Plausible Denial

In the annual Underhanded C Contest, programmers compete to construct code that looks innocent but does undocumented and devious things. One of the judging criteria is plausible deniability - which in this case means the ability to claim the error as a genuine mistake rather than a cunning trick. (Via Bruce Schneier)

In delegating stuff from an agent to a principal, plausible deniability can operate in either direction. Many well-known examples, both in real-life and in fiction, involve the principal denying knowledge or responsibility of the actions of the agent. For example, governments sometimes keeping the dirty details of espionage at arms length. Or well-known companies sometimes being strategically ignorant of the exploitation of child labour in their suppliers' factories, or turning a blind eye to short-cuts and risks taken by subcontractors.

But the programming example works in the other direction. It involves the agent (in this case a programmer) craftily subverting the intentions of the principal (the user of the program), while remaining "innocent" if the trick is detected. There are many situations in delegation and procurement where a dishonest agent or supplier can abuse trust with impunity. Even if the trick is detected, it can be passed off as human error, and probably forgiven and forgotten after a sufficiently charming apology and repair.

Quarantine

Question

Banks are highly aware of some types of threat, but seem to ignore other types of threat. How can you have a secure system in which one party is systematically blind to a particular class of threat. You would have to hold them in some sort of quarantine.

Answer

How can you have a secure system that only works if all the parties are completely free of conceptual limitations?

I think my children are systematically blind to certain things. (No doubt they think I'm systematically blind to certain things.) This means I trust them in certain contexts/situations and not in others.

A guard dog can provide some degree of security, can be involved in a secure system. That remains true despite the fact that dogs are unable to recognize certain classes of threat, and you certainly wouldn't delegate the design of the whole system to the guard dog. Why can't we say the same about a bank?

You put a dog into quarantine because you think it might have rabies, not because you think dogs are stupid. Banks aren't stupid either.

Quarantine may be a useful architectural pattern in certain situations. It protects against delayed attacks - such as a disease with an fixed incubation period, or a software virus. An entity remains in quarantine until it can be properly scanned and disinfected, or until the disease emerges and runs its course, or until the incubation period expires. (For example, a software artefact might be presumed free of a Friday 13th software virus if nothing detectable happens on Friday 13th.)

However, guard dogs need to be contained - for their own safety as well as the safety of others. They must be protected against specific attacks - the burglar who tries to feed them with drugged meat, or to confuse them with extreme smells. When dogs bark their heads off, these reactions need to be properly interpreted. And when a dog doesn't bark in the night, this may provide an important clue to what happened (Sherlock Holmes)

Similarly, banks might need to be contained, and their activity (and inactivity) interpreted. (But I don't think this counts as quarantine.) But whether this is necessary (or even meaningful) depends on the architecture of the whole collaborative system.

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Negligent Supervision

Ernie the Attorney writes that nobody is responsible for their own work anymore.

In the context of discussing the recent plagiarism charge against one of Harvard Law School's celebrity law professors. Charles Ogletree explained that the plagiarism was not intentional, but was a by-product of his not closely supervising his assistants. Hmmmm, okay.

So what lesson can we take away from the Ogletree affair and its ilk? Well, one thing is that since plagiarism is an intent crime you can easily avoid responsibility. First, hire some assistants and try to guide them (if you can make the time). If you don't have time to guide them, and you are charged with plagiarism you can always defend yourself by pleading 'negligent supervision.' Especially if you are a superstar. No one expects superstars to do their own work anymore. And apparently no one even expects them to closely supervise, or even train, the underlings who do it for them.

Of course we should not be surprised that someone with a finely trained legal mind can find ways to evade responsibility for anything. (Some politicians on both sides of the Atlantic spring to mind.) It is also well-known that people find incompetence easier to forgive than deliberate malfeasance. (See my note on Hanlon's Razor).

But we trust professional people to be competent, and to be diligent in the exercise of their competence. A law professor should be competent in at least two things: Law, and Being a Professor. (Among other things, being competent as a professor means the ability to train and supervise your research assistants.)

Perhaps Ernie the Attorney is being ironic when he calls Professor OgleShrub a superstar. Real superstars have integrity. Think of great musicians, film directors. What they produce is special, and what is produced under their leadership is special. You may not like the latest release, but you can tell that it was produced with intent.

Integrity links back to trust. The negligent supervisor trusts his assistants to take the rap for the *rap. That's a degraded form of delegation, but one which is sadly prevalent in modern institutions.