[mercer]

It would be ironic if at some point he was wiretapped and blackmailed into toeing the party line (where 'the party line' is 'they', and 'them', clearly).

On a more serious note though: it strikes me that in our time of 'total information awareness' the ability to blackmail people in powerful positions is a significant flaw in our system, much more so compared to the past.

Has any research been or anything worthwhile been written about this (potential) problem? I mean, we know people have been blackmailed or that attempts have been made, so the question is how common this actually is.

Despite my internal knee-jerk 'this sounds tinfoil-hatty', I can't think of anything keeping intelligence agencies from wielding massive hidden power in this way. Or would it just have come to light much more often if that were the case?