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Why the NSA Can't Replace 90% of Its System Administrators

An anonymous reader writes "Curious about the recently purposed NSA cuts, Courtney Nash explores a few myths about systems automation 'In the aftermath of Edward Snowden's revelations about NSA's domestic surveillance activities, the NSA has recently announced that they plan to get rid of 90% of their system administrators via software automation in order to "improve security." So far, I've mostly seen this piece of news reported and commented on straightforwardly. But it simply doesn't add up. Either the NSA has a monumental (yet not necessarily surprising) level of bureaucratic bloat that they could feasibly cut that amount of staff regardless of automation, or they are simply going to be less effective once they've reduced their staff.'"

5 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. Outsource to China by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Maybe instead of cutting staff numbers they can just outsource the administrators to China?

  2. Better becareful posting that stuff by mysidia · · Score: 4, Funny

    Don't you dare try to get rid 90% of system admins.

    Better back off, or I will replace your management team with a 5 line shell script, and sell it to Obama as a way of demonstrating that he is serious about more efficient government.

  3. Re:Laying off Americans, hiring Bangladeshi ? by myowntrueself · · Score: 5, Funny

    Perhaps NSA is not kidding

    Perhaps they will just go ahead and lay off 90% of their admins, who are American citizens

    And then, they will hire admins from Bangladesh as replacement

    NSA doesn't need to be troubled by admins who are American citizens who understand the concept of Liberty, Human Rights, and Democracy - they can hire replacement admins from 4th world countries where nobody cares about any of those "Western Luxuries"

    Actually this is a good point. If the sysadmins are not American citizens and are not based in America then the NSA can legally spy on them with no problems.

    So yeah NSA outsourcing system administration to India might be a winner!

    --
    In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
  4. Re:Laying off Americans, hiring Bangladeshi ? by Chrisq · · Score: 4, Funny

    Perhaps NSA is not kidding

    Perhaps they will just go ahead and lay off 90% of their admins, who are American citizens

    And then, they will hire admins from Bangladesh as replacement

    NSA doesn't need to be troubled by admins who are American citizens who understand the concept of Liberty, Human Rights, and Democracy - they can hire replacement admins from 4th world countries where nobody cares about any of those "Western Luxuries"

    Actually this is a good point. If the sysadmins are not American citizens and are not based in America then the NSA can legally spy on them with no problems.

    So yeah NSA outsourcing system administration to India might be a winner!

    Pakistan would be even better, then if any of them cause problems they can just send in a drone

  5. Re:replace Windoze with Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

    I love how all databases on Linux get large performance drop-offs once you get past 1 client per core. MS SQL can easily go into dozens or clients per core. At my work, we got thousands of connections from many web servers all hitting the same DB and it has nearly the same performance as only a hand-full of clients. Take a look at any other DB and you see quick drops in performance degradation on a 24 core DB once you get past 24 clients.

    Welcome to the OpenSource world, where no one seems to know how to code high performance async+multi-threaded code, but are great at forking processes and using IPC. Must context switch more!