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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.'"
change of title? are all IT workers called system administrators? do all IT works say do stuff maybe 1-2 times an week that classes them as an system administrator? maybe with more automation then that 1-2 times a week can go a way?
That's one way to reduce the number of sysadmins effectively.
This comment has been generated by obligatory troll-bot 10000, an innovation of Huawei and your local NSA front. Have a nice day.
Bye!
Maybe instead of cutting staff numbers they can just outsource the administrators to China?
Apparently they look for clues to organizations that have solved similar problems.
NSA Boosting Automation in Wake of Snowden Leaks
The agency has created a private cloud using OpenStack, a Web standard developed by NASA and Rackspace Hosting Inc. Analysts say this lets the NSA run its IT operations in a way that more closely mirrors that of Amazon.com Inc. or Google Inc. Previously, it took weeks or months for employees at NSA to get access to computing resources, said Nathanael Burton, a computer scientist speaking at the OpenStack Summit in Portland in June. The private cloud “let us grow to a scale that a very small team of 12 to 15 people could manage,” he said.
“We’ve transformed the NSA and over the next few months we’re going to be working with the larger intelligence community to roll out our OpenStack system across the entire intelligence community,” said Mr. Burton in a video of the conference. The NSA did not respond to requests for comment.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
1. Fill current admins heads with bad info. 2. Get rid of 9 out of 10 of them. 3. From then on everytime someone working at NSA leaks something blame it on a. disgruntled or b. info that does pan out (it was contrived anyway) 4. ????? 5. Profit.
@Valentinial
Since "anonymous reader" isn't in a position to know anything about how the NSA's systems are set up, what these administrators exactly do, who has/needs administrator privileges vs. who could do their jobs with reduced privileges, etc., etc., then isn't this discussion even more of a waste of time than usual on slashdot?
...or they have ways of automating unimaginable to the uninitiated. Take a look at stuff the US government made, and when.
The F-22, developed in the 90s at latest, had processors more powerful than 2005 commercial processors. The NSA's improvement to encryption technology proved math knowledge 7 years ahead of its time. The Blackbird was over a decade ahead of its time for physics.
Now IBM has a brain simulation with as many synapses as a human brain, running 1500 times slower. That's just 16 years of Moore's law doubling. Is it so far-fetched to thing the NSA has AI that can replace a lot of sys admin and basic spycraft duties?
> or they are simply going to be less effective once they've reduced their staff.
Which wouldn't be such a terrible thing.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The worst thing you can do with a person in a privileged access position is tell that person substantially in advance that they have a 90% chance of being made redundant. The overwhelming majority of people are reasonable, rational and won't do anything - but when you have such a large set of people - some won't be so amenable to being pushed out the door.
In short, I'd be surprised if they haven't created a small army of potential Edward Snowden's through this. Wherever I've worked, if we made a system administrator redundant we'd have disabled their account before they were told and then broke it to them - even if it was under consideration, we'd send them home with pay for the duration - it's just common sense.
-SG
So many companies claim this, then have their computer systems basically implode. The NSA will not be an exception. I don't think too many Americans, (or anyone else, really), will mourn their passing.
Replace computers with typewriters.
Have gnu, will travel.
... 100% of potential leakers are now 90% sure that they're going to lose their job anyway.
Carry on, NSA.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
source for that f-22 shitniz? 'cause I call bullshit OR it's very creative definition for a commercial processor. blackbird wasn't ahead in "physics", rather it was and still is a milestone in _manufacturing_(titanium).
but yes, it is far fetched to "thing" that nsa has an AI, since they don't seem to have even a HI. they just said they're cutting down on system admins to get the senate off their backs since what the NSA actually is... is that it is a MASSIVE money pump to private hands(for people who skim the contractor wages).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Hello? Have you have your sarcasm detector surgically removed?
And please don't do that fucking boneheaded bit with the fucking asterisks. If you're really fucking old enough to say "fuck" and that's what you fucking mean, then fucking say "fuck", already. Otherwise, just fucking use a different fucking word.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The NSA could certainly prevent 90% of their systems administrators from seeing the data though. All data should be encrypted when it is not displayed. Everything on file servers should be encrypted and most of the admins won't need the keys.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
woot?
