Defense, intelligence, policing, all these things exist in order to uphold the constitution, protect the "American ideals", etc. Many of his statements pretty directly show that he doesn't care about the collateral damage to innocent people's privacy or any founding principles, he just wants his mission to be unhindered. It's the same mentality behind police forces wanting to make their job less dangerous and more straightforward, by escalating use of force and trampling rights.
With this hypocrisy, as has come many times before (congress shocked and demanding privacy when the CIA spies on them, for instance)... I can only shake my head. Come on.
Encryption is our webcam tape.
They aren't particularly interested in the 'big picture'. They may say they are, they may think they are, but on a practical, day-to-day basis, it's irrelevant. They know the mission of their organizational unit, they know the goals that need to be accomplished to achieve that mission, they know the metrics they need to hit to advance within that organization, and they are adept at focusing their full attention and energy on whatever task is in front them that leads directly to those ends. It's a personality type that thrives in large organizations - government, private, whatever - and to a certain extent its necessary to make large organizations work, but the risk is that you end up with people wielding significant power who behave like wind-up dolls.
This is really the one.
It seems like the country is in a crisis of metrics. Nobody trusts anybody to do their job anymore so everything has to have a surrounding bureaucracy with the stated purpose of keeping everybody honest but having the actual consequence of setting many misguided and contradictory rules and then strictly enforcing an arbitrary subset of them.
The people who succeed are then the people best able to game the bureaucracy rather than the people who are honest and good at their jobs.
That is basically how the Soviet Union fell. Something has got to change if we don't want to be next.
They'll voluntarily make their own jobs more difficult if it makes the project better, even in ways that only others skilled in their craft would notice. They'll actually fight management for more hours, more money, better tools, different processes, etc. so they can get it right. Management's role isn't to force them to do their jobs, but to restrain them from going overboard.
Of course, this requires that they feel respected, sufficiently autonomous, and compensated fairly. And that they like what they're doing, at least a little bit. You get this routinely from theater professionals. Warehouse stock pickers, not so much.
Quantitative metrics and "goals" are a form of coercion that management deploys against its enemies to extract performance from people who fundamentally don't want to do a good job. In this kind of situation, we've taken to threatening to cut off their access to food and medicine and send armed men to seize their homes and cars (no, the layer of indirection between employers and lenders doesn't really matter). People like to eat, so they play along. And in rote jobs that only exist because they aren't cost-effective to automate yet, maybe that's the only way to do it.
You're not guaranteed a work environment where craftsmen are intrinsically motivated just by foregoing metrics, but as soon as your introduce "goals" (i.e. threats) a good chunk of people who would otherwise be on your side have instantly switched to searching for the minimum effort they can get away with until their either retire or find job that respects them.
Even if people still somehow feel respected, hitting/optimizing the metrics probably means doing the job sub-optimally, and that takes its toll - even if you personally decide not to play the wrongheaded metrics game, others in the organization will, and that creates conflicts (that you usually lose) where there should have been cooperation.
The Wire is essentially a show about this, and how it creates institutional dysfunction that breaks cities. "The fury of a bureaucrat who wants to do their job but can't because they've been fucked over."
On one hand, you want to (in my world) empower developers and let them take ownership of ... whatever. On the other hand, you want to learn, as a group how to do better. On the gripping hand, you want to be able to tell the customers (and investors) what to expect and when.
It seems as if you can do the combination of #1 & #3, somehow, without tracking what you are doing and how you are doing it, but that #2 requires us to baseline what we are doing and try to brainstorm about what we can try in an attempt to, as a functional group, do better.
In your world, measurement is "bad" for an individual's autonomy. And it may well be. How does an organization accomplish goal #2 (and #3) along with #1?
Anecdotally, I found that the self-directed process improvement (PSP - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_software_process) helped a great deal. I didn't go overboard with formalism, just jotted myself some notes along the way during the week that I spent 20 minutes compiling on Friday, but I found that I had to record what I was doing to even know what I was doing. And that's just me. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I really didn't know. And my own estimates of what I was doing were ... surprisingly off.
We are about one month into a three-month experiment where we are asking people to track time on their activities (mix of IT and developers). For some, it is a struggle with all the complaints when you try to make a small group "corporate". For others, they are having huge revelations of where their time is going that (I think) has been valuable.
What I've been trying to communicate is that the time tracking data has nothing to do with the individual, and is not being used as a measure of performance (it really isn't, and it isn't on anyones performance plans). What it IS being used for is a way for us to communicate with senior leadership to better demonstrate our value to the organization (in terms they are more familiar with). Basically, the "IT needs to better speak to the business" conversation that's been going on for ~15 years or so now. I suppose you could also tie it into the topic of when a startup grows beyond x people, with x in the range of 30-50 people.