Bloomberg's Secret Agents Fan Out Across America

Bureaucracies love to overstep their bounds. They always want more jurisdiction. The more jurisdiction they have, the more employees they can hire. The more employees on the payroll, the easier it is to get a promotion for managers. They have more to manage.

This has been a well-known law of bureaucracy ever since the publication in The Economist in 1955 of Parkinson's Law.

The New York City Police has decided to run spying operations out of state. It is after terrorists. But you never know where terrorists may live. Maybe in New Jersey. So, the NYPD set up a surveillance center in an apartment in New Brunswick, not far from Rutgers University.

Then, true to form, the NYPD forgot about it.

Read more.