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Got Malware? Get a Hammer!
FuzzNugget writes "After the Economic Development Administration (EDA) was alerted by the DHS to a possible malware infection, they took extraordinary measures. Fearing a targeted attack by a nation-state, they shut down their entire IT operations, isolating their network from the outside world, disabling their email services and leaving their regional offices high and dry, unable to access the centrally-stored databases. A security contractor ultimately declared the systems largely clean, finding only six computers infected with untargeted, garden-variety malware and easily repaired by reimaging. But that wasn't enough for the EDA: taking gross incompetence to a whole new level, they proceeded to physically destroy $170,500 worth of equipment (PDF), including uninfected systems, printers, cameras, keyboards and mice. After the destruction was halted — only because they ran out of money to continue smashing up perfectly good hardware — they had racked up a total of $2.3 million in service costs, temporary infrastructure acquisitions and equipment destruction."
It sounds like they were using this as an excuse to buy new equipment, so they destroyed extra equipment hoping that someone would allow them to chalk up the expense to the virus and thus give them shiny new stuff.
Because, RTFA?
"The total cost to the taxpayer of this incident was $2.7 million: $823,000 went to the security contractor for its investigation and advice, $1,061,000 for the acquisition of temporary infrastructure (requisitioned from the Census Bureau), $4,300 to destroy $170,500 in IT equipment, and $688,000 paid to contractors to assist in development a long-term response. Full recovery took close to a year."
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Yup. Likely what happened here is that the million-dollar security contractors gave the advice to do this bug hunt in the first place, and then provided the temporary replacement infrastructure, and walked away from the whole fiasco with a tidy profit. The reason this happens is because the government isn't generally allowed to hire people to do work like this, because "private industry is better." Of course, this sort of private industry is just a mechanism for siphoning off tax dollars, and the people who believe that hiring government employees to do government work is wasteful are actually responsible for fiascos like this, which are depressingly common.
Even when the contractors aren't crooked, the cost of employing them instead of federal employees is typically several times higher. But "corporations good, government wasteful." If we keep repeating that long enough maybe it will come true.
It seems to be a symptom of some underlying pathology in a democracy when so much effort is put into protecting the head of government. At least in the ideal it doesn't matter who is president;
You're completely missing the point of protecting the Head of State - it's not because an assassination would cause a change in policies, but to keep extremists from using threat of assassination to to blackmail a Head of State into changing those policies.
In other words, if the POTUS has to fear for his life as a result of every decision he makes, he is going to be pressured to cater to the most radical and violent groups.