NSA Firing 90% of Its Sysadmins 634
sl4shd0rk writes "NSA Director Keith Alexander has decided that the best way to prevent illegal data leaks is to reduce the number of ears and eyes involved. During a talk at a cybersecurity conference in New York this week, Alexander revealed his plans to cut 90% of the System Administration workforce at the NSA. 'What we're in the process of doing — not fast enough — is reducing our system administrators by about 90 percent,' he said. Alluding to an issue of mistrust, Alexander further clarified: 'At the end of the day it's about people and trust ... if they misuse that trust they can cause huge damage.' Apparently, breaking the law and lying about it leaves one without a sense of irony when speaking in public."
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
And even worse, letting it slip in advance? None of them ever read slashdot!
Partitioning and reducing the number of eyes on data is a good idea. Re-checking the people with access to the most sensitive information is a good idea. Blanket orders from higher up administration who do not understand the problem, BAD IDEA. 'Automation' that could allow one person (with access legit or not) to get to even more information than before, recipe for disaster.
Seems like someone from upper management saw a presentation on this subject (from a vendor) and now thinks they know everything.
Re:So firing 90% of their admins (Score:5, Informative)
Even better is what happens a few months down the line, when they realize software can't fix hardware and they just fired the people that knew how the systems actually worked.
"So, yeah, we HAD all this data, but..."
Exactly. They just lost a massive amount of tribal knowledge. Even if they haven't made the cuts yet. Because those admins have no motivation to cooperate.
When my company announced outsourcing 6 months before the date, they told us that we were all to document our jobs thoroughly so that admins with absolutely no experience in some poverty stricken town in Asia could do our jobs by reading our procedures. And that worked just about as well as you are imagining right now. After cutover, things started melting down almost immediately, and the outsourcing company blamed it on the laidoff employees, for not documenting their jobs well enough. Which was partly true, because none of these people had any motivation whatsoever to do so, and were busy looking for a job anyway. The other part, of course, was the business model itself; that you can pull in street vendors, hand them a stack of written procedures and turn them into sysadmins for a dollar a week.
In this particular case, it sounds like they're depending on the soon-to-be-dismissed employees to have a hand in automating their jobs, or at least giving someone an understanding of what their job entails so it can be automated. This has two problems:
1) Assuming employees will cooperate after you've told them you're going to let them go.
2) Assuming that the job is of a nature that lends itself to automation. Anyone who has managed a large, complex installation knows the answer to this. (The answer being, automation can help and should be pursued, but there is no substitute for knowledge, insight, and experience. You rapidly find that a system simple enough to not need admins is a system too simple to do the job.)
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Informative)
A better question is, "You have 900 people doing WHAT?!".
That's actually a good point, but not, perhaps, in the way you meant it. The powers that be almost certainly do not know what those admins are doing or the value thereof, even if they were (or were not) vital to the organization. Their true value (if any) will be discovered after they're dismissed.
"We have to fire the employees to find out what they did."