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Disgruntled Engineer Hijacks San Francisco's Computer System
ceswiedler writes "A disgruntled software engineer has hijacked San Francisco's new multimillion-dollar municipal computer system. When the Department of Technology tried to fire him, he disabled all administrative passwords other than his own. He was taken into custody but has so far refused to provide the password, and the department has yet to regain admin access on their own. They're worried that he or an associate might be able to destroy hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents, including emails, payroll information, and law enforcement documents."
...you disable his account *before* you tell him he's fired.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
Or they could just unplug it? Lost productivity is better than lost data here, I'll bet.
With the correct knowledge, it should not be too difficult to get back door access to their system again.
This seems to be more of a PR excercise on making an example (as they should) of this guy.
More and more reasons why people like us should have a recognised code of ethics.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines
Idiotic new law in 5...4...3...
"Childs has worked for the city for about five years. One official with knowledge of the case said he had been disciplined on the job in recent months for poor performance and that his supervisors had tried to fire him."
How the hell do you "Try to fire" someone .. either you do it or you don't.
(And please .. no Yoda BS. If you go back and look at when Yoda was first introduced as a character he didn't do that cutesy backwards sentence construction. That came later. So I put it in the realm of Jar Jar - obnoxious character development)
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
We all dream about doing this to our ex-employer, but he's the one who's had the balls to do it!
No, not all of us do. Especially those of us who don't do things that get ourselves fired.
This guy's the limit!
Such a thing is incredibly easy to do, and frankly, I am shocked it does not happen more often. Truth is, most jobs, utilities, or companies operate a fine line between working, and being brought down. Imagine, if you will, a guy having his car towed due to a paperwork error, then the towing company charging him for the inconvenience. If he snapped, walked in and went all "Falling Down" on the place, who would be the victim in the situation?
To me it looks as if the city either was wrong about the firing, or dead-on accurate on him needing to be let go, but sloppy in the execution. He would have snapped either way, they should be thankful he did not do more damage.
This is why the boss of any company needs to be technilogically savvy, and not just rely upon his subordinates.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Why the hate towards the public sector? I have found the exact same shit going on in private companies, many of them quite successful.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
ok, you're mad at your employer, perhaps there reasons for firing you are invalid
but taking it out on third parties, such as with locking up law enforcement documents that might decide the guilt of hardcore criminals: you're a selfish asshole for setting up that scenario
maybe you didn't deserve to be fired
but now you deserve to rot in jail for how you responded to your firing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
FTFA:
"At a news conference announcing Childs' arrest, District Attorney Kamala Harris was tightlipped about what his motive may have been."
I think there's more going on here than we're being told.
That director over there, he gets a golden handshake as he goes out the door... You want to keep him sweet because he knows where all your dirty secrets are and could cause all sorts of trouble for your operation.
The sysadmin, youre going to kick out the door becuase hes blue colar... Oh, wait a minute... He really does know where all your dirty secrets are and really can bring your operation to its knees. In fact hes far more dangerous going out the door than the exec... pity you didnt think of that.
Execs are heaved out the door all the time for being incompetent, but its done with kid gloves because theyre deemed to be potentially damaging... And they wear a suit.
Word of advice: if youre sacking somebody who can bring your operation to a grinding halt, make sure you you keep them sweet, regardless of the job they do for your organisation. Its simple business.
I don't understand how it's possible to be locked out of a system that you have direct local access to. You should at least be able to pop in a livecd and edit /etc/password from a livecd. If you need to decrypt stuff might as well start cracking the hash.. they certainly have the computing power to do it o_O
A reputation, based on people with a serious ideological axe to grind. Blind faith in the market producing magical efficiency gains is contrary to everything I have seen during my professional life, both in the public and private sector. From my perspective, I have never seen one bit of evidence to show there is any truth to it outside the imaginations of Tory politicians.
Furthermore, people like you who are so besotted with 'market forces' did attempt to introduce them to public services in the UK, and it has been an unmitigated disaster. The inability of internal prices to truly reflect the quality of services has resulted in huge waste, massive bureaucracy and a decline of standards. Now, the ideologues are at it again trying to push for a new round of 'targets' in the NHS. They never learn.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Assuming it is Windows or Linux. It might run on some other (e.g. special hardware or mainframe) or/and have en encrypted HDD.