Why do I have to read all this classified garbage on Slashdot? Is the NSA's shredder broken?
you stop at the DoD??? pfft, the same could be said of ALL federal employees. We could cut the federal government by 90% overnight and the vast majority of americans would not even feel a bee sting out of it. Plain and simple the federal government is suposed to be small, the states are suposed to be the ones with the power. Sometime about 100 years ago (some would argue the progressive movement) things changed and we started giving the federal government more power. First alcohol prohibition (which at least they had the decency to amend the constitution vs what they do these days and just claim power) and so on and so on. to be fair im sure someone will come out with previous abused by the federal government, for example jefferson overstepped when he made the LA purchase, but id say it was between 1915 and 1945 that the country radically changed, and not for the better. well, maybe for the short term but not long term.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Like everything else, they will simply offshore all those sysadmin jobs to India, China, Vietnam and Russia, of course, which is what they normally do, you douchetards!
I'm perfectly fine with their being less "effective."
Keep your eyes to the sky.
and in the spirit of pointy-haired bosses everywhere it means little. The administration is going to squeeze whatever good press they can garner from the comment and then do nothing. Oh, wait, there will be a panel of learned IT staff, then a study group, then a plan-for-a-plan group, then a project planning group then a phase I project and then, wait for it, a cut in funding that cancels the project.
Hey, they were the ones that claimed that noone need to have anything to hide, unless they are terrorists. In the other hand, maybe the ones that order drone strikes qualify as that.
Look how well the DRM take down bots have worked. Another flawed knee jerk solution to a already flawed system.
When it hits the fan it will cover everyone that has signed off on this. If we end up having another 911 just wait and see everyone trying to blame someone else for missing it and pointing fingers.
Why didn't the bots catch it?
Who was responsible for the writing of the bots?
Why don't you have more people tracking your data?
Why weren't you people trained better to see the patterns in the data?
Why do you collect so much data that you don't have the time or resources to filter it or review it?
Who implemented this?
My not just migrate To The Cloud.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
And you want the job of spying on your fellow citizens, breaking the law, abusing your power, and covering up for others who do the same?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I think I lost a few IQ points just reading it. Anyway, in rebuttal:
1. You don't need very many smart people. Albert Einstein did all the hard stuff when it came to the atom bomb. Factories run with a 2 or 3 engineers instead of thousands of workers. Lotus 1-2-3 put thousands of accountant clerks out of work. Etc, etc. I suppose we can all go work at Walmart.
2. Fewer people means less people to leak. Also fewer jobs means people more afraid of losing what little they have. It means less idealism and more dog-eat-dog survival.
But hey, who am I point all that out. If we just keep telling ourselves the scary stuff isn't happening because it didn't all happen at once that makes it OK, right?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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"
I've worked with Phds who programmed and admined machines. It was scary. Horrible code and scripting and one guy deployed an hardened box on the interweb outside of the organization firewall. The server which was deployed was compromised in less than a day.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Why are people unable to parse simple English? They are not "laying off 90% of their system administrators" - they didn't say "we're going to lay off 90% of our sys admins." They said "we're going to take admin privileges away from 90% of the people who have sysadmin privileges." The job doesn't cease to exist just because you can't type "rm -rf /*"
NOWHERE in the coverage of Gen Alexander's remarks has he said they were planning to lay off 90% of their IT workforce. What he said was this:
This is a case of the NSA saying, "we've given sys admin access to far too many people, and we're going to restrict that now."
Most people do. Show me anyone, anyone at all, and, given enough access, I could probably prove them a liar.
I am John Hurt.
Perhaps the reason they are laying off 90% of them is because they simply don't need them anymore because XKeyScore now does manually what used to take a lot of manual system administrator work to accomplish. They say they've been collecting data since 2008 but its plausible they've been at it for a lot longer than that.
Plain and simple the federal government is suposed to be small, the states are suposed to be the ones with the power.
