Democratic checks and balances built slowness that intelligence agencies sought to bypass.

Evidence

For all its secrecy, even the NSA was subject to the temporalities and legal restrictions of a democratic state. The tempos of democracy are slow by design, weighted by redundancies, checks and balances, laws and rules. The agencies sought methods of deployment that could rapidly bypass legal and bureaucratic restrictions. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 367

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘state of exception’ frame from Agamben and to James C. Scott’s work on high-modernist speed-versus-legibility tensions. — connects to: Democratic lawmaking is structurally slower than private-market innovation. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 16