Yes. I meant the overall number of sysadmins to be ‘fired’. Overall though 90% is 90%, and you can bet if they don’t understand their own operations any better than this, the people who will remain in that position won’t necessarily be the same ones who most benefit overall operations. ‘Sysadmin’ can mean a number of different things, even within a single operation. So I’m betting it’s going to be a matter of changing some people’s job descriptions or titles, and that’s about it.
There was a time when I did work for an agency that had its domain names spread all over the place.
When the Cabinet Secretary (a career politician) ordered all email domains to be combined under one domain, the agency Director ignored him, figuring it was just a flip of the old domain switch. Then, I got ordered to cancel my vacay and spoof all the thousands of email addresses. I was not a sysadmin. They handed it to me because the sysadmins didn’t know how to do it, but nobody bothered to ask until the deadline was a heartbeat away. The newspapers carried the Secretary’s proud announcement that the mission was accomplished under his fabulous leadership…and all for the sake of ‘greater transparency in government for the American People’. He’s long gone, I’m long gone, and I’ll bet you lunch they have NEVER actually consolidated those domains, lol. That’s entirely typical of how the game gets played internally.
By ‘Infrastructure Analyst’, I am assuming Snowden was what anyone else would call a Systems Analyst, but one with a background in Systems Engineering. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been as likely to understand how the whole thing was built out. There wouldn’t be a huge number of people with that particular skill set in any organization, as the person in that position talks to pretty much everybody and has to know how it all fits together. SysAdmins usually only get one or two platforms or some sub-specialty to work on as a practical matter, and it doesn’t take a whole army to do that. So, I’m assuming they use the term ‘SysAdmin’ in the way you would refer to a person’s security permissions within the OS security settings themselves. If that’s the case, then the Admins who gave away all those permissions to everybody and their brother are the fools who need to go, lol. But it DOESN’T imply that any one of those SysAdmins knows the entire architecture of those systems, regardless of which definition they are using.
It’s very obvious bs and scapegoating, top to bottom. And it’s ONLY value is that while people here understand this stuff, John Q. Public pretty much doesn’t.
I agree, too. Good image! These guys are what makes evil clowns soooo scary. (I’m pretty sure that’s who was driving the bus, too.) If I have any nightmares tonight, I’m blaming you!
Plot twist: They’re reducing their sysadmin staff by shutting down 90% of their surveillance programs. They simply shut down everything that hasn’t given them any solid info on terrorists.
the U s of A is assuming that citizens such as Manning and Snowden are All of the Leakers. So if even one of these nine hundred gleaned some something prior to departure and then third partied the data to say wikileaks,then there could be a third leaker. Mathematically the odds are there that this could happen
Saw in another article that NSA has about 30,000 employees total. That’s even smaller than the agency I was in. Given that that one was far more data-intensive even in its ordinary operations, I’m going to estimate the networking services staff at 15 or less, and 6 or 7 will be federal employees in ‘supervisory’ positions who can’t readily be fired at all. They can be furloughed or transferred, but nothing short of a murder conviction gets them ‘fired’. (I am not even kidding you - actually worked in one agency that had a guy in the proverbial tin foil hat! And a legally blind woman assigned to inspect printed material for quality control, in a room where the then-Energy Czar had declared that most of the lightbulbs had to be removed to save energy.)
Now, the rest of the crew at NSA will be contractors, who may certainly be blind, stupid, or crazy, providing they do not exceed traditional limits established by their federally-employed counterparts. The contractors are not the agency’s employees in the first place, and therefore cannot be fired by the agency, period. The company that brought them in has a contract, though, and will get paid upwards of 6 figures per employee, whether or not they are actually supplying people to the job.
So, if the rest of the model holds up, there will only be maybe 4 or 5 in the group who ever get anywhere near a server, and every last one of those will be contractors. Losing 90% will require that the last remaining sysadmin will necessarily be drawn and quartered. Probably by an evil clown. I’m sure they’ll save the head, though!
Man, that’s some deep Clapper! Where are my boots?
Because that’s exactly how you set up a super-secret agency, by understaffing and having a lot of private-public contracts, because that always works great!
(I did not type one word of that with a straight face, my last stint was working with Wisconsin’s Badgercrare programs and. . . wow, just wow. I’ve yet to find a long-term private-public partnership that doesn’t somehow take on the worst qualities of both)
Also. . .
Great, now I have the giggles. People are going to look at me funny now.
Oh, ye of little faith! That’s just Government partnering with Industry. Because corporations are people, too! Haven’t you heard? Campaign finance reform took care of any potential conflicts of interest ages ago, and congressional oversight obviously takes care of the rest. And Holder makes sure everybody is doing their job and he tells Congress. I mean, you wouldn’t want the lowly GAO being privvy to all that icky government stuff, would you?
