...is a big deal. Example: About 15 years ago, the computer systems used by Revenue Officers of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service had reached their zenith. The primary application was called the Integrated Collection System. It did everything ROs needed to do their jobs. Running on SCO Unix laptops in the field and one SCO Unix server per group, *everything* that ROs needed was there without being bogged down with management report-generating crap that wasn't needed to do the job.
Guess what? The whole system was designed, mostly coded, and often administered by Revenue Officers. 80% of the people who ran the project, from coders to SAs to high-level execs, were former Revenue Officers who had been recruited for their "on-the-side" tech skills. These were the guys who everyone went to for computer help and who were always complaining that a properly designed and selected set of computerized tools could make their jobs better.
When just about everyone involved in a software project has actually done the job of the end user, it's unbelievable how much smoother things go in the long run. Yes, it's a pain to take a motley crew of bill collectors and teach them enough about computers (even if they were computer-loving types to begin with) for them to design, code, and maintain such a huge system. But if you commit to that process, you wind up with a vertical app that meets the needs of the customer better than you would normally dare to hope.
Addendum - Naturally, the PHB types couldn't leave well enough alone. Unix for end users was considered too weird so once everything was working perfectly for a few years, execs from outside the normal chain of command demanded that the system be scrapped and re-written for Windows. At the same time, they insisted that it be loaded up with functions designed not to help ROs do their jobs but to produce reports for management and tools for management to control the field employees. (In the view of upper management, the earlier iterations of the program gave the end users far too much ability to do their jobs without interference from management.) Nowadays, ICS is far too much of an employee-control tool. Oh, well, nothing good lasts forever, I suppose.
Rockwell attracts lots of haters due to the fact that he's opinionated, blunt, and it's always possible to come to a different conclusion given the same set of facts.
However, he's never too far wrong and he's easy to understand.
Yes, but the audit comes much later. The exemptions will be given to whoever files first. The person who was supposed to get the exemptions will then be stuck without getting credt for the exemptions for many months until everything is sorted out.
I stand by my initial statement. As a practical matter, if you want things to go smoothly, file first (assuming, of course, you are the one who is legally entitled to the exemptions).
So keep this in mind - Any politician who says they want to reduce government debt but who does not also say they are willing to fund the IRS to the level it needs is a liar.
Revenue Officers, even new ones, bring in 3 to 20 times their salary (sometimes much, much more) per year. So why aren't we hiring more Officers and Agents and all the support people they need? Because politician are liars, people with no integrity who will say whatever it takes to get elected whether it makes sense or not. Here's the most basic test I can think of - Any politician who says they want to abolish the IRS is too stupid to carry out any job more complex than janitor (and I really hate to insult janitors by suggesting politicians could do their job). Don't vote for them.
Nixon badly misused the agency. In the aftermath, Congress cracked down on the IRS like they have done for no other agency. For example, even small agencies usually have lots of political appointees. Those jobs are often used as payback. The IRS, though, has only two political appointees - the Commissioner and the Taxpayer Advocate.
Anyone who believes the IRS routinely launches audits of personal income tax returns upon the orders of some high-placed politician is living in 1972. There have been more recent allegations of political reasons for starting audits of exempt organizations such as churches but there have been virtually no shenanigans concerning individuals for decades.
You can have anything you want, if you pay for it.
You missed the part where I specified "for half the price of stick-built."
Technology will have taken over the construction business when your vision of
At some point they'll show up with some sort of huge 3D printer, make the whole structure for the house,...
becomes a reality AND the price of such construction drops as precipitously as the price of computers. I just don't think that will happen in the lifetime of anyone currently alive.
I hope I'm wrong, mind you. Every time I see one of those 3D concrete printers (which is not what they're called but the concept is the same) that extrudes finished guardrails I yearn for the day when such technology is widely deployed to make inexpensive, high-quality housing for everyone. I just don't think I'll ever see it.
Maybe they could go work in construction. Except the tech will get there as well. You can bet that the construction companies are salivating at the prospect of having machines that print walls, and they'll get made at some point.
I disagree.
The construction industry builds, among other things, the places people live and work. People, for all sorts of sentimental and illogical reasons, like to be in spaces that feel handmade. As a result, the construction industry (in all phases, but especially in residential homes) is one of the most conservative around. It's been possible to manufacture houses remotely and install on site for a long time. It's done on a reasonable scale in some places. But still, the majority of housing is what is called in the U.S. "stick-built". It's pieces of wood, hammered together.