Poor soul. All pissy over a job that pays 150K/yr? This guy lacks perspective, huge. If incarceration and bankruptcy don't help him figure things out - perhaps a stint delivering pizza or a cardboard sign at the offramp.
Are you sure it's a UNIX variant? I assumed it was big iron, and I am not sure those have cd-rom drive. What's more, if he choose a REALLY good password, brute force decrypt might take a *long* time...
because
They're worried that he or an associate might be able to destroy hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents, including emails, payroll information, and law enforcement documents.
Yes - that's the reason.
Not because he showed up their complete incompetence and made them look like fools and now they want retribution. Protecting the public's right to privacy - yes, that's the reason.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Responsibility is part of the sysadmins job. This concerns sensitive data and uptime of services. He failed.
and if, because of his 'stunt', the lack of access to one of those
confidential law enforcement documents and jail inmates' bookings
allows a crime to be committed, what then?
In the scenario you descibre, the streets would become choked with dirty, unsafe buses and traffic would grind to a halt. This, in fact, happens.
Like so many market fundamentalists, you just can't see how easily your ideology falls flat on its face in the real world, or you would've seen the flaw in your own argument.
You are essentially laying all inefficiency at the feet of the 'state' - i.e. any actor that isn't an entrepreneur - and then using that as 'proof' that the entrepreneur is more efficient. This is what people smarter than you refer to as 'circular logic'.
Perhaps, when you've grown up, experienced the real world a bit and stopped reading Ayn Rands bullshit, you might get a clue.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
You're quick to play the fear card, aren't you? Even considered a position in the Bush administration?
You can't use 'what ifs' to try and pin a more serious crime on someone. Its tyrannical, because essentially your 'what ifs' are subjective and thus you are using your own opinions to override the law.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Yet another "Engineer" with a bizzare sense of entitlement.
-No Ethics
-No Responsibility
-No Morals
Here it takes real training to become an "Engineer", it's not something any simple programmer or College dropout can do.
Charged with a crime like this? You will never work in "Engineering" again.
I'm not saying ethics and morals can be taught, but at least there is a direct reporting structure, and a board of ethics that can impost additional penalities, besides the obvious civil ones.
Revoke a simple programmer's license? yeah , right, in 1-2 years he can pull this stunt again, somewhere else.
Hint to you IT "Engineering folks", it's not "your" network, "your" PC or "your" data, it's the companies. Don't like the policy? GO work else where.
Why yes, torture is only wrong when its done by some banana republic. Done right its the utmost expression of freedom, the american way of life and free speech.
HTTP/1.1 400
Professionalism would have been sending them an email. Changing files, no matter how unimportant, might even be illegal depending on your legal system.
> on any Linux system you can log in in init 1 (runlevel 1)
Anyone with even the slightest bit of security concern would put a restricted flag in the boot loader to prevent this sort of thing. The boot loader will then ask for the password to alter the boot command line. See RedHat docs for a howto.
Of course, if we all had wings, we'd fly. Then reality sets in. Can't change the past.
I'm sure he was plenty stable until he became disgruntled, otherwise he wouldn't have ended up with the admin passwords, no?
Anyone who'd be an asshole like this, doesn't deserve to be in a position of responsibility. Anyone who would do something like this, regardless of the work situation, doesn't deserve a job that has that kind of responsibility. While your situation at work may suck, your boss may be an asshole, etc, etc this sort of thing is just unacceptable. Goes double when you are in the public sector and you will be screwing over people who have nothing at all to do with the situation.
Well, I'm sorry then, but it did sound like you were making an extreme market argument.
The idea of a middle ground between conflicting positions though is a position in itself. Its one that tends towards a maintainence of the status quo and can if over-applied stop a society making the changes it needs to in order to adapt and survive.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
That gets you into the operating system. Once you are there, what do you do? SQL databases can/should use passwords.
Web servers can/should use passwords.
