From my reading of his post, the one big failure of the system is that he had an access he didn't think he had. This is sort of like me typing find . | xargs -n

From my reading of his post, the one big failure of the system is that he had an access he didn't think he had. This is sort of like me typing find . | xargs -n0 rm -rf in the root directory and thinking "it's OK because it will only delete files I have permission to delete" but not realizing that I'm root. I could certainly see the argument that the system should have made him more aware of the permissions he had. But it seems like instead he's arguing that he shouldn't have been given those permissions to begin with, which goes back to my point. Because one person was given many permissions and used them irresponsibly, now everyone's default permissions are more restrictive.