I'd love to live in a super-insulated plastic house with a roof and exterior finish that will last forever without maintenance and can be built for half the price of stick-built, sort of a "500 square foot Japanese pod hotel concept" house. Such a thing is technologically possible. But you can't buy one. No one offers it because no one except us weird tech geeks would ever want to live in one, no matter how practical it is.
That's why, when the subject of what to do for a living comes up, I usually say to young folks "Find something that can't be outsourced that everyone needs. Housing needs are universal so carpenter, plumber, electrician are good choices. Alternatively, if you want a job that's different, find a position that exclusively provides services to rich people since it seems we'll never run out of those. Yacht crewman looks pretty good these days."
tl;dr - Construction is a conservative (nearly hidebound) business and while technology may disrupt it, the basic trades like electrician and plumber will remain a good way to make a living for at least another generation, probably longer.
...people don't search for content based on the domain name.
Back when searching for strings of text in domain names actually did produce useful results, I loved the Northern Light search engine. They made it so easy.
It's been a long while but the last time I checked, no one made this possible in the same way any more.
Nowadays, does any search engine have this feature? The ability to search for a text string in an URL while limiting results to only those characters to the left of the TLD could still be occasionally useful.
Before somebody points to Google, I'd like to note that I find their tool useless. If I'm using it wrong, please correct me, but the Google "allinurl" search will find the text *anywhere* in the URL. That's not what I want. If I want to find sites that deal with, say, lowriders, the google results will inevitably show 10,000 links to places like http://www.someweirdasspicpostsitenoonehaseverheardof.ru/some/ridiculous/bunch/of/subdirs/someusername/lowrider001.jpg . Such results are completely without value when you're looking for http://www.lowriders.com/ or some variant thereof.
The reason why someone would risk their reputation for a small increase in profit is cultural. The Chinese have no misgivings about ripping off their customers. Whatever they can get away with, they will.
Go to the Consumer Electronics Show sometime and talk to the people there. You'll hear horror stories over and over that all follow the same pattern - "The minute we turned our backs, the Chinese contractor started substituting whatever cheap-ass parts they could find."
It's cultural. They believe if they *can* rip you off and get away with it, then that's the right thing to do. Anyone who does business with them who doesn't have their own people in the factory, doing QC and generally being suspicious, is taking way too much risk.
I was a government IT worker in the U.S. Treasury for decades. Before I retired, contractors were being brought in to replace workers in my position. One guy comes to us fresh from a front-line support position at, believe it or not, Best Buy. After a long while, he turned out to be not so bad, trainable, and useful. It took about a year to get him up to speed.
At some point, he decided he trusted me enough to talk about pay. I was shocked. Why should he treat salaries as some sort of secret? As a public employee, my pay is known to anyone who wants to look it up. I showed him how to look up what anyone in the organization made, showed him my salary, and couldn't imagine why anyone would think of this stuff as proprietary information.
In his case, though, I can see why his employer had gone to great pains to create the impression that salaries were some kind of secret. He was doing the same work as a first-tier support employee but was being paid roughly one-fourth as much money. The contract to his employer was sufficient to support employees like me (the agency was paying roughly twice the annual salary of a senior computer specialist for each contractor who reported to a job site) yet the contractor simply took the contract, took a cut, and subcontracted the rest out. The subcontractor took a cut and subcontracted the rest out. The next level subcontractor took a cut and hired an out-of-work Best Buy leftover to report to the job for a pitifully small percentage of the original contract payment.
It was a multi-level sham. I was annoyed at the waste. The contract guy was annoyed that he wasn't making any more money. Overall, contracting for these positions was a completely stupid thing to do that only accomplished just one thing - slicing off shares of pure profit to a few middlemen. Ultimately, the workers on the ground and their customers got screwed and the U.S. government got a *very* poor return for the money spent.
Naturally, once the guy was fully trained and providing real value to the organization, budget cuts forced cancellation of the support contract and he was gone in a flash. All that training time, all that productivity diverted from helping customers to bringing him up to speed was, in an instant, flushed down the toilet.
I'm sure it's not always the case, but contracting for services like this by the government is, in every case where I've gotten a close look, a completely stupid thing to do.
The article says the R.O. in this case "asked" the ISP for the information. That can be done a number of ways. The most informal is to, you know, ask.
If an R.O. wants to find out about you and you live in an apartment complex, they'll ask the complex management for a look at your application. 20 years ago, the management would hand it over. Nowadays, in the aftermath of the Revenue Reconciliation Act of 1998 that, in many ways, neutered R.Os, nobody complies with simple requests.
