Cross-national intelligence and the cross-bureaucratic Coase theorem

The sharing of intelligence information has exploded since 9/11, so one way to avoid national restrictions on your intelligence service is to have someone else’s intelligence service do the actual spying.  Henry Farrell reports:

There’s been relatively little discussion of whether there is a problem in principle with international surveillance, and most of what there has been has concerned the question of whether or not privacy is a universalhumanright. But the recent Der Spiegel revelations combined with some earlier material points to a narrower but very troubling set of problems for liberal democracies. Cross national cooperation between intelligence services has exploded post-September 11. This cooperation is not only outside the public space but, very often, isn’t well known to politicians either. Such cooperation in turn means that intelligence services are in practice able to evade national controls on the things that they do or do not do, directly weakening democracy.

Henry concludes:

This implies that national security liberalism, to the extent that it ever was a credible position, isn’t any more. Liberals who embrace national security and extensive foreign intelligence gathering do so on the rationale that there is a clear distinction between national politics (where we owe obligations to our fellow citizens not to torture them or invade their privacy) and international politics (where they believe that at best a much weaker set of rights and obligations applies). But if national intelligence agencies are working across borders, creating a pool of shared information that systematically undermines national protections, then national security liberalism is at best incoherent, and at worst active apologetics on behalf of measures that not only corrode global rights, but the national level rights that they claim to care about too.

There is more here.