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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.'"
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
> 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
... 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)
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.
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.