If a recordkeeper wants a piece of paper to cover themselves for giving up the privacy of their customer, that's easy. It's called a "Notice to Exhibit Books and Records" and the R.O. can fill out one and hand that over. Nowadays, those get rejected, too.
The involvement of Counsel in this particular case means that the R.O. actually sent a summons for information to the ISP. If the summons hadn't been overbroad (asking for the text of emails), then there wouldn't have been a problem.
Here's what gets me - Why did the R.O. want the text of emails, anyway? It's enough to know the basic details provided at signup. Generally, unlawful tax avoiders try to make everything difficult for the R.O. by refusing to hand over even simple information or avoiding contact all together. Getting the basic sign-up info would provide the R.O. with a (probably) valid street address and credit card info. That's plenty to build on.
My two most successful ways to find people, back when I did this job: First, summons the persons mother. Mom generally knows where their kid is. Second, if you know the general neighborhood, summons the nearest schools for the emergency contact information provided for their kids. Even tax cheats tell the truth (daytime location/employer and all phone numbers) when it comes to letting the school know how they can be contacted in case of an emergency involving their kids.
tl;dr - RO issues overbroad summons and gets slapped. BFD and not unusual.
So when do these technological advances trickle down to regular users?
From the article:
AugmentedID will let you take a picture of someone with your phone, and the app will search its database for a matching face. It seems like this is only a small step away from being able to search Facebook and other Social Media for matching photos,...
Who cares about searching through social media? I'd just like an app that would find all the variously-named, varying-resolution dupes of the porn images on my computer. Ideally, it would then show me all the dupes via an interface that helps me categorize and move the files I want, then delete the excess copies.
Help me get that shit in order. That would be my idea of a "social good".
I once did a really intense, really satisfying six-month stint supporting about 2500 new hires and instructors in a hotel environment. We didn't have a help desk to dispatch so we made it up as we went along. We gave the instructors balloons to hang outside their classrooms when they had a problem then practiced "support by walking around."
Upper management, however, wanted at least a cursory measure of what sorts of problems we were handling. We had no time. We were running our asses off.
I put up a grid on a chalkboard in the "war room" and everybody put a check mark in the appropriate block whenever they stopped by.
At the end of the six weeks, just over half of all calls were in the "not plugged in, not turned on" category.
There's slightly more to it than that. Some of the most widely-distributed equipment was problematic in that it had a funky turn-on/warm-up sequence that was easy to misinterpret. Still, I just wanted to agree with you in the strongest possible terms. Checking to see if the non-functioning device is plugged in and turned on is basic, mandatory, and all-too-often overlooked.
All U.S. government employees and contractors were warned when the first Wikileaks dumps happened that classifications had not changed and that it was still a violation to repeat any of that stuff.
We got memos. We got emails. It was a mandatory discussion topic at group meetings.
Everyone knew/knows that you can't repeat any of that information, you can't link to it, you can't read it from your work computer. If you're a fed or a contractor, that stuff might as well be radioactive anthrax.
He knew, period. He also knew there would be consequences. How stupid was this guy?
I just retired from nearly 30 years at Treasury. I can't count the number of employees I've seen fired.
Perhaps a dozen were led out in handcuffs for violating disclosure or other laws.
I've seen behavior infractions (fisticuffs, actually) result in a "both of you go home and we'll sort it out later", with the conclusion that one voluntarily resigned and the other was fired.
My agency was the IRS and IRS employees get ZERO slack on filing their tax returns late; 100s of employees have been fired for that reason since the Revenue Reconciliation act of 1998.
I've seen student aides arrested and fired for stealing.
I've seen at least a half-dozen fired for fully-documented poor job performance, a process that takes time, to be sure, but can be done.
I've seen two fired for downloading porn. I saw one (a Special Agent, no less, who apparently thought his off-network investigative workstation was immune to audit) who was allowed to resign before he was arrested two weeks later for spending all day at work and leaving his computer running all night downloading kiddie porn.
Hell, I even saw a *Division Chief* fired and criminally prosecuted for falsifying less than $1000 in relocation expenses on a travel voucher!
Yes, tenured civilians in government service get fired. Maybe they don't put as much emphasis on personal accountability at whatever agencies you worked for, but I know that at the IRS, employees got fired.
As an aside, relative to a circumstance in the GP post - I've known 7 employees who got caught having sex at work. 2 got fired. 2 got a 3-day suspension with loss of pay. But 3 got kicked upstairs/promoted out of the place. (The number is odd because one of the caught employees was screwing a contract security guard. She got promoted; he got fired.) I never really understood the rules surrounding that particular infraction.