God Bless Amurika! Makes ya want to just bust out in a line dance, doesn’t it?
(Better they should look at you funny than with sudden comprehension, don’t you think?)
Oh, but they are SPECTACULARLY bad at lateral hops, it’s almost embarrassing. Breaking context just kind of makes their brain short circuit slightly. (And that’s not me being disrespectful, that’s part of the psychology)
In my past lives it was a constant source of exasperation (i.e. taking MONTHS to get people to be okay with using a marketing algorithm to predict healthcare visits, despite it being mind-bleedingly obvious and even better for that than marketing). But I will confess to occasionally having. . . fun with their brains.
the NSA, like a lot of technical orgs, grew rapidly and hastily cobbled together processes that involve doing a lot of things by hand, and then realized that those things should be automated, and were belatedly trying to do so, and expecting it to reduce the number of sysadmins needed by 90%.
While questioning Cory’s analysis, you also seem to be taking the word of the same NSA guy that also said this incredible lie repeated within the article:
“No one has willfully or knowingly disobeyed the law or tried to invade your civil liberties or privacies,” he said. “There were no mistakes like that at all.”
Why trust a boldfaced liar like that?
I have much more reason to trust that they’re scrambling like headless chickens (or cockroaches with the lights turned on) than to think this is some calm, controlled, well-thought-out measure. I have no reason to believe the were already taking any rational measures beforehand.
It just isn’t wise to trust the words of perpetual, blatant, willful liars. Also, safely firing 90% of system administrators sounds like a crock of shit to me and anyone else with proper IT experience.
Now that Snowden has leaked all this info and the media and congress and senators are breathing down their necks and asking them hard questions about security
Some are asking about security and others are asking about the lack thereof from quasi-governmental entities prying into all their communications. I think the latter issue is what’s got the NSA flying into desperate damage control mode more than anything else.
The last thing these guys want is more transparency because average, private, American citizens will start snooping around into their corrupt war profiteering. What better way to protect that from happening than by intimidating and destroying average Americans by performing virtual strip searches online and a literal ones at the airport?
It is just more security theater. They have no idea how to implement this scheme of sniffing everyone’s metadata.
I think it’s a bit of both security theater for profit taking and also true, limited implementation to thwart peaceful activists, steal valuable info, etc. – Meanwhile, they’ll continue to use traditional, actual police work to hinder terrorism and continue to falsely claim spying on all Americans is what was needed (or helped).
Of course, if that fails, then I guess we’re due for some false flag operations (very unfortunately) that will scare the shit out of most Americans and use that fear to get what they want… again.
Well, remember the part just before that: “the Reuters article makes it sound like until the Snowden leak, the NSA, like a lot of technical orgs, grew rapidly and hastily cobbled together” and so on. No, I certainly don’t trust that absolutely, but it does seem more plausible than the idea that the NSA ran up against pressure, Keith Alexander got hot under the collar, and “downsize sysadmins by 90%” just popped out unexpectedly at some press conference. Safely firing 90% could only possibly make any sense at all if they had somehow become grotesquely overstaffed.
It’s a good point that they’re getting one set of hard questions about the NSA’s security from leakers, and also a second set of hard questions about the public’s security from the NSA. However, so far they’re offering only the usual “this is for your own good and you should thank us” to the second, and this 90% cut only seems to have anything to do with the first.
There! You see? We have just become terrorism meta-suspects! Because we just said bad things about the wrong people. Like the guy who got arrested just for smack-talking Obama online. Or the guy who just happened to be acquainted with the bomber bros in Boston. Or Snowden, for revealing national security secrets. Well, meta-secrets, actually. Which probably makes him a meta-terrorist, don’t you think? And we just added to the metadata by uttering a meta-threat, which everyone knows is basically meta-evidence about actual terrorism.
The Takeaway:
Never, NEVER downplay the importance of stuff about other stuff when the safety of the nation is involved! You have no reason to be concerned personally though, because it’s only stuff about your stuff, not your actual stuff. Get it? Got it? Good!
Yep. I started out as a Systems Analyst - ages ago when businesses were first beginning to automate their internal operations. It was a natch - my dad was Chief Technical Editor for a huge IT corp, so I grew up with it in a house filled with greenbar paper where programming languages were for weenies and human language was mostly considered an annoyance, unless you had a good sci-fi book to talk about. At that time, most IT people came out of the military. That’s about all they’d been using computing for - banking, and military applications - the main military application being…ta-dah… surveillance systems. The very idea of using computers this way is far more old hat than black hat.
Heh - did you actually say, ‘algorithm’ out loud in front of them? with a straight face? Cuz that would pretty much do it, right there!
