Ohio Official Docked Vacation Time For Stolen Tape 218
Lucas123 writes "The missing tape, stolen from an intern's car, contained data on all 64,467 state employees, 19,388 former employees and 47,245 Ohio taxpayers. The state believes the incident will cost them $3 million. So after four months of deliberation, the Ohio Department of Administrative Services
announced today that they decided to take a week's vacation away from Jerry Miller, their payroll team leader and the guy in charge of the missing data."
The guy's damn lucky. (Score:5, Insightful)
Is that all they are going to do? (Score:5, Insightful)
If I screw up that bad at my work, I'd be facing a discharge...
I bet those judging him (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong punishment (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's torture him next! (Score:3, Insightful)
From personal experience, trying to do more work and cut off your vacation is the most sure-fire way to bring your work quality and productivity down.
Are they trying to set him up to lose another tape?
Gee. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wrong punishment (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a joke, and a big problem in our society. Incompetence is rarely punished, something that you see all the time in the political world.
Some quick considerations... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, it's evident it wasn't 100% on him. The data was stolen from an intern's car. He bears the indirect culpability of not encrypting it, not backing it, trusting the intern, whatever. It's natural to feel that "heads should roll" but why should the onus of all this fall necessarily on him? (Well, maybe it all should--I'm just going off the blurb in the summary.)
On the other side of it, a week's vacation time is ridiculous, whether or not he's at fault. If he is, well, there should be a real punishment. If he's not, it's fairly idiotic to slap him around just for the show of doing so.
And how much did the four-month long investigation cost? If it was more than a week of this guy's vacation time... yeah, well, that was another win for the taxpayers, wasn't it?
The way it should have worked is that there should have been a clearly defined set of rules, a clearly defined set of responsibilities, and a clearly defined set of repercussions. When employee X neglected responsibility Y, he should have already been aware that Z would be the punishment, and Z should have been what happened immediately afterward. You might need a four month investigation to find the harddrive thief, but you shouldn't need more than a week to handle violations of internal policies.
Smells bad (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand, maybe the organization subscribes to the principle of giving people a second chance.
Re:Is that all they are going to do? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like the guy's a long timer who was doing his job and now has to carry the can to protect his pension.
From the article: "The tape was pilfered in June from the car of an intern responsible for carrying data used by the Ohio state government's computer systems...described Miller as a "stellar longtime DAS employee" and said he has been forthright in acknowledging his role in the "management glitch" pertaining to the stolen backup tape."
This wasn't some guy who took a company laptop home to play games, it was his responsibility and no extra security was provided for him to do his job. Would you like everyone else robbed at work to forfeit leave or be sacked? The "management glitch" is probably that his bosses wouldn't stump up for secure transport of the tapes.
Re:Gee. (Score:3, Insightful)
If you've any experience with bureaucracy, when they say stuff like "4 months" they really mean "we took 4 months to schedule the 1~3 meetings required to reach a decision."
I'd look at the "petty punishment" as something they felt compelled to do, because to do otherwise would be to admit outright that the security around their data handling is seriously broken. Punishing the employee allows them to save face by spreading the blame around.
Re:Is that all they are going to do? (Score:3, Insightful)
But hey, that guy just lost data, not something important. Considering the way our other officials hand out our data like candy, that blunder is just a nuisance because, well, the general population got to know about it. So they had to do something about it.
Think Sony and rootkit.
Mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
What's all this crap about his punishment should match the cost of the mistake rubbish?
If a doctor makes a mistake and a patient dies, do we kill the doctor?
Re:A week? (Score:2, Insightful)
Remember that the next time some Western European slags off the Yanks within earshot. They paid for the reconstruction of most of the Western European economies after WWII, and footed the bill for keeping the Soviets out during the Cold War.
This same thing happened in Japan, don't forget.
So, when they do get their f*&#ing measly 10 days of annual vacation, they certainly don't want to spend at least two of them traveling to/from a foreign country, only to be insulted for their selflessness. I agree it's sad that Americans simply don't travel as much as many other nations do, and yes, this certainly is a significant cause of American ignorance of the rest of the world. Unfortunately, it is simply not the fault of the 'average' American that this is the case.
I received the "We lost your data" letter ... (Score:2, Insightful)
1) Their IT staff is incompetent. In my department, we ship over 50TB a week to our DR facility in England. We have had instances where tapes were lost in transit (thanks FedEx!) but the data was encrypted. No harm, no foul. That being said, their idea of sending tapes offsite was to put it in the back of an intern's car. GENIUS!
2) This petty hand-slaping is absurd. Yes, I want the idiot fired and replaced by someone who gives a damn about data management, security, and data classification.
3) 2 months to contact people who were on the tapes?! FFS!
4) Their incident handling in the media was that the criminals would need "specialized knowledge and tools" to extract the information. It says what kind of tape it is right on the case! That, and a little Google go a long way. Stop feeding the public a line of BS and own up to the fact that it's really not that hard to get the data off the tape.
There are others, but those are the ones that are pissing me off at the moment.
Re:Wrong punishment (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Isn't.. (Score:1, Insightful)
In a case like this, if he followed correct handling procedure - the employer is liable. It's likely though that under "transportation of data" there isn't a paragraph covering "leaving your data in an intern's car", meaning he made a judgement call of his own - a bad one - meaning the employer has nothing to do with it. We have to make decisions like this every day in jobs and in the corporate world there can be large consequences for such decisions. The key to success in such areas is, don't be an idiot. Yes - there is a reason why corporations require candidates to have degrees for even the most menial positions.
