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How do you avoid thus when it comes to national security? Not every single person in the Army needs to know that Bin Laden is getting rolled on tonight. I thi

How do you avoid thus when it comes to national security? Not every single person in the Army needs to know that Bin Laden is getting rolled on tonight. I think what happened is the citizenry picked security over privacy. And our elected officials who oversee these organizations thought they were making the right tradeoff.

bediger4000 13y ago
"Need to know" is just a doctrine, not a physical or mental necessity. I thought compartmentalization (a.k.a. "