Payroll systems MUST use passwords, with all data encrypted.
The above (and others) are where the problem lies, and no single user reboot will fix this.
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John 8:32(King James Version)
Well, if you'd come on over to the USA for a little while, you could have the pleasure of seeing it in the imaginations of our conservatives as well.
Not to say I haven't seen horribly inefficient and stupid government agencies on this side of the pond. But it seems to me that every time conservative politicians are let near a social program or government organization, we see something like the following:
[Senator] "This program doesn't work because it's inefficient! We need to hack away the fat!"
(attacks program with machete, leaving a mangled bloody corpse.)
[Senator] "See?!? It's still not working! Looks like we're just going to have to farm this out to my good buddy Ted."
[CEO] Hi. I just bought my third mansion and a private 20-seat jet with the massive reimbursement plan I just secured.
[Senator] Now that's what I call efficiency!
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Get fucked, asshole. The last thing this country needs is for butthurt pussies to define another ordinary crime as "terrorism" because they think a particular perp should be punished more "as an example" or because they're afraid.
This is not terrorism. It's an act of sabotage by one individual (who should undergo a psych eval) who should be prosecuted to the extent of the law, and to a lesser extent it's a failure of leadership for his bosses.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Then why do colleges produce innovations? How do colleges get teaching done (my university certainly manages)? Taking longer to do a task isn't necessarily a sign of laziness - it can be a sign of thoroughness. This is why the private sector notoriously fails at big projects such as infrastructure and space travel. Market forces breed the patience of a 5 year old with ADHD. If you can't do something RIGHT NOW they will find someone who can - or at least *claims* they can.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
(windows systems too.. I mean it is a muni we're talking about..)
But yes.. physical access to a device trumps all. It's probably something like they only have -one- guy that knows what he's doing.. and he just went from being fired to Fed-pound-you-Penn
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
We won't be asking you to come consult on any engagements. "Well, you sound competent and like you'd be a great team member for this project. Do you engage on /.? Yeah? What your nickname? DoctorFrog? Oh....." click.
He didn't.
He said "what if" and wanted a hypothetical answer, not 'he should get time because it might', which is what you imply he did.
Just how offensive to society is this type of crime versus murder or rape
Screwing with the computer systems that run city governments? That sort of thing could end up impacting emergency response, the payroll that goes to people that deal with murderers and rapists, and even the administrative requirements that have to be perfectly met while processing murderers and rapists. If you can't see how a city's information systems could directly or indirectly relate to life-altering, or financially ruinous turns of events for companies, individuals, victims, defendents, or a thousand other twists and turns - then you just aren't a big-picture sort of person. He went out of his way to deliberately prevent a city government from being able to do its job. It's not any different than a bomb threat in a court house, or torching a parking lot full of police cars.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
This guy is the reason the rest of us have to deal with such draconian security measures around the office place. He has made life worse for everyone he works with and everyone whose CEO reads about this in the newspaper.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
.
or sued. or jailed.
or would rather not spend the remainder of our prime earning years shelving stock at WalMart or flipping burgers for McD.
To any Stephenson fan, this sounds remarkably like certain points from The Big U.
As the avid reader will remember, fighting the Worm in an attempt to save the data was a losing proposition, a total wipe and reload was necessary to be sure of what software was actually there.
--The FNP
Back in the 80's I had an analyst working for me that seemed to become more unstable as each day passed.
We had a big project that he was working on and making great progress but then he started feeling like the software he created was his and not the company's.
I talked it over with the regional VP as we did not have any reason to fire this guy but yet feeling more flaky with him all of the time.
Plus replacing him would set the project back months.
So I went in each evening (only lived a mile from the office) and made a backup of the files just in case.
The project was successful and in retrospect making the backups kept me sane and kept the pressure off of him that he would feel if I was nervous or watching him too closely.
It seems we attract those things we fear.
Dealing with brilliant but somewhat unstable (supposedly) individuals is a tricky balance and occasionally the situation can tip in the wrong direction.