And who is supposing this? Also, people might have had more sympathy for States' Rights if states didn't use them to oppress people.
fuck fuckity fuck fuck fuck
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Yes, that's a pretty apt description of the likely downward spiral of greed.
(I guess I was just busy enjoying some cheap thrills, watching JD troll himself with the China reference at the top of the thread.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Some poor sods are behind filters that won't let the see any web pages that contain words like fuck unless the word is obscured in some way.
you stop at the DoD??? pfft, the same could be said of ALL federal employees. We could cut the federal government by 90% overnight and the vast majority of americans would not even feel a bee sting out of it. Plain and simple the federal government is suposed to be small, the states are suposed to be the ones with the power. Sometime about 100 years ago (some would argue the progressive movement) things changed and we started giving the federal government more power.
No. Not 100 years ago, but 148 years ago, with the end of the civil war, which settled once and for all the supremacy of the federal government over states powers (including the power to keep slavery legal.) Let us not skip the nitty gritty details, shall we?
Plain and simple the federal government is suposed to be small, the states are suposed to be the ones with the power.
And who is supposing this? Also, people might have had more sympathy for States' Rights if states didn't use them to oppress people.
Don't say that, for the people who call the Civil War "The War of Northern Aggression" might get offended with facts and shit like that.
This shouldn't be that complicated.
1) Sysadmins who implement surveillance systems have access to information for which they are not authorized. Replace them with small shell scripts.
2) Since analysts as well can abuse their authority in selecting surveillance targets, replace them with a "target identification AI."
3) Drone pilots are fallible, and may accidentally fire on the wrong targets (or worse, refuse to fire at all!). Replace them with automated piloting systems.
That should do it! Why, with the computers in charge of selecting targets, observing and tracking them, and then dispatching drones to eliminate them, we'd save billions in tax dollars, and there's no humans in the way to abuse their authority. What could possibly go wrong?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
As of today, System Administrators will require an Entry Permit. System Administrator Entry Tickets are no longer sufficient.
To be fair when you work force is made up of a lot of computer scientists, cryptographers, mathematicians, etc you could probably turn over some responsibility for administration to the workforce with out losing much.
HA HA HA HA HA!
Hoo.
Competence with algorithms does not carry over into competence with administering systems (which is equal parts programming, psychology, resource management, customer service, and arcane lore).
Their thinking probably goes along the lines of: each admin has a0.00003% of ratting them out each year and with a zillion admins they are looking at an 8% per year chance of a whistle blow. (Numbers came out of my ass) So if you can reduce the number of potential whistle blowers to 10% you massively reduce the chances of a whistle blow to less than one per career.
But if you have fewer admins each will have to not only have greater power due to the larger surface area but due to the whole hit by the bus thing the overlap will have to be greater. So you now have a bunch of guys with a bigger picture and better access. In that case I should invest in portable media companies as these guys are going to be running in and out with truckloads of data.
What all these agencies really need to do is to reevaluate what they are doing. This way the Snowdens still working for them will say; oh look we just used boring legal means to arrest run of the mill terrorists. Nothing to leak there.
But instead these various agencies are more concerned about covering their own asses. If I were a betting man I would guess their are more resources now deployed to catch Snowden and anyone working with him than probably the top 10 genuine terrorists put together. Not to mention the damage that they are doing to their own country. Every right they trample in their attempt to catch him just adds another exclamation point to his leaks. So services like AWS aren't going to collapse tomorrow but right now there are people all over the world looking to get their data out of the US and there are companies all over the world slowly ramping up to accept their business. You don't move your servers overnight and you don't set up data centers over night. But I suspect that you will see a slight change in the growth graph and that change is permanent.
The other key damage is even more subtle. If you are running a company such as Siemens would you probably had suspicions that China would be after your data to give to their companies. But now you might be thinking whoa is the US pulling this crap too? Now you are going to be reticent about any of your best stuff going to the US. You are going to rethink research grants to US universities. Again not overnight but all things being equal world relations with the US just chilled a few degrees.
maybe i dont know, the 10th amendment???
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
They "went" through rigorous background checks in the past. In the past ~10 years its more digital, your boss/work/skills and their political contacts.
