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I thought this was perceptive: "False Narrative: Government should attempt to emulate the fast-paced innovation of Silicon Valley. [...] The USG is not a techn

I thought this was perceptive: "False Narrative: Government should attempt to emulate the fast-paced innovation of Silicon Valley. [...] The USG is not a technology vendor nor is it a start-up. Under no circumstance should the USG attempt to become a technology vendor. The USG can never develop, support or secure products economically or at scale. Government developed products are not subject to the extensive testing in the commercial market. Instead, the Government should attempt to emulate the best-practices of large private-sector Fortune 50 customers, which have competed, evaluated, procured and secured commercial technology successfully."

sitkack 9y ago
Bullshit. The USG has a the ability to leverage scale like no business ever could. The government consumes of tech are balkanized and sold billion dollar contracts over and over again when they could pay industry wages and still come out ahead.
- malchow 9y ago
  I mean, I think reality intrudes on your fanciful theory. When GSA was hacked and life-threatening personal information on security-cleared government employees was leaked, the public reaction was: eh. Compare this to Equifax, where the intrusion was less successful than at GSA, but which may nevertheless cease to exist, and whose entire leadership will likely be replaced. I think the reality is: people have seen and therefore expect government tech systems to be awful and vulnerable. And people have seen and therefore expect private tech systems to be relatively better.
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    I think this is more an anecdotal case of "I'm not a security-cleared government employee, so why should I care". I see as much or more of the opposite viewpoint from what you are espousing: the GSA is forced to be accountable with giant audits and meetings and red tape until the problems are found and root causes discovered and mitigations (even token mitigations) in place. Meanwhile, Equifax was hardly punished in the stock market, the one place that supposedly gets any sort of accountability out of publicly traded private corporations these days (since they only seem to care about quarterly profits rather than employees or customers or people in general). There was a lot of anecdotal resignation among my friends that no one is or can hold Equifax accountable and we'll never leave the status quo of Equifax making millions of dollars in profits warehousing data that they have no right to own.
0xcde4c3db 9y ago
It reads to me like warmed-over old propaganda about how The Government uniquely sucks at doing anything useful and The Market has already optimized everything into the best of all possible worlds anyway.

sitkack 9y ago

Bullshit. The USG has a the ability to leverage scale like no business ever could. The government consumes of tech are balkanized and sold billion dollar contracts over and over again when they could pay industry wages and still come out ahead.

malchow 9y ago
I mean, I think reality intrudes on your fanciful theory. When GSA was hacked and life-threatening personal information on security-cleared government employees was leaked, the public reaction was: eh. Compare this to Equifax, where the intrusion was less successful than at GSA, but which may nevertheless cease to exist, and whose entire leadership will likely be replaced. I think the reality is: people have seen and therefore expect government tech systems to be awful and vulnerable. And people have seen and therefore expect private tech systems to be relatively better.
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  I think this is more an anecdotal case of "I'm not a security-cleared government employee, so why should I care". I see as much or more of the opposite viewpoint from what you are espousing: the GSA is forced to be accountable with giant audits and meetings and red tape until the problems are found and root causes discovered and mitigations (even token mitigations) in place. Meanwhile, Equifax was hardly punished in the stock market, the one place that supposedly gets any sort of accountability out of publicly traded private corporations these days (since they only seem to care about quarterly profits rather than employees or customers or people in general). There was a lot of anecdotal resignation among my friends that no one is or can hold Equifax accountable and we'll never leave the status quo of Equifax making millions of dollars in profits warehousing data that they have no right to own.

0xcde4c3db 9y ago

It reads to me like warmed-over old propaganda about how The Government uniquely sucks at doing anything useful and The Market has already optimized everything into the best of all possible worlds anyway.