Sounds like this case in SF tipped all the way.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
For what it's worth, the guy is a network engineer, I'm assuming these are switches and routers. You don't boot them off a CD. Resetting the password on some of these devices is made possible only by resetting the config. If nobody kept proper config backups, you would have a hard time reconfiguring the device from scratch.
Then why do colleges produce innovations?
If you spend enough (especially of someone else's) money you will eventually produce something.
Market forces breed the patience of a 5 year old with ADHD.
The reason everyone focuses on quarterly earnings is because the government requires quarterly reporting.
Productivity? By a government agency?
This is not about productivity, it is about control.
It is not gutsy to do this. It is childish at best.
Gutsy and childish aren't mutually exclusive, you know.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
My temptation was excessively high. I got the shaft for no good reason, and I was told that either I'd resign or they'd sue me for some kind of breach of contract: they didn't want to have to pay my unemployment, so they made this threat...I can't even remember what it was about now, but I do remember that the PHB...
Oh wait, I remember, it was an Arcview application that had never gotten completed because the demographic data was hung up at the state level, and he kept calling it Arcserve. So yea, I'm sitting there listening to this fat idiot with the bad hairpiece threatening me with a breach of contract dealing with a Windows backup program which we didn't even sell.
What a moron.
Anyway the "contract" was a complete handshake agreement, no paper work, no actual project specs, nothing, and the ball was in the clients court anyway, and in my opinion, they had no real interest in it in the first place. Basically he was trying to force me out to isolate one of the partners (my actual boss), and he was a real asshole about it.
So I had a moment, when I realized I had basically unlimited access, where I was tempted. I'm not a fuckup like the guy in San Fran either; I could have set shit in motion that would never have been caught, and I knew the state their backups were in.
But I'm a professional, and while I never would have been caught, I wouldn't have felt like I could be trusted with the big systems, wouldn't have been able to sit in an interview and say that my personal integrity matters more to me than just about anything.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Apparently, this is one of the more widespread fantasies employees at that place have.
Not to give anyone any ideas or anything....
I don't know what horrible abuses the workers telecom workers in parent's state suffer, but I'd rather be known as, "that guy who pwned our boxen after getting fired." than, "That guy who smeared poo all over the place after getting fired." ... Though being known as, " That guy who got a cushy job at Google or wherever." is far preferable to either.
rand, the bitch who perfected the philosophy of selfishness
basic altruism trumps genius
every time
a solitary selfish genius is routed by a coordinated effort of retards working for the benefit of the group, every time
rand loses. her philosophy is inadequate to survive in this world
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I've patched programs stored in a DB without knowing the DB admin password, just by hexediting the DB files.
Worst. Idea. Ever.
You should be ashamed of yourself, not proud.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Box in the warehouse has a bios boot password. It is clearable, but there's a problem, the hard drives are 'locked' and are only unlocked by a code stored in the bios during later part of boot. And clearing the bios boot password also clears the lock code.
The guy who set it up drove his car through a red light and got his neck broken. He apparently didn't write down this password.
They ended up sending one set of the mirrored drives to a data recovery house.
Fortunately it was not mission critical, merely 'important' data.
So I'm sure it's doable to make the situation untenable 'on purpose'.
And the government ASSURES us that they can gather all our data and keep it safe from compromise, misuse, or abuse.
Riiiiiiiiiiight.
Betcha he'll be charged with a trumped up "terrorism" related offense.
And betcha more and more ordinary crimes fall under the terrorism category.
Which is a damn good reason not to piss off the people who actually know how the technology works.
All government policy wonks should take note of the inevitable reaction to stupidity.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Way to play into the hands of the beast. This stuff is set up exactly so that the ignorant can 'tip' past the critical threshold and become monsters.
If everybody thought like you, then we might as well be living under Saddam Hussein.
There are always better solutions than the ones which hot emotion dishes out as the fast and dirty answer. Just skimming the first few feet of posts, already half a dozen people have pointed out that with physical access to the system, it takes relatively little effort to crack a password.