The Civil Service Retirement System was killed for new hires in, what, 1983? When it was replaced with FERS (Federal Employee Retirement System), management at nearly every agency engaged in a 6-month all-out propaganda war to convince CSRS employees to switch to FERS. There were multiple mandatory meetings where outside experts would come in and tell everyone that if they'd just drop CSRS and convert to FERS, they'd all be millionaires by the time they retired. Seriously, we're talking full-court press, here, all the time, for months on end.
I was in the last group of employees at my agency and district to come in under CSRS so I was still wet behind the ears when the FERS conversions kicked in. Still, after only about a year on the job, I had learned one thing: If it's voluntary and management wants me to do it this desperately, it must be bad for me.
I'm not joking. I did no financial analysis. I just saw that management was desperate beyond my ability to describe to get everyone to convert and I knew that if those lying bastards wanted me to do something...then I shouldn't. That was the sole basis for my decision to stick with CSRS.
Now, almost 30 years later, I've just retired. I have no debts; decent (not great) life, health, and long-term care insurance; a little money in the bank; a little money in the Thrift Savings Plan; and a pension that's just a little more money each month than what I require to live.
Thank God for the paranoia that was instilled into me by the mid-level management bastards I routinely encountered all those decades ago. Sticking with CSRS is the single smartest financial decision I've made in the last 30 years. My heart goes out to all those folks who swallowed the propaganda and switched to the new system.
Law enforcement tries to keep such knowledge out of the hands of defense attorneys. While books like this are written, the truly cutting edge stuff gets discussed at conferences like cacconference.org , a gathering where lots of great info is discussed that defense attorneys and the techs that work for them could use.
If they did use that info, though, it would help create a level playing field when computer crime gets to court. LEOs at every level, of course, detest the notion of a level playing field or fairness in any form. Thus, the conference is extremely strict about keeping out anyone who could potentially work for the defense.
I'm not prepared to say that such an approach is unethical but it's certainly intellectually dishonest. Thus, my answer to your question is that I have such low expectations of integrity from everyone in the legal system that I wouldn't doubt they'd try to blame the author.
Integrity just gets in the way of locking up the pervs, guilty or not.
...working less than an hour a day doesn't mean that you're not productive, or, more to the point, that you're not delivering a product to your employer that's worth what you're paid.
I once worked in a large organization where we shuffled paper. Literally. I'd get a file folder, put the forms in order, dispose of duplicates, fill out a summary sheet for the terminal operator to input into a dumb terminal connected to a mainframe half a state away, bind it all together and stick it in my outbox.
We had an entire intake unit that did nothing but classify the work. It was possible to glance briefly over each folder and determine how complex the work was. A bad case with lots of arithmetic (manual interest calculations and the like) might take 8 hours. Simple cases might take two minutes. Similar work was bundled together with a coded ticket on top.
Each morning, I and the other drones would pull the work we were qualified for. We had to pull at least 8 hours of work, as per the Work Planning and Control system and the classifiers who fed it data.
Some people pulled 8 hours of work and struggled to get it done in 8 hours. Most people could pull 8 hours and have it done in 5 or 6. I preferred to pull 10 hours work, finish it in 90 minutes, and spend the rest of the day wandering around.
My bosses knew exactly what I was doing and didn't care. In crunches, they could ask me to help and I'd happily pull 40 hours work per day for a few days. Generally, though, they left me alone to do the minimum and then help out wherever a special problem came up.
If it hadn't been for the need to physically pick up the case files, this is exactly the sort of thing that would work well for a telecommuter.
Why the heck should my employer care if I'm only working for 1.5 hours a day as long as I'm delivering 10 hours worth of work? Good for those telecommuters who can do in an hour the amount of work that their employers expect in a day. That was the promise of technology, wasn't it? That we could do the same amount of work in less time?
In the organization from which I just retired, we had a standard metric for basic laptop health. Assuming the user quickly and without errors types in two logins and two passwords, the time from power-on to a "settled down and usable" desktop was 8 minutes. Once in a blue moon, we'd see someone achieve 7 minutes on a new machine, but 8 was the standard. If boot times stretched past 15 minutes, users generally knew to open and ticket and get a tune-up.
I know of about 120,000 users who would jump for joy at boot times measured in seconds instead of minutes.
Slashdot Mirror
Usually, yes.