Of course, this'll be -trolled.. Nobody likes having to face up to that regular people, not only companies/politicians/lawyers, make mistakes..
Re:Wrong punishment (Score:5, Insightful)
I could REALLY see how if I, say, stopped at a gas station on the way between the two to get gas and a galon of milk as I do sometimes on my way home. I leave the truck locked even when walking into the quick-e-mart for a minute to get the milk and pay for the gas, but even with that it's possible someone could break into my truck and steal anything that was convenient for a "smash and grab". There's nothing else in my truck that's not nailed down that would make an attractive item to quick grab, so those tapes would probably get snatched for lack of anything else to show for the theft.
I would not want major sanctions for being a victim of that theft, and arguably there's not much more you could have expected of me.
Do not hold the peon responsible for the company's unwillingness to provide appropriate security and to place a potentially very big onus on one lone employee, in the interest of saving a few bucks. VERY few businesses are willing to provide adequate protection under such circumstances. Mostly only those that are required to do so by law or agreement. (banks, companies handling credit card numbers, etc)
Now in such a situation, had I not even bothred to lock the truck, that doesn't make the theft any more legal, and unless there were some company policies in place saying "employees transporting backup tapes must leave their vehicle secured whenever unattended" (which until this happens once, you can bet the policy does not exist) then even in that case the employee should bear no additional responsibility,
I'm Impressed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I bet those judging him (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The guy's damn lucky. (Score:5, Insightful)
Allow personal information on tens of thousands of people to get out due to massive incompetence, costing the state millions and potentially ruining the credit of everyone whose info was on the tape, lose a weeks' vacation.
Share music online at no cost of any sort to the copyright holders, and then get railroaded through an ignorant and corrupt legal system, and get fined several times your yearly salary.
Is Canada hiring?
Re:But (Score:4, Insightful)
peons does nothing good for the company. The problem still
exists. And the health of the company took a dip, potentially,
as the workers fired might have been competent, the incompetent
is still there, and the remaining workers will see this, and
they usually are not fooled, and will be demoralized, lowering
their productivity temporarily, and the best of the people there
will be more likely to move to another company.
Has nothing to do with hating managers "on principal". Has nothing
to do with fair.
Republican Cuture of Corruption (Score:1, Insightful)
Look at the "coin scammer" dude. He will get a slap on the wrist too, even though he was blatantly embezzling from the state worker's pension fund.
Then we can also jump to the Federal level, where the DOJ is permanently sitting on hundreds of cases involving war profiteering in Iraq. This is the face of conservative government. The only answer is to vote them all out, and make sure none of the bastards ever get elected again... if they ever get out of prison.
You are an outlier (Score:3, Insightful)
The real issue is that the perception the public has isn't drawn from the class of "all government workers.". The public's perception is based on things like the California DMV offices, where dozens of citizens stand in long lines while about 50% of the "workers" behind the counters engage in banter, sit idly staring off into space, and generally appear to be doing nothing much; or the city clerk's office, where the belligerent receptionist can barely contain her indignation that you've interrupted her game of Solitaire to tell her you've arrived for an appointment; or county road workers, who are frequently seen in groups of seven or eight, where one guy is digging and the rest are all leaning on shovels/brooms, and chatting on cell phones; or the folks who are so hidebound that they can't imagine a solution to a problem that hasn't been carefully documented in the official handbook; and on, and on, and on.
Until all the citizen-visible positions in government are filled by hardworking, customer-service oriented folks who take their breaks out of site of the waiting area (an outcome so unlikely as to be impossible) the perception isn't going to change.
Re:Is that all they are going to do? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, that's probably the usual case.
But you're thinking in terms of an employee. Imagine you're a manager (I mean Jerry Miller's boss, not Jerry Miller the manager of the intern). One of your people just did something horribly destructive. Something has to be done, but think: what is there to gain by firing him? Miller has already soiled his pants and he's probably not going to make the same mistake again.
The question you face is, was this just a one-time fuck up, or is the guy systematically incompetent so he really just can't be trusted to do things right? In the second case, yeah, fire him. Fire anyone else too, whether they've fucked up yet or not, if you think they're going to do dumb/destructive things. But what about the first case?
How did this fuck up really happen?
I wouldn't just assume that firing the guy, is the smartest thing to do.
Re:A week? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A week? (Score:3, Insightful)
And where did Spring Break and wet t-shirt contests come in? I never said Canada was a bastion of ancient architecture and culture, I said I like to go to places where I can discover new cultures... I'm already here, I know Canada's culture. But I want to experience the culture of Japan, Thailand, Germany, Italy, France, England, Sweden, Egypt, etc. So some people (read you) don't want to, I'm merely stating that there's other reasons people take vacations than siteseeing, at least for some people. Don't get in my face because I disagree with you. Ignoring other cultures doesn't make you better, it doesn't make you worse. It makes you different, and that's all i'm saying. you're different than me. Not better, Not worse. Different. this isn't a flame, this is merely statements. nothing even remotely inflamitory i don't think, I tried really hard. especially since my talking about what I like to do for vacations is considered ridiculing others, quote me if you want, but I didn't say anything to ridicule you or anyone else on their choice of vacation. just letting you know that there are more than one reason for trips.