The days of new staff having extended sit down family, teachers, lovers, friends interviewed for hours is less.
Long exhaustive paper work trails of the family tree and deep political connections where once done.
Now low level staff face a digital state and federal cross reference and deep interview bringing past "work" in as clearance or the firm/brand as counting as some wider clearance.
Above that it seems to be more skills in need over expensive deep real world background work.
A lot of rushed expansion and now they want the cloud to work with more gov/private people getting a look in to replace existing staff?
A lot of new cash for clearing up the 'people' side.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
That would be pretty much every SlashDot discussion that has more than a dozen comments.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Actually, I would bet that it is Option A AND Option B. This is a government agency we are talking about. They are perfectly capable of having a monumental level of bureaucratic bloat and firing all of their competent people in the effort to reduce it.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Replace all of your systems administrators!! Just install Microsoft System Center, press a few buttons, wave a magic wand. Then get those pink slips ready! Sit back and relax as Microsoft System Center takes care of everything. It supports just about every operating system, non-Windows(tm) based systems requires additional licensed third party vendor software. Once you stream line your business and embrace the cloud you will be able to reduce your human capitol. If you do ever have any issue Microsoft will always be there to help. Contract with our knowledgeable experts who will get you back on track fast, additional support contracts and minimum fees may be required.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
But is says to the states respectively, or to the people. Also, the Fourteenth disallows the states to violate Constitutional protections.
That's one of the most naieve things I've ever read.
Plenty of high intelligent and professional people do the bare minimum / take shortcuts it comes to getting their application to work. Good and secure system administration is about as far as you can get from "bare minimum".
None of them are perfect, but if I had the NSA's budget, I could probably roll a few together into one useful tool. If they're hiring I ain't cheap, but it sounds like fun.
Plain and simple the federal government is suposed to be small, the states are suposed to be the ones with the power.
And who is supposing this? Also, people might have had more sympathy for States' Rights if states didn't use them to oppress people.
Ironically posted to an article about one of the many federal agencies currently in the news for oppressing people.
Do you have ESP?
Sucks to get laid off and I feel real bad for those that might but...
Hire 95% more or lay off 95%. Doesn't matter really. Either way, our individual rights will benefit. The turmoil will only distract from their efforts to subvert our inalienable rights.
Actually, probably better if they were to hire 95% more managers. That'd make them incapable of doing anything aside from having meetings.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
H* w** b**** fucking s********, y** fucking i****.
They plan to confine their activities to legal surveillance from now on.
Yeah, right.
Albert Einstein did all the hard stuff when it came to the atom bomb.
Einstein didn't do diddly with the atom bomb besides help persuade Roosevelt to get out ahead of the Germans in developing one.
Have gnu, will travel.
As if the states were opposing the NSA.
Which 10% are actually doing the work, which they should keep? Which 90% are spending their days playing Minesweeper?
Its a problem that most of industry has to deal with. And indications are that they haven't done a very good job of it.
Have gnu, will travel.
With a few hundred well written powershell scripts.
Or maybe it's just a trap to flush out potential leakers, sort of like the Hundred Flowers Campaign, except with a stick instead of a carrot (make the sysadmins think they have nothing to lose). In which case they'll drop the idea after catching as many of them as possible.
They will lay off all of their system administrators at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th.
That's when PRISM will become fully self-aware.
people might have had more sympathy for States' Rights if states didn't use them to oppress people.
Civil rights has always been pioneered by the states. You probably remember the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by the federal government in 1863. But I am willing to bet you forgot that slavery was abolished in Rhode Island almost a hundred years earlier in 1774, Vermont in 1777, Pennsylvania is 1780, Massachusettes in 1781, New Hampshire in 1783, Connecticut in 1784, New York in 1799, and New Jersey in 1804.
Right now, who has passed DOMA, and who has legalized gay marriage? Who has legalized recreational marijuana, and who is sending agents to bust the dispensaries?