...is a big deal. Example: About 15 years ago, the computer systems used by Revenue Officers of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service had reached their zenith. The primary application was called the Integrated Collection System. It did everything ROs needed to do their jobs. Running on SCO Unix laptops in the field and one SCO Unix server per group, *everything* that ROs needed was there without being bogged down with management report-generating crap that wasn't needed to do the job.
Guess what? The whole system was designed, mostly coded, and often administered by Revenue Officers. 80% of the people who ran the project, from coders to SAs to high-level execs, were former Revenue Officers who had been recruited for their "on-the-side" tech skills. These were the guys who everyone went to for computer help and who were always complaining that a properly designed and selected set of computerized tools could make their jobs better.
When just about everyone involved in a software project has actually done the job of the end user, it's unbelievable how much smoother things go in the long run. Yes, it's a pain to take a motley crew of bill collectors and teach them enough about computers (even if they were computer-loving types to begin with) for them to design, code, and maintain such a huge system. But if you commit to that process, you wind up with a vertical app that meets the needs of the customer better than you would normally dare to hope.
Addendum - Naturally, the PHB types couldn't leave well enough alone. Unix for end users was considered too weird so once everything was working perfectly for a few years, execs from outside the normal chain of command demanded that the system be scrapped and re-written for Windows. At the same time, they insisted that it be loaded up with functions designed not to help ROs do their jobs but to produce reports for management and tools for management to control the field employees. (In the view of upper management, the earlier iterations of the program gave the end users far too much ability to do their jobs without interference from management.) Nowadays, ICS is far too much of an employee-control tool. Oh, well, nothing good lasts forever, I suppose.
Rockwell attracts lots of haters due to the fact that he's opinionated, blunt, and it's always possible to come to a different conclusion given the same set of facts.
However, he's never too far wrong and he's easy to understand.
Go to his "recommended cameras" page. Read the intro for useful general guidelines. Read the other sections for other target audiences. But the section you want is http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/recommended-cameras.htm#pocket
Obvious statistical screwup is obvious - and constantly repeated by people with an irrational fear of weaponry.
Yes, but the audit comes much later. The exemptions will be given to whoever files first. The person who was supposed to get the exemptions will then be stuck without getting credt for the exemptions for many months until everything is sorted out.
I stand by my initial statement. As a practical matter, if you want things to go smoothly, file first (assuming, of course, you are the one who is legally entitled to the exemptions).
The ROI for the IRS is, indeed, fantastic.
So keep this in mind - Any politician who says they want to reduce government debt but who does not also say they are willing to fund the IRS to the level it needs is a liar.
Revenue Officers, even new ones, bring in 3 to 20 times their salary (sometimes much, much more) per year. So why aren't we hiring more Officers and Agents and all the support people they need? Because politician are liars, people with no integrity who will say whatever it takes to get elected whether it makes sense or not. Here's the most basic test I can think of - Any politician who says they want to abolish the IRS is too stupid to carry out any job more complex than janitor (and I really hate to insult janitors by suggesting politicians could do their job). Don't vote for them.
Believe me, there are people who are trying to do something very similar to that.
To avoid bad guys using the IRS to help steal your identity, FILE AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE! I can't stress this enough.
Also, to prevent your ex from taking exemptions for the kids even though s/he isn't entitled, make sure you file first.
Nixon badly misused the agency. In the aftermath, Congress cracked down on the IRS like they have done for no other agency. For example, even small agencies usually have lots of political appointees. Those jobs are often used as payback. The IRS, though, has only two political appointees - the Commissioner and the Taxpayer Advocate.
Anyone who believes the IRS routinely launches audits of personal income tax returns upon the orders of some high-placed politician is living in 1972. There have been more recent allegations of political reasons for starting audits of exempt organizations such as churches but there have been virtually no shenanigans concerning individuals for decades.
tl;dr - You don't know what you're talking about.
You missed the part where I specified "for half the price of stick-built."
Technology will have taken over the construction business when your vision of
becomes a reality AND the price of such construction drops as precipitously as the price of computers. I just don't think that will happen in the lifetime of anyone currently alive.
I hope I'm wrong, mind you. Every time I see one of those 3D concrete printers (which is not what they're called but the concept is the same) that extrudes finished guardrails I yearn for the day when such technology is widely deployed to make inexpensive, high-quality housing for everyone. I just don't think I'll ever see it.
I disagree.
The construction industry builds, among other things, the places people live and work. People, for all sorts of sentimental and illogical reasons, like to be in spaces that feel handmade. As a result, the construction industry (in all phases, but especially in residential homes) is one of the most conservative around. It's been possible to manufacture houses remotely and install on site for a long time. It's done on a reasonable scale in some places. But still, the majority of housing is what is called in the U.S. "stick-built". It's pieces of wood, hammered together.
