They Are Winging It
Marcy Wheeler has been busy going through a new pile of documents that are the result of a Freedom of Information request on NSA and the FISA court and is generating multiple posts about the oversight of the system.
The bottom line is that there is no effective oversight, nor is such oversight actually possible, because Alexander the Geek and his merry band of hackers and crackers don’t actually know how their own system works.
There are a 1000 system administrators, but no overall system administrator who rules them all. There doesn’t seem to be a master system design showing how the parts are supposed to function and who is responsible for what, and who has access to what. Despite being ordered to isolate and protect certain types of information, there is no effective method of doing that in the current overall system, which will come as a shock to anyone who has ever set up a network, because that capability is readily accomplished in almost all network software I’ve ever used going back decades.
This reflects such complete incompetence and total lack of planning and design, that it makes me suspicious that it may have been done on purpose to cover what they were really up to.
4 comments
This reflects such complete incompetence and total lack of planning and design, that it makes me suspicious that it may have been done on purpose to cover what they were really up to.
that’s pretty much what i was thinking as i was reading your description.
Yep! Add me to the list of believers! 😀
However, whilst I do suspect as y’all do that twas done a-purposely, I also suspect that it was also just plain stupidity & incompetence (which was probably the prime rationale for hiring ‘Alexander the Geek’!) 😉 😀
I can assure you that what they’ve done here is quite doable by typical government contractors without the need for any conspiracy theory to explain the abject incompetence. And I can say that as someone who once worked for a government contractor and knows just how competent I was back then at the beginning of my career — and I was one of the more competent ones, my coworkers were horrifyingly incompetent. Just another day in Federal contracting :twisted:.
Badtux is right that outsourced government IT projects have an almost perfect record of failure with the project(s) at the FBI having achieved legendary status. When you factor in the clearance requirements you really have a limited pool of people to select from.
Still, setting up ‘permissions’ is really basic stuff, you even have to do it on a Windows home network.