The simple fact is that any government is oppressive by definition, some worse than others. But the state system limits the total power of any of its oppressive elements, and reform can happen in one place, achieve meaningful results, and those results can spread elsewhere. At the very least, if you are in a state whose laws don't suit you, you can move to another state (even in an extraordinarily oppressive situation you wind up with things like the Underground Railroad). Relying on a central government does mean that states lagging behind the average are forced to catch up---I'm willing to bet that is the only part you think about when you consider central government vs. federal government---but it also means holding everyone back until that central government is ready to make the move. And which form do you think is more removed from the people it represents, and which has the resources and inertia to lay more heavily upon its citizens?
Everyone wants the federal government to swoop in and pass laws to get all the states on board with their latest agenda. What they forget is that if we actually had a system like that, they would still be occupied trying to undo the laws passed fifty years ago. (probably until they had enough votes to override a fillibuster)
who is supposing this?
Ostensibly, the same people who decided our nation was to be known as the United States of America.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Seems to me that in order to succeed the NSA has to disband itself.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The problem with the NSA is, they think they can see all their systems as "a larger installation" and as such, automation would work. By connecting all their systems into one "larger installation" they are effectively putting all their data in a single place. That's something you really don't want to do. Before you know it, someone tasked with migrating the data to a newer instance of "a larger installation" makes a copy of it and runs off to Hong Kong with it.
By giving "everyone" access to the Business Intelligence systems you have set up on your data pools, the chance that someone will abuse it, will grow exponentially. By not giving anyone access, there is no use for these systems.
The only way to prevent people to run off with any significant amount of imformation, is to keep that information out of their reach. This means you will need a lot of isolated installations and people tasked to do just a few things. Even if they go rogue, the damage is contained to the information they were able to access, not the motherlode. In practice, this means you'll need a lot of "system administrators" doing lots of "manual tasks" that could easily be automated if there would be enough scale for it to make it worthwhile. The NSA wants their cake and eat it too, but they'll keep on moving the risk, not removing it.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
It doesn't matter what OS is on these servers. The NSA used to work with a separation of privileges and isolated systems. This means that people would get a limited amount of rights, to do a limited amount of tasks on a limited amount of servers. If they would go rogue, they wouldn't be able to do a lot of damage per individual. This means that any possible form of automation is usually already done, regardless of the OS.
Moving to a "sharing culture" and "Business Intelligence" systems that are shared within the entire organization and with other agencies and countries, means that the NSA lost the advantage of having a lot of small islands of information that can't be "lost to the enemy" all at the same time. Still having the "old" administration policies in place means that they now have a lot of people with admin rights but also access to a large cache of data. They don't want to go back to the segregation system and lose the BI, so they are trying to limit the risk by automating administration over larger sets of servers and removing the manual processes. Regardless of what OS they are running, just moving from a plethora of small platforms to just a few large groups of servers will give them a significant reduction in the amount of people required to admin them. By linking their systems to each other on admin level they probably are creating a new risk, that of an attacker gaining admin rights and walking all over their systems with a single account....
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
My guess is a change of title, too.
I don't understand why the news and journals report what the NSA announces. For a long time this agency didn't even exist officially. They are allowed and expected to lie about absolutely everything, there are not even reliable records on how many people they employ. Their official statements are and have always been deliberate bullshit and disinformation. It's pointless to take into account anything they say about themselves at all.
Most people do. Show me anyone, anyone at all, and, given enough access, I could probably prove them a liar.
I don't believe you
How many linux programs or services handle low disk space nicely.
Some even go more crazy creating more logs, eating more of what tiny space is left.
How many server software that creates its own logs is smart enough to recompress all raw logs when disk space hits zero. None, they are happy to leave gigs of logs sitting there. But a dead server is better working server right? Server dead, but you have logs.
Or the other case where programs go, cant connect error, retry 100000000000 times, creating a 100 gig log file.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Or rather its easier just to get a 4G USB stick, plug it into a 10feet usb cable that hides the 4G connection in the pot plant.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I imagine that there is such a seeming glut of sys admins simply to compartmentalize their infrastructure.