I'd love to live in a super-insulated plastic house with a roof and exterior finish that will last forever without maintenance and can be built for half the price of stick-built, sort of a "500 square foot Japanese pod hotel concept" house. Such a thing is technologically possible. But you can't buy one. No one offers it because no one except us weird tech geeks would ever want to live in one, no matter how practical it is.
That's why, when the subject of what to do for a living comes up, I usually say to young folks "Find something that can't be outsourced that everyone needs. Housing needs are universal so carpenter, plumber, electrician are good choices. Alternatively, if you want a job that's different, find a position that exclusively provides services to rich people since it seems we'll never run out of those. Yacht crewman looks pretty good these days."
tl;dr - Construction is a conservative (nearly hidebound) business and while technology may disrupt it, the basic trades like electrician and plumber will remain a good way to make a living for at least another generation, probably longer.
Back when searching for strings of text in domain names actually did produce useful results, I loved the Northern Light search engine. They made it so easy.
It's been a long while but the last time I checked, no one made this possible in the same way any more.
Nowadays, does any search engine have this feature? The ability to search for a text string in an URL while limiting results to only those characters to the left of the TLD could still be occasionally useful.
Before somebody points to Google, I'd like to note that I find their tool useless. If I'm using it wrong, please correct me, but the Google "allinurl" search will find the text *anywhere* in the URL. That's not what I want. If I want to find sites that deal with, say, lowriders, the google results will inevitably show 10,000 links to places like http://www.someweirdasspicpostsitenoonehaseverheardof.ru/some/ridiculous/bunch/of/subdirs/someusername/lowrider001.jpg . Such results are completely without value when you're looking for http://www.lowriders.com/ or some variant thereof.
The reason why someone would risk their reputation for a small increase in profit is cultural. The Chinese have no misgivings about ripping off their customers. Whatever they can get away with, they will.
Go to the Consumer Electronics Show sometime and talk to the people there. You'll hear horror stories over and over that all follow the same pattern - "The minute we turned our backs, the Chinese contractor started substituting whatever cheap-ass parts they could find."
It's cultural. They believe if they *can* rip you off and get away with it, then that's the right thing to do. Anyone who does business with them who doesn't have their own people in the factory, doing QC and generally being suspicious, is taking way too much risk.
I was a government IT worker in the U.S. Treasury for decades. Before I retired, contractors were being brought in to replace workers in my position. One guy comes to us fresh from a front-line support position at, believe it or not, Best Buy. After a long while, he turned out to be not so bad, trainable, and useful. It took about a year to get him up to speed.
At some point, he decided he trusted me enough to talk about pay. I was shocked. Why should he treat salaries as some sort of secret? As a public employee, my pay is known to anyone who wants to look it up. I showed him how to look up what anyone in the organization made, showed him my salary, and couldn't imagine why anyone would think of this stuff as proprietary information.
In his case, though, I can see why his employer had gone to great pains to create the impression that salaries were some kind of secret. He was doing the same work as a first-tier support employee but was being paid roughly one-fourth as much money. The contract to his employer was sufficient to support employees like me (the agency was paying roughly twice the annual salary of a senior computer specialist for each contractor who reported to a job site) yet the contractor simply took the contract, took a cut, and subcontracted the rest out. The subcontractor took a cut and subcontracted the rest out. The next level subcontractor took a cut and hired an out-of-work Best Buy leftover to report to the job for a pitifully small percentage of the original contract payment.
It was a multi-level sham. I was annoyed at the waste. The contract guy was annoyed that he wasn't making any more money. Overall, contracting for these positions was a completely stupid thing to do that only accomplished just one thing - slicing off shares of pure profit to a few middlemen. Ultimately, the workers on the ground and their customers got screwed and the U.S. government got a *very* poor return for the money spent.
Naturally, once the guy was fully trained and providing real value to the organization, budget cuts forced cancellation of the support contract and he was gone in a flash. All that training time, all that productivity diverted from helping customers to bringing him up to speed was, in an instant, flushed down the toilet.
I'm sure it's not always the case, but contracting for services like this by the government is, in every case where I've gotten a close look, a completely stupid thing to do.
Where to start?
The article says the R.O. in this case "asked" the ISP for the information. That can be done a number of ways. The most informal is to, you know, ask.
