Secret handshake-based collaborations let intelligence agencies evade legal oversight

Evidence

The government’s need to evade constitutional oversight, argues legal scholar Jon Michaels, leads to secret public-private intelligence collaborations that tend to be “orchestrated around handshakes rather than legal formalities, such as search warrants, and may be arranged this way to evade oversight and, at times, to defy the law.” He observed that intelligence agencies are irresistibly drawn to “and in some respects dependent upon” firms’ privately held data resources. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 380

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader thesis about surveillance capitalism’s institutional conditions, and to later debates about warrantless surveillance and backdoor access. — connects to: Secrecy norms make an industry prefer extralegal agreements over courts — Lisa Bernestein, Opting out of the Legal System, 144; Secrecy and distance structurally prevent principals from monitoring agents. — Shapiro, Susan P., The Social Control of Impersonal Trust, 50; Handshake contracts shift enforcement costs onto reputation bonds. — Lisa Bernestein, Opting out of the Legal System, 126

Broader Connections

• Handshake contracts shift enforcement costs onto reputation bonds. #expands (0.80) — Lisa Bernestein, Opting out of the Legal System, 126
• Secrecy norms make an industry prefer extralegal agreements over courts #expands (0.78) — Lisa Bernestein, Opting out of the Legal System, 144
• Secrecy and distance structurally prevent principals from monitoring agents. #expands (0.75) — Shapiro, Susan P., The Social Control of Impersonal Trust, 50