22 December, 2011
Corruption and Anti-Corruption by Seumas Miller, Peter Roberts, Edward Spence
I think these sapient authors did a fine job of discussing how anti-corruption organisations themselves need a code of ethics and a carefully itemized list of Facebooks and YouTubes (Youtube is badly a 20% bandwidth hog of my monthly broadband allowance) for leaking sensitive information about ongoing investigations.
In summary, anti-corruption organisations need their own filtering litany and every employee should be familiarised with polygraphing at least once a year. Although the UN does not allow polygraphing of all the spies pretending to be clerks but I believe it's because UN is suffering from spying as well as the incompetence and lack of productivity that comes from putting their spies in cover jobs. The authors also emphasize the truly severe challenge of being able to follow global electronic transactions and also provide an entire chapter on whistle-blowing.
The priceless lesson I draw from this book is that anti-corruption campaigns do need to make it very easy for whistle-blowers to submit helpful information. This is where the culture of "ethical resistance" comes in and I am actually moved to believe we might able to clean up our filthy anti-corruption systems. Yeah right.