If an R.O. wants to find out about you and you live in an apartment complex, they'll ask the complex management for a look at your application. 20 years ago, the management would hand it over. Nowadays, in the aftermath of the Revenue Reconciliation Act of 1998 that, in many ways, neutered R.Os, nobody complies with simple requests.
If a recordkeeper wants a piece of paper to cover themselves for giving up the privacy of their customer, that's easy. It's called a "Notice to Exhibit Books and Records" and the R.O. can fill out one and hand that over. Nowadays, those get rejected, too.
The involvement of Counsel in this particular case means that the R.O. actually sent a summons for information to the ISP. If the summons hadn't been overbroad (asking for the text of emails), then there wouldn't have been a problem.
Here's what gets me - Why did the R.O. want the text of emails, anyway? It's enough to know the basic details provided at signup. Generally, unlawful tax avoiders try to make everything difficult for the R.O. by refusing to hand over even simple information or avoiding contact all together. Getting the basic sign-up info would provide the R.O. with a (probably) valid street address and credit card info. That's plenty to build on.
My two most successful ways to find people, back when I did this job: First, summons the persons mother. Mom generally knows where their kid is. Second, if you know the general neighborhood, summons the nearest schools for the emergency contact information provided for their kids. Even tax cheats tell the truth (daytime location/employer and all phone numbers) when it comes to letting the school know how they can be contacted in case of an emergency involving their kids.
tl;dr - RO issues overbroad summons and gets slapped. BFD and not unusual.
Wow. I was mostly joking but those look like truly useful applications.
Seriously - many thanks.
So when do these technological advances trickle down to regular users?
From the article:
Who cares about searching through social media? I'd just like an app that would find all the variously-named, varying-resolution dupes of the porn images on my computer. Ideally, it would then show me all the dupes via an interface that helps me categorize and move the files I want, then delete the excess copies.
Help me get that shit in order. That would be my idea of a "social good".
I once did a really intense, really satisfying six-month stint supporting about 2500 new hires and instructors in a hotel environment. We didn't have a help desk to dispatch so we made it up as we went along. We gave the instructors balloons to hang outside their classrooms when they had a problem then practiced "support by walking around."
Upper management, however, wanted at least a cursory measure of what sorts of problems we were handling. We had no time. We were running our asses off.
I put up a grid on a chalkboard in the "war room" and everybody put a check mark in the appropriate block whenever they stopped by.
At the end of the six weeks, just over half of all calls were in the "not plugged in, not turned on" category.
There's slightly more to it than that. Some of the most widely-distributed equipment was problematic in that it had a funky turn-on/warm-up sequence that was easy to misinterpret. Still, I just wanted to agree with you in the strongest possible terms. Checking to see if the non-functioning device is plugged in and turned on is basic, mandatory, and all-too-often overlooked.
All U.S. government employees and contractors were warned when the first Wikileaks dumps happened that classifications had not changed and that it was still a violation to repeat any of that stuff.
We got memos. We got emails. It was a mandatory discussion topic at group meetings.
Everyone knew/knows that you can't repeat any of that information, you can't link to it, you can't read it from your work computer. If you're a fed or a contractor, that stuff might as well be radioactive anthrax.
He knew, period. He also knew there would be consequences. How stupid was this guy?
I just retired from nearly 30 years at Treasury. I can't count the number of employees I've seen fired.
Perhaps a dozen were led out in handcuffs for violating disclosure or other laws.
I've seen behavior infractions (fisticuffs, actually) result in a "both of you go home and we'll sort it out later", with the conclusion that one voluntarily resigned and the other was fired.
My agency was the IRS and IRS employees get ZERO slack on filing their tax returns late; 100s of employees have been fired for that reason since the Revenue Reconciliation act of 1998.
I've seen student aides arrested and fired for stealing.
I've seen at least a half-dozen fired for fully-documented poor job performance, a process that takes time, to be sure, but can be done.
I've seen two fired for downloading porn. I saw one (a Special Agent, no less, who apparently thought his off-network investigative workstation was immune to audit) who was allowed to resign before he was arrested two weeks later for spending all day at work and leaving his computer running all night downloading kiddie porn.
Hell, I even saw a *Division Chief* fired and criminally prosecuted for falsifying less than $1000 in relocation expenses on a travel voucher!
Yes, tenured civilians in government service get fired. Maybe they don't put as much emphasis on personal accountability at whatever agencies you worked for, but I know that at the IRS, employees got fired.
