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NSA To Lay Off 90 Percent Of Its System Administrators
- john_b 13y agoIn the short term, they'll probably be replaced by a legion of contractors who will be tasked with automating the work formerly performed by the sysadmins. It's not like a NSA contractor has ever leaked sensitive material before though...
- madaxe 13y agoThis could be great news - I'd imagine there are a whole bunch of sysadmins at the NSA right now thinking about what variety of backdoors and "I accidentally the data" bugs they can work in before they're kicked out.
- jstalin 13y agoAnd/or downloading a whole bunch of something to pastebin somewhere...
- cliveowen 13y agoI highly doubt the NSA has such loose policies regarding code reviews so as to make that even possible. Give the guys some credit.
- alexqgb 13y agoThis is a place where all the windows are embedded with a very fine copper mesh to block unwanted RF (coming or going).
- karlkatzke 13y agoHave you ever worked for a government in IT? If it's anything like the government job I used to have, they have all the equipment and policies in place to prevent breaches and data leaks, but it's poorly maintained or implemented... if it's even implemented at all. Yet, for the right people, it passes audit every year. It's all about looking good and following procedure, not being good.
- madaxe 13y agoYou can sneak very nasty yet innocuous things past reviews - you just have to make it out of sane looking parts, and in unrelated commits.
- chris_mahan 13y agoMaybe they can contact the companies they compromised and offer to help remove the backdoors?
- amitparikh 13y agoOriginally reported and published by Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/09/us-usa-security-nsa-leaks-idUSBRE97801020130809 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/09/us-usa-security-ns...
- binarymax 13y agoDear worthless drone. In order to improve our national security, you have the honor being sacrificed for a greater cause. Remember that your experience with us is secret, and due to the necessities of the state we expect you will continue to do your protective duty in silence. As protocol dictates, we gratefully extend your $1432.67 severance for your 12 years, 5 months, and 3 days of effort. Thank you for your service. Goodbye.
- stephengillie 13y agoEnough hyperbole. These people aren't being killed, they're being released back into the labor pool to either find new jobs, or make new jobs. Maybe some of these admins will start their own datacenters or consulting firms instead of working for someone else's.
- stasmo 13y agoNo humour allowed!
- sophacles 13y agoStop looking for nonexistent hyperbole - There is nothing in the post which suggests people are being killed. There is a bit of hyberbole about the "automation of tasks" and the "small severance/bureaucratic manner", both of which are (get this craziness): funny.
- kbenson 13y agoI, for one, would be hesitant to hire a former NSA admin. There's a lot of things to consider: Will they be approached at a later date by past acquaintances to circumvent normal mechanisms and allow access data? Can they be coerced to circumvent normal mechanisms and allow access to data? How much were they aware of about what the NSA was doing, and were they aware it may have/definitely did break the law? Should that even be considered? I'm not saying it would prevent hiring, but it would sure be on my mind.
- hox 13y ago
- mrt0mat0 13y ago"I've been feeling guilty about my job at tricking the people as a systems admin for the NSA, but the money is great, so i keep my mouth shut... wait... i'm fired?... ctrl+a, ctrl+c.. ctrl+v.... send"
- hochiwa 13y ago"ctrl+a, ctrl+c.. ctrl+v.... send myself to prison for 90 years"
- vidarh 13y agoPeople take disproportionate risks out of anger all the time. Furthermore, a lot of people in these types of positions (sysadmin work etc; and I say that as someone who does this type of work myself, though not at a three letter agency) get a feeling that they're good enough to get away with it - whether or not it's actually true. Making an announcement like that just seems exceptionally stupid.
- Cryptex 13y agoIndeed they do. And not all of them have the benefit of being able to justify themselves with "I leaked this for the good of the country". It's not all that rare to see sysadmins that get fired or even just perceive mistreatment by coworkers or employers to jump the shark and mess up the systems they're meant to take care of.
- stephengillie 13y agoI wonder how much of this is related to virtualization -- one of my previous positions was obviated due to this. Instead of having system admins maintain the software state and hardware state on a forest of servers, it's a lot simpler to have VMs that delete and reprovision themselves whenever they have a software issue. When you add in virtual HDDs or UNC paths for data locations, then the system is completely abstracted from the underlying hardware. If one of these physical hypervisor host systems has a hardware problem, the virtual servers on it can usually be live-migrated to other hosts, and the hardware can be repaired/replaced by a low-level hardware-only tech. When the hypervisor OS has an issue, it can be automatically reimaged as well. Changes like this have made Office365 much more efficient than BPOS, and are likely at play in AWS and other datacenters as well as the NSA's.
- josh2600 13y agoVirtualization solves a lot of these problems, but a lot of my milspec friends have been expressing concerns about APTs that jailbreak the virtual environment to attack the underlying physical host. It will be interesting to see how the human element of networks evolves over time.
- stephengillie 13y ago(APT = advanced persistent threat?) I'm thinking back to the HDD firmware hack[1] that was on HN earlier this week -- if a HDD was exposed directly to a VM, that would definitely be a plausible attack vector. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6148347 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6148347
- josh2600 13y agoYes, you're correct on the definition. I don't wanna go look it up but there's a good one about an embedded attack hidden in an internal PCI board's on board memory. If someone with $100M wants to get you, they're probably gonna find a way.
- halviti 13y ago
- swang 13y agoThis should be read as: "Government agency has been wasting taxpayer money by employing 900 people that they didn't need but didn't bother care to fix because the extra people justified their ballooning budget that they could use to spy more on said taxpayers."
