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Former TSA Analyst Charged With Computer Tampering
angry tapir writes "A Transportation Security Administration analyst has been indicted with tampering with databases used by the TSA to identify possible terrorists who may be trying to fly in the US. If convicted, he faces 10 years in prison."
So was it poor performance, over staffed department, or scapegoat for a possibly security breach and/or coverup?
Not that it matters for the court case, but most people are going to be asking "well what was he trying to do?"
Delete his girlfriend's name? Add the name of the guy who slept with his wife? I guess at least it leaves plenty of room for pointless speculation.
Someone had to do it.
seven days after he'd being given two weeks notice that he was being dismissed
So, you have this super-secure database system that is really important so the country doesn't get overrun by terrorists and then you do this!
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If I did the same thing I would be accused of violating DMCA, across federal borders, with intent to destabilize the National Security. I would be lucky to get away with a life sentence without parole. This guy is getting as much as somebody stealing a really big TV.
It's about time that a TSA agent steps over the line enough for the justice system to finally react and hit back. So far the TSA has been running their own show and making up their own laws so much that I became genuinely scared of passing through the USA on my next trip.
If things like this were public knowledge similar to "most wanted" lists, perhaps abuses like this wouldn't happen. Secret lists will only lead to more abuses the more we rely on them.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
He could lose a small part of his pension.
Aiding the enemy during a time of war is considered treason and according to US laws treason is punishable by death. NOT prison. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Three_of_the_United_States_Constitution#Section_3:_Treason
Nothing is impossible. It just hasn't been figured out yet.
It makes a claim without any relevant details. For example, if this former employee were doing a normal security assessment to file a report on what they need to lock down after he's gone, one which his new boss didn't ask for or understand as appropriate security practice, he could face exactly these kind of charges. Or if he were plugging a hole used by the NSA for warrant-free tapping and injection of data, knowing that the hole was a constitutional violation mandated by his previous boss, and whose discovery and protest over its existence was the reason he was fired, I'd applaud his desire though not his means to plug such a hole.
Let's be quite clear: the TSA has inherited bad staff, bad bureaucracy, and bad guidance from the White House itself down to all the agencies it was created to oversee and merge and which it has profoundly failed to coordinate. The result is a security and policy nightmare, the kind of political football that incompetent middle managers flock to because it's so hard to close, and it's so hard to actually measure its work product. I'm not surprised that an employee being terminated was mishandled, or misbehaved by the agency's standards. But the agency engages in so much blatantly civil rights abuse that it's unreasonable to believe its claims of cyber attack without far more detail about what was attacked, and why.
Sorry, I'm not clicking anything that has 'colon' in the url. I learnt that the hard.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
If someone is going to be a problem, you can just let them go in most states. If you feel bad about letting them go, give the 2 weeks pay. You don't have to and you can let them go any time.
People think there is some mythical 2 week rule. No mater where you work, you could be let go tomorrow for any reason without notice.
So if this guy was some kind of problem they should have just given him his walking papers. If it was something else, well they are just stupid anyway.
And desertion by members of the armed services in time of war is punishable by death, and yet somehow George W. Bush was never court-martialed, convicted, and appropriately sentenced.
Neither are the ~50 soldiers who are chaptered out for desertion at the Personal Control Facilities at Ft. Sill and Ft. Knox every week.
> no no no no. it's his own fault for being a stupid douche and tampering with shit he knew damn well he shouldn't be tampering with.
More than one person can be at fault here. Nobody is arguing that it's not this guy's fault. Maybe you think it's a good idea to stand on the train tracks all day and whine about how any decent conductor should be paying enough attention to stop, but most people would say that you're asking for trouble.
Trying to get off the hook for not stopping foreseeable problems is just another way of dodging personal responsibility while claiming not to. Playing victim doesn't help, either.
Some poor innocent woman was arrested and very nearly sent to prison for many years because all of the PCs in her elementary school classroom started displaying pr0n to the shock and amazement of all the little kids.
It took a lot of time and a lot of effort that shouldn't have been in any way necessary, but she was finally vindicated when an expert witness was finally able to demonstrate that the pr0n display was the result of every PC in the class having been 0wn3d by a virus.
Seriously guys? We read an unsubstantiated claim of "computer tampering" and automatically assume that he's guilty of treason or something equally malicious? The indictment was incredibly vague and we have little to go on.
'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao Tse-tung
really, I'd like to know-- does this fall under that category? INAL....
In banks serious about security SAs and DBAs can't see the data on the machines and databases they are administering.
Encription tehcnology and role based privileges have been there for a while already (no, not in Windows I believe, but I may be mistaken), so why it is not being implemented?
- Timebomb on the code? Is nobody auditing new in-house code?
- email by cronjobs? Are you not auditing your cron jobs? (at.allow, at.deny and from there automated tools, both inhouse and commercial to raise flags when somebody changes a cron job).
You can't secure everything to perfection, but boy, you are assumming that companies leave open the obvious holes for exploits (well, not the ones I work with, but that is why nobody buys me lunch: I am not lax with my employer's security).
He's a data analyst, or maybe a sysop (the article is a bit light on the details), but not an agent. And he's not the first one of those to go off the reservation and get smacked. Happens a couple times a year, and gets reported here.
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The TSA doesn't oversee other agencies, that's Homeland Security. TSA is only responsible for the security of flights originating in the U.S. It sound like this guy was responsible for reviewing information from other agencies watch lists and determining if such information properly should be included in the TSA don't fly list. Such analysis is valuable because it prevents the database from being filled up with irrelevant junk. I wonder if he just decided to clear his desk by dumping all the records he received from the US Marshal's Service Warrant Information Network into the TSA database. That may have included record info that should not have been disclosed even to TSA employees. Yeah it's pretty stupid, but it's not treason. And yes, his access should have been pulled days before.
If you attempted to do any part of what this guy does every day, you'd be in prison probably indefinitely, and he gets a paycheck. Is that a double standard?
You would be accused of different infractions because you are not an employee in charge of maintaining that data. Simply trying to log in would be attempted hacking or unauthorized access, where this guy probably logged in every day as part of his job.
You weren't cleared for access and given permission and credentials to access the information. This guy's job was updating the database. I'm guessing he used a front-end to do his work, not direct back-end access, and that may be the source of the problem.
Updated, and more professionally written.
"No Fly" databases are a fairly hot topic right now. How do we know he's not being set up to discredit anything he might have to say about his previous duties???