As an aside, relative to a circumstance in the GP post - I've known 7 employees who got caught having sex at work. 2 got fired. 2 got a 3-day suspension with loss of pay. But 3 got kicked upstairs/promoted out of the place. (The number is odd because one of the caught employees was screwing a contract security guard. She got promoted; he got fired.) I never really understood the rules surrounding that particular infraction.
The Civil Service Retirement System was killed for new hires in, what, 1983? When it was replaced with FERS (Federal Employee Retirement System), management at nearly every agency engaged in a 6-month all-out propaganda war to convince CSRS employees to switch to FERS. There were multiple mandatory meetings where outside experts would come in and tell everyone that if they'd just drop CSRS and convert to FERS, they'd all be millionaires by the time they retired. Seriously, we're talking full-court press, here, all the time, for months on end.
I was in the last group of employees at my agency and district to come in under CSRS so I was still wet behind the ears when the FERS conversions kicked in. Still, after only about a year on the job, I had learned one thing: If it's voluntary and management wants me to do it this desperately, it must be bad for me.
I'm not joking. I did no financial analysis. I just saw that management was desperate beyond my ability to describe to get everyone to convert and I knew that if those lying bastards wanted me to do something...then I shouldn't. That was the sole basis for my decision to stick with CSRS.
Now, almost 30 years later, I've just retired. I have no debts; decent (not great) life, health, and long-term care insurance; a little money in the bank; a little money in the Thrift Savings Plan; and a pension that's just a little more money each month than what I require to live.
Thank God for the paranoia that was instilled into me by the mid-level management bastards I routinely encountered all those decades ago. Sticking with CSRS is the single smartest financial decision I've made in the last 30 years. My heart goes out to all those folks who swallowed the propaganda and switched to the new system.
Law enforcement tries to keep such knowledge out of the hands of defense attorneys. While books like this are written, the truly cutting edge stuff gets discussed at conferences like cacconference.org , a gathering where lots of great info is discussed that defense attorneys and the techs that work for them could use.
If they did use that info, though, it would help create a level playing field when computer crime gets to court. LEOs at every level, of course, detest the notion of a level playing field or fairness in any form. Thus, the conference is extremely strict about keeping out anyone who could potentially work for the defense.
I'm not prepared to say that such an approach is unethical but it's certainly intellectually dishonest. Thus, my answer to your question is that I have such low expectations of integrity from everyone in the legal system that I wouldn't doubt they'd try to blame the author.
Integrity just gets in the way of locking up the pervs, guilty or not.
I once worked in a large organization where we shuffled paper. Literally. I'd get a file folder, put the forms in order, dispose of duplicates, fill out a summary sheet for the terminal operator to input into a dumb terminal connected to a mainframe half a state away, bind it all together and stick it in my outbox.
We had an entire intake unit that did nothing but classify the work. It was possible to glance briefly over each folder and determine how complex the work was. A bad case with lots of arithmetic (manual interest calculations and the like) might take 8 hours. Simple cases might take two minutes. Similar work was bundled together with a coded ticket on top.
Each morning, I and the other drones would pull the work we were qualified for. We had to pull at least 8 hours of work, as per the Work Planning and Control system and the classifiers who fed it data.
Some people pulled 8 hours of work and struggled to get it done in 8 hours. Most people could pull 8 hours and have it done in 5 or 6. I preferred to pull 10 hours work, finish it in 90 minutes, and spend the rest of the day wandering around.
My bosses knew exactly what I was doing and didn't care. In crunches, they could ask me to help and I'd happily pull 40 hours work per day for a few days. Generally, though, they left me alone to do the minimum and then help out wherever a special problem came up.
If it hadn't been for the need to physically pick up the case files, this is exactly the sort of thing that would work well for a telecommuter.
Why the heck should my employer care if I'm only working for 1.5 hours a day as long as I'm delivering 10 hours worth of work? Good for those telecommuters who can do in an hour the amount of work that their employers expect in a day. That was the promise of technology, wasn't it? That we could do the same amount of work in less time?
Cool. Seriously cool.
Related and always relevant: the famous Lenny Bruce "Nigger routine".
Define "boot up".
In the organization from which I just retired, we had a standard metric for basic laptop health. Assuming the user quickly and without errors types in two logins and two passwords, the time from power-on to a "settled down and usable" desktop was 8 minutes. Once in a blue moon, we'd see someone achieve 7 minutes on a new machine, but 8 was the standard. If boot times stretched past 15 minutes, users generally knew to open and ticket and get a tune-up.
I know of about 120,000 users who would jump for joy at boot times measured in seconds instead of minutes.