This might be a part of the story - but it is not the most important one. It makes a good story - a fight between the good and the evil bureaucracy. But what I

This might be a part of the story - but it is not the most important one. It makes a good story - a fight between the good and the evil bureaucracy. But what I have seen is rules created in perfectly good faith and often they are reasonable answers to some immediate threats. The problem is with revising them when the situation changes or understanding how they work in the presence of other rules etc. It is quite analogue to how code becomes bloated - this might be an effect of some programmers believing that this is their work security - but more often than that the programmers hate it. Bureaucratic rules are quite literally the code that the administration runs - and we need them, it is just very hard to understand them all.