Everybody I've met who I've had the chance to really discuss this with are usually only looking for an excuse to hurt people because they get off on it. There's a reason S&M is popular with some people, often in sexually repressed people, (i.e., Republicans). Torture NEVER truly has anything to do with the stated reasons. It's always about justifying the feeding of dark appetites, because in the dark recesses of the mind, it feels good to cause pain. This is what drives school yard bullies and psychopaths. Some people hide from this reality and do not admit it, others know it is true which gives them the choice to deliberately resonate on a different level and change into beings who are naturally repelled by the mere idea of torture, whereas others jump right in and become evil.
What do you want to become?
-FL
You boot from CD, mount the /etc partition, edit the passwd/shadow file, then reboot normally. Or you pop the boot drive out and connect it to another system, mount the /etc and so on.
No, it just means you got lucky. Plenty of bad ideas work, that doesn't mean they're the best idea.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
You are being disingenuous at best. Are your roads in order, is the traffic calm and orderly? Do you have electricity in your home? Are you being raided by armed bandits? what about clean water, can you drink the water coming out of your faucet? What about the mail, is it being delivered?
Need I go on? You are suggesting local, state and federal government do nothing.
Are you seriously suggesting that without the government, business would be less concerned with the bottom line? That shareholders would stop making a fuss? Are you that naive?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I'm intrigued by the carefully constructed character assassination that went into this article. I am disappointed others did not see how the information in this article was delivered in such a way as to shift all of the blame to the employee.
There is no doubt the employee did lots of wrong things that deserved dismissal. I am not arguing for his position at all.
Note carefully, that while the guy has the admin password, it's the source of the story that has shifted the blame entirely to the employee. By adding "we're afraid he's going to bring an IT Armageddon to the city of San Francisco!" to a very poorly managed situation, management is off the hook.
The story *should* be a cautionary tale. Where are the management procedures to prevent this kind of event? Don't ever discuss fragile IT systems, that are running mostly on blind faith. How about management's total incompetence in this episode?
Nope. Instead the blame conveniently shifts away from the OTHER responsible party in this story.
Let this be a cautionary tale for those with company IT "by the balls." Hopefully, you won't do some of the horrible things purportedly done by this fellow. You deserve to be fired if you make those kinds of bad choices.
Note how ridiculously easy it is for Management to publicly discredit you and bring your IT career to a swift end using anecdotal evidence. As this story so elegantly exemplifies, it is very common, and people would really do that to you and not lose a minute of sleep. You would have no forum with which to air your side of the story either...
My approach to bringing some balance to the situation is to make my IT role as transparent as possible. Which, means basically, lots of documentation.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Sorry, but I'm not. I read the first part as a joke and the second as the truth (ie, this is not about productivity, it is about control . . .). One persons funny is another persons flaimbait I guess.
He's either an authentic genius or a certified whacko.
And its usually hard to tell the difference.
You should be ashamed of yourself, not proud.
Oh, boo hoo. I've made a binary patch to an executable we no longer had the compiler for and it worked fine. If you know what you're doing, it's perfectly safe. Thankfully in my case I just had to zero terminate a string early.
Modifying blobs in a database is only a problem if they're indexed. My guess is that no one would be foolish enough to build an index over a field full of executable code, much less figure out a way to use it.
The roads where I live have ridiculous potholes - there's still an 8" deep one from when my parents moved into their current house 20-odd years ago. We get our electricity from a private (although admittedly regulated) utility. My neighbor's car was broken into last night, and a nearby town's water is unbreakable because of an E. Coli contamination.
But, I did get some mail yesterday! Is it the government that pre-approves me for all these amazing credit offers...?
DATABASE WOW WOW
When I fired our IT manager I had an employee changing his access rights at the same time I was giving him the bad news. It's a "Duh" sort of thing.
"Are your roads in order, is the traffic calm and orderly? Do you have electricity in your home? Are you being raided by armed bandits? what about clean water, can you drink the water coming out of your faucet? What about the mail, is it being delivered?"
I drive very little on the death traps I have for roads as I have a bicycle and a horse. Thanks to gas prices there is very little traffic anyway. As for electricity I generate my own and what little I get from outside I pay for. Armed bandits?? They lost and haven't had problems since. I have a well and water collection system and distill what I drink. The only mail I get is the odd bill and other garbage. I won't get into the waste of paying for other peoples brats to go to school/babysitter.