- dspeyer 13y agoLet's wait to see if the whole system crashes now before we conclude that. Not that we'll ever know.
- pekk 13y agoTalk about sensationalized headlines...
- jbooth 13y agoThat only applies if you're spying on the taxpayers, though, or possibly threatening to kick their doors in looking for drugs. If you're teaching taxpayers or helping them in any other way then most of your department got the axe a decade ago.
- Spooky23 13y agoNot really. More like: "Government agency hires army of contractors to automate jobs of 900 people" They're building a layer of abstraction to separate the running of the systems from the data.
- cliveowen 13y agoIt's never good when so many people lose their jobs but I can't stop thinking that if so many people can be replaced by automation, something must have gone awfully, awfully wrong in the process of wisely spending taxpayers money. Why were they using people in the first place to perform tasks best left to machines?
- greghinch 13y agoBecause at one point they were necessary. Welcome to government provisioning. Optimization comes only when someone's political career is on the line.
- jabits 13y agoBig business works similarly.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ethomson 13y agoI don't think these changes are about expense, but about security. I suspect there will be little cost savings, at least not immediately. Instead, you're just shifting the workload from (manual) system administration to automating the system administration. To use an example - now a human swaps out a backup tape and has physical access to it. By replacing this with a tape robot, you've taken the insecure part - that person - out of the loop.
- jjindev 13y agoIf you had unlimited budget, and disgruntled ex-employees were a greater risk than current employees, what is your short term strategy?
- cliveowen 13y agoI don't see how disgruntled ex-employees would be a risk if the correct policies are put into place like, you know, the whole confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements.
- cavilling_elite 13y agoFor all of those who are commenting about sysadmins grabbing as much data as they go out, I highly suspect that all of the newly unemployed sysadmins were or have been escorted by armed guards.
- 7952 13y agoIf these sysadmins are a security risk, giving them notice of redundancy can hardly improve security (in the short term). Especially for an organisation with such recent history of trouble with disgruntled ex-employees.
- walshemj 13y agonah the work is getting outsourced to booze allen and of course outsourcing national security work always works
- JulianMorrison 13y agoTomorrow's news today: "Chinese NSA break-in was caused by unpatched code, overwork and corner-cutting after staffing was reduced in the name of limiting access to secure data, sources say."
- diakritikal 13y agoI wonder how many are agents to help further NSA penetration of civilian systems and networks. That's a lot of talent going on the labour market but I don't think I'd be prepared to knowingly hire anyone with this kind of experience and connections.
- louwrentius 13y agoThese people could be seen as Trojan horses secretly collecting some extra dough while working at some big cloud service.
- kinnth 13y agoHonestly what is going on in America any more you guys are all crazy?
- wavefunction 13y agoA good portion of the populace is indeed crazy. And unfortunately they are the ones that get all the press. However, there are a lot of people that are normal and decent but they don't get much play in the media.
- Ziomislaw 13y agoSo it is the same as everywhere ;)
- pekk 13y agoSysadmins never get laid off in Europe?
- jivatmanx 13y agoThe primary qualification is now ideological purity.
- grossvogel 13y agoHuh... I figured they'd need twice as many sysadmins with the new "two-man rule." http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57594486/officials-say-new-anti-leak-measures-set-at-nsa/ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57594486/officials-say-n...
- nfoz 13y agoSo close! Try for 100% next time!
- muyuu 13y agoWell, we know that a lot of the work has been automated, as they have on-demand access to the likes of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. Once this setup work has been done, they can make do with fewer admins.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- calpaterson 13y ago"To be replaced with simple bash script"
- eliasmacpherson 13y agoWhose bright idea was this? Piss off 90% of your sys admins? This is a hilariously bad move.
- zhemao 13y agoWell, it's probably the 10% they didn't fire that they have to worry about now.
- eliasmacpherson 13y agoNo I doubt that, these are sys admins? Unless they wipe everything and start over?
- kbenson 13y agoThis is where all those psychological profiles they did at the interview stage pay off. At least, that's what they are banking on.
- samstave 13y agoRecall that the CIA really likes to hire Mormons for their loyalty [1]. I'd be REALLY interested in knowing what % of the remaining sys ads are Mormon. [1]: http://www.businessinsider.com/11-surprising-things-you-didnt-know-about-mormons-2011-6?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/11-surprising-things-you-didn...
- eliasmacpherson 13y agoIf that is so and the last 10% are as you suggest, surely that's discrimination for nonconfmormance?
- zhemao 13y agoI mean worry about more than the 90% who have been fired and (presumably) don't have access to NSA computers anymore. Also, I don't think leaking NSA secrets is the main problem. I think their main problem will be finding and retaining talent. Why would you go work a government job like this if you don't even have job security. It's not like there's a shortage of demand for sysadmins in the private sector.
- kbenson 13y agoI have to wonder what they had the sysadmins doing. One of the primary functions of the job is usually automating common tasks. Had they already done this and they just never downsized the department? If not, I doubt they can cut 90% quickly, that's a lot of automation that needs to be put in place. Guess whose job that is?
- kapitalx 13y agoThe title of the article seems to imply immediacy. the article itself though says that they plan on automating 90% of the employees out of a job. So I suspect a lot of people will work really hard in hopes that they remain part of the 10% and the smart ones are working on their resumes. Though the whole layoff itself is probably at least a year away.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]