Oh, god. Yeah. With government contracting, it gets just plain surreal, like everything else about working in Defense. Not disk encryption, but my personal nig

Oh, god. Yeah. With government contracting, it gets just plain surreal, like everything else about working in Defense. Not disk encryption, but my personal nightmare happened a decade ago, when MIS found out I had a data background, and they needed someone to resolve network latency issues, they told me 37k on what was supposedly gigabit ethernet. They pointed me at their security doohickey, the DMS, and a giant pile of pcap files. I had zero idea what I was doing, but I came back with 80% +++ infosec garbage, like, everywhere, even the packets on the factory floor and other dumb metal. I must have checked and rechecked a bazillion times - as mentioned, I really didn't know what any of this stuff was, and relied on text mining and Wikidata. After ganking the entire DMS into my magic widgets, found that there were seventeen network packet analyzer / security products all spooging into the network, all - if I can trust my gensim skills - reporting on each other, because ALL of them were implemented completely separately. Each one was some idiot program manager parroting instructions - forcing network changes - from the customer based on who knows how many deadend procurement officers. And judging from the contract documents, the sniffers were the tip of the iceberg: it was across the board for AV, encryption, email settings, you name it - you probably need to review all of that. It was a mess, but the guy who brought me in - damn, he was a really nice guy, realized that I was a pay grade above janitor at the time, tried to make my life decent - that guy . . he looked actually sick, like, "I-need-a-toilet-right-now" sick. Above him, no one wanted to tell the level above, so we kept getting kicked upstairs until we ended up at E-level and they're calling the Overlords in the corporate office. In the end, nobody wanted to rock the boat, for fear of running afoul of some random procurement officer or other (who could of course become VPs any second, or any quarter they needed a quick sale). And so it remained. As far as I know, their security setup remains unchanged to this day. Ah, that wasn't even the worst of that kind of thing to happen, but that's another story, in an area where I was actually semi-qualified . .