reason I've remembered Judd and his "deference deficit" all this time is because his remarks came on the heels of so many cases that demonstrated the way that law enforcement and intelligence agencies seemed to be using George W. Bush's marketing campaign, aka the Global War on Terror™, as an opportunity to break down the barriers that have rightfully been put in place to protect the rights of all of us from the people who are supposed to be protecting us. And even the guilty have rights — that's one of the hallmarks of a liberal democracy.
We've already seen a number of cases in Canada where innocent citizens have been put at risk because overzealous agents with CSIS and the RCMP were too quick to share information with foreign countries, including countries known to practice torture. The rights and safety of citizens who had yet to be found guilty of any crime were something to which they were unwilling to defer. Now we learn that CSIS is unwilling to defer to a legal tradition that's hundreds of years old and that is a fundamental part of our justice system.
There's your deference deficit.
Thanks for this, pogge.
Few things this year have made me angrier than that line from Mr Judd, which I find chilling and also cheeky. If he and his agents grasp so little of democracy that they can't recognize who owes whom deference, then given the special powers we've handed them, that is scary.
And then Mr Judd is quite right about that failure thing. We have little reason to believe that CSIS are competent, and quite a lot of reason to believe they don't really know what they're doing. Contrast their behaviour at GTMO with that of the FBI, eg, who asked all the right questions of headquarters, from the very beginning (early 2002). If the CSIS agents who slouch through that video with Omar Khadr or the DFAIT reps who went down had said or written anything intelligent about the process they were slotted into, I think we would have heard by now because that would be exculpatory.
Hot flash from the the news room Jim Judd - respect and deference are earned not given. And once lost - lost because of betrayal of the law and tradition - the trust is nearly impossible to get back.
Case in point, its not just CSIS. A once respected and venerable police force is now seen as dangerous thugs because they have consistently acted like dangerous thugs.
Why are these people so stupid?
A local 'C0PS' type show that features the Vancouver Police Dept. called 'To Serve and Protect' is known in the Downtown Eastside as: 'To Serve (the Rich) and Protect (Their Property).
'Nuff said!
VPD & DE perp
I think, to be honest, there has unfortunately been a cultural loss of respect and trust for public institutions; this loss has helped the right by removing collective action through admired public institutions as an alternative to their organizational models.
However, there are three obvious problems here.
First, it's a lament that has to state the obvious - that institutions and political figures played a key role in public disillusionment. I think it's kind of baloney to suggest that public mistrust of institutions is necessarily all that merited or a good thing; I think the paranoiac vision of organization and authority ultimately lends power to right wing Orwell-libertarian demagogues, but failing to note that it's a two-way street makes one an apologist for authority as such.
Second, it's one thing to make that argument as a political observer and quite another to make it as a public official. Most obviously, an official in a police capacity of any kind!
Third, "deference?" Maybe, if one were having an abstract cafe discussion, one could agree that some measure of deference to institutions is the practical outcome of trust and respect. But in public? Lamenting the loss of deference really couldn't be much better calculated to piss people off.
Incidentally, Adam Curtis' three part documentary "The Trap" has some interesting observations on the... well, he argues near demonization of the institutions of the postwar consensus by libertarians left and right in the 1970s.
It's 'intellectual history,' with all the usual pitfalls of selective historical 'tunnelling,' but it's argued with a ton of verve and the visuals and soundtrack are also amazing even for Curtis. Brian Eno meets John Carpenter soundtracks.
The basic theme is the death of the concept of a public interest and positive freedom, to be replaced by the elevation to canonical status of self-interested models of human behavior, and attempts to harness them constructively through game theory, incentives systems etc. (With disastrous results) Even if you have problems with the thesis, parts of it - like when the creator of Yes Minister avers that every single episode of the show was meant as propaganda for Thatcherite Public Choice Theory views of government - will really raise an eyelid.
Tax policy and economics in general are underplayed as causes of inequality. But with that main caveat I think it'd be a great accompaniment to Paul Krugman's book if I had to make a "My Ideology" x-mas gift pack.
Well, I think it's fundamentally inaccurate to lump all these institutions together for purposes of your analysis. There are two quite different kinds of institutions under consideration here; I would argue that they divide in much the same sense as the conceptions of "negative" and "positive" freedoms.
That is, first there is the kind of institution dedicated to helping specific individuals (e.g. teaching them in schools, giving them welfare payments, subsidizing selected industrial sectors, yadda yadda). Second, there is the kind of institution dedicated to harming specific individuals (criminals, spies, illegal aliens, people in countries we're at war with, yadda yadda).
Both these kinds of institutions use money taken from the public in general to produce targeted results of some sort. In both cases the argument is usually made that by carefully deciding on specific targets for the money and effort involved, some disproportionate gain to society at large can be created. In both cases, opponents often have fairness quarrels with the nature of the specific targeting of the money and effort.
But generally, while both right and left libertarians have sometimes been skeptical in general of the nature of large, remote bureaucracies, their reaction to the two different types has generally been quite different. Specifically, they each tend to grudgingly accept one while wishing it could be designed differently, and have a very strong, almost instinctive dislike for the other.
Right libertarians accept the need for the "harming certain people" kinds of institutions. Gotta have cops, gotta have an army, pity it involves taxation, is the general reaction. But they deeply resent the perceived unfairness of nearly every positive intervention by government, They hate the idea of public goods. They hate the idea that it may be possible to allocate funds in a way better than the random actions of individuals would allocate them. And they hate the idea of using collective action to help individuals disproportionately even if it produces a net positive outcome because they want everyone to be treated equally in some theoretical sense, so that they can all compete equally in the race for self-betterment.
Left libertarians are the reverse. They accept EI, welfare, socially provided medicine, insurance etc., although they grumble about the hierarchical nature of the bureaucracies providing these things and wish they could be structured in some more decentralized, egalitarian way. But they hate the idea of cops, spies and armies; they try to acknowledge that yeah, some of that is needed--but it fundamentally bugs them. Or rather, us, 'cause I guess I'd answer to the "Left libertarian" label myself. The thing is, in the end a police force or an armed force or a counterespionage force is a group that enforces authority using force. It's their *job* to fuck people over and they have special dispensation to do so, not to mention weapons. The key is in the definitions, theoretical and working, of just who they are supposed to fuck over. The idea is that they're supposed to nab bad people who are threats to the public good, thus protecting the public good by eliminating the threats. But from a left libertarian perspective, it's pretty much inevitable that a hierarchical, bureaucratic pillar of the status quo will define the public good as the public good of authorities and elites, and therefore define deviance and threat as anything bad for those elites (more than society at large), which could include mass murderers or invaders, sure, but which will also almost always include left libertarians and in general any group favouring shakeup of the status quo in favour of the lower layers of society, or even just any group wealthy elites feel distaste for (e.g. unsightly folk sleeping under bridges). When the revolution comes, or even the unrest pushing for change, they're the ones out there stopping it by breaking heads, spying on us and arresting us and so on. You really can't expect Left libertarians to start liking the cops and the spies and the army.
But aside from self-interest, I think Left libertarians viscerally like the idea of collective action to do positive interventions promoting positive freedoms, and don't much like the idea of government doing negative interventions even if it's supposed to be to defend negative freedoms. Right libertarians are the reverse.
I see what you mean, but I think he was primarily thinking of the public choice critique from the right, and the countercultural critique from the left, both of which saw the postwar consensus and its institutions as essentially tending towards some sort of fascist dystopia, leaving aside the coercive (police, military) aspects of the state.
Great viewing, if you get a chance.