If you compare the level of taxes paid to the services received you'll find many of us, you know the public, are ripped off. I'm not saying government does nothing, just very damn little that's meaningful versus the money spent. They do plenty if you're talking about going in circles as slowly as possible. Just look our current troubles and you can see how well our tax dollars have been and are being spent.
That's theory. In practice, you're talking power grid or water or mass transit or traffic lights or other very very essential things for a big city.
If YOU were on the spot to take such a decision, would you REALLY want to shut those down?
If so, can you give an estimate for how much time? You can't, 'cause you don't know what he's done to the thing. So, if it at least appears to be working well and you have no proof to say otherwise, would you really go ahead and pull the plug just for the sake of the theory, or wait some more, see how it goes? Maybe he'll cave in, actually he's quite likely to cave at some point and make a deal if he's not gone completely nuts.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
LiveCDs don't work on domain accounts. Even if you can get access to the unencrypted SAM file which has the hashed passwords, you can only break it through brute-force hash comparisons if the password is relatively simple. If it's 16-characters random with special symbols and numbers and upper case, you can pretty much forget it. You can however retrieve all your data if the systems are not encryped but you'd need to re-setup your Active Directory from scratch.
Something tells me that there is more to this story.
People don't usually hold out like that after being arrested just because they don't want to lose their job.
My guess is that there is something politcal going on where there shouldn't be or shouldn't have been - he may be standing on principal.
The simplest solution when it comes to firing the "admin"... have an equal or higher level admin lock the fired employee out of the system BEFORE telling him (s)he's fired! *shrugs* I bet that would solve 99% of these cases, and nobody would have to worry about their data... just the employee coming back with a shotgun :-/
Just my thought.
During World War II, the Allies allowed convoys to be attacked, ships sunk, people killed, in order not to reveal to the Germans that their codes had been broken. The TLAs would probably sacrifice all of San Francisco to keep their ability to crack AES keys a secret.
I see a lot of claims that he did this. But all I see are claims.
- That he locked everybody else out.
- That he gave them a fake set of passwords.
- That he refuses to give them "the real one(s)".
And I don't see word one from him.
Is this what really happened?
I can imagine a number of scenarios where we'd see this external claim when, in fact, it's NOT what happened. For instance:
1) After firing the sysadmin they didn't like on the second attempt, management tries to change the passwords and fumbles it. They demand "the real passwords". He gives them what he has. It doesn't work. So:
a) They do a scapegoat operation on him to cover their own incompetence.
b) They're so incompetent that they don't even realize what happened, and honestly go after him for the crimes they believe he committed.
2) The system got pwn3d about the time they fired him. (Maybe just before, leading to the firing of the already-disliked employee. Maybe just after.)
And I could go on.
Now I have no reason to believe that he DIDN'T do it, either. (After all, it turns out Hans DID kill Nina...) But I see a government agency with a hung system doing a major smear job in the press, with lots of accusations and no details or evidence. And I see all the other posters taking as given that the accusations are true.
Let's reserve judgment until we hear what the evidence actually is, shall we? (If nothing else, they guy deserves a fair trial when it finally gets that far. It's going to be hard to find an uncontaminated jury at the rate things are going.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You are being disingenuous at worst. At best, you are ignoring copious known truths and years of data:
Need I go on? Or do you want some time to think up other areas of our lives where government has gone meddling with a promise of making things more reliable, fair, affordable and predictable?
There is a reason why I call Dominos for a pizza and not my local government. Government is an institution that protects the lazy employee and rewards those that never leave. The incentives are aligned with stagnation and waste. It is no wonder that we never see anything innovative, efficient and useful from our governments. The above poster wasn't claiming that government doesn't do anything, I believe the claim is that government doesn't do anything useful or efficient.
You have to create an environment of competition to weed out the crappy service. Roads, water, power, security are all examples where competition has been eradicated and government monopoly stagnates.
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
This whole experience has shown me the benefits of a union
I've been in a situation similar to yours, and instead of pointing me towards union membership it pointed me towards only working for companies and people whom I respect and by whom I feel respected.