On 2013-08-22 at 19:33 +0000, Edward Ned Harvey (lopser) wrote: > This is the NSA we're talking about. They can't be *that* stupid, can they?
> I don't know. But I do know there's an overwhelming demonstration of > incompetence and stupidity going around, and I know I'm in favor of > exposing the secret programs a la PRISM. This is verging far enough from Snowdon as sysadmin to be off-topic for LOPSA, but in the vein of "knowing just how stupid your organisation is, so you can mitigate the damage", I'll paint this as essential sysadmin awareness. Just because an organisation is an acronym agency, that doesn't make them immune. In fact, as a Brit I'll reference my own birth nation's agencies for fairness; perhaps the following posts are informative for those who cherish their belief in spies as heroes, from watching too much James Bond as a child: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER and then the author Charles Stross has a post on the Snowdon affair which cites (links to) a number of background pieces, including the above one, so even if you disagree on stance, it's worth reviewing for background: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/08/snowden-leaks-the-real-take-ho.html EOSNOWDONDISCUSSION And bringing things tangentially back on-topic: Charles Stross is a former programmer, with a CPAN account, who wrote magazine pieces on Linux in the 1990s, and is now a successful fiction writer. So: there is light at the end of the tunnel of our careers ;) and he's worth reading because his tech is (scarily) plausible, given whatever assumption is needed for the suspension of disbelief in one storyline. Every sysadmin familiar with the BOFH and any fondness for Lovecraftian horror should read Stross's Laundry Files series (though that's perhaps more than a little stretch of the term "plausible"). Those with an interest in privacy and near-future tech should try the Halting State series. In fact, every sysadmin in the UK/EU who hasn't read Stross should spend £2 now, for The Atrocity Archives ebook, part of a summer promotional discount (multiple ebook retailers) lasting until September 5th: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/08/cheap-reads.html (Although apparently there are "issues" getting this price in the EU outside the UK) -Phil _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