Easy enough to do away with... but there goes your compartmentalization. I imagine that the remaining SA's are going to be cream of the crop and also subject to higher standards of scrutiny.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I also wonder why they don't encrypt this data? A SA doesn't need the keys to decrypt the files. All (s)he needs to see is that the files are there and that they are not corrupt.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
When you leave NSA you head on down the HR and they basically tell you what you can put on your resume during the debrief.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
With Chinese H-1B workers!
Rick B.
Proof A) A person has had more than 50% of their brain removed/taken out by some accident, but they are still 100% normal and can talk etc recall all memories.
So we know that the human brain is 90% duplication, and possibly 99% redundancy. So even a brain 1/100th the size could comprehend and be as smart as a human in theory.
IF the brain is nothing more than a conduit socket to the soul that has the real brain power, then brain simulation is dead and cannot ever be done unless we ressurect ghosts to run our VM brains.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Instead of creating their own in-house private cloud linked through their own private facilities linked all over the world, they went with a public company that can do this for them? Are they NUTS? No, really. If this isn't the worst, most unsecured way to do ANYTHING, I don't know what is. Do they use their full names as their login IDs as well?
Are you kidding me?
That, exactly. In the acronym-laden government agency that I work, a huge majority of the local staff are coded as 2210 Systems Administrator, and a large portion of them never touch a PC, let alone a server. Recode the job titles appropriately, cut where possible, and a 90% "reduction" is entirely feasible with virtually zero impact to efficiency.
So the NSA is using software to start automating their systems. I can see the headline now:
Air traffic grinds to a halt, All US citizens on TSA no fly list
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
If Snowden's accounts are correct, many people have Sys Admin level access even though that is not their role in the organization. It is entirely possible that, like every sane organization, the NSA is working to fix their systems so that people outside of IT don't need Sys Admin level access to do their jobs. This process is sometimes known as implementing proper security.
Taking away Sys Admin rights from people who don't need it is "reducing our system administrators." Headcount does not need to change at all for them to accomplish this goal.
I gotta agree with the GP. Phds are specialists.
I've never seen code as bad as was produced by a bunch of applied math Phds. FORTRAN that included calculated GOTOs. Databases tables with more columns then the engine allowed and no primary key. (Their fix, a second table, joined on a 100 char 'id column', with a bunch more columns for data.)
Of course you couldn't tell them anything. One got real butt hurt/lost face when I said his project would get a failing grade in an undergraduate data structures course. Truth hurts.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
What does the NSA mean? Lay offs? Ship to Guantanamo? Make disappear? They can't let all those folks just wander the streets with the knowledge they have. Can you truly leave the NSA and remain alive or condemned to a life in hiding?
I would really *LOVE* for them to carry this out. Fire 90% of your staff trained in network security.
Awesome.
That would mean the NSA spy machine would suddenly become the property of the blackhat community. I'd find that HIGHLY entertaining.
So, back to the NSA. They should replace *nix servers with Windows? I'd like that. Any person who wants the NSA to be far less effective would like that!
def get_legislator_vote(Representative me, Bill b) :Yes
else
return :Present
end
end
if me.received_campaign_contributions_from_opponent?
if me.can_spin_to_constituents(b)
me.add_actions(:acquire_favors, b.supporters)
return :No
else
me.add_actions(:cash_in_favor_to_get_no_votes)
return :Dont_Vote
end
end
if b.bill_gives_government_more_power? && me.can_spin_to_constituents(b)
return :Yes
end
if b.bill_restricts_government_power?
return :No
end
if b.cnn_says_bill_addresses_current_crisis?
return :Yes
else if b.cnn_says_bill_will_cause_apocalypse?
return :No
end
if me.party == b.billsponsor.party :No :Yes :Amend :Present :Present :No :Yes :Present :No;
if me.received_campaign_contributions_from_supporter? if me.can_spin_to_constituents(b, b.supporters) return
if me.party == currentpresident.party
if currentpresident.opposes? b
return
else if currentpresident.supports?(b)
if me.canSpinToConstituents?(b)
return
else b.amendable?
else
end
else return
end
else
if currentpresident.supports
return
lse if currentpresident.opposes? return
else return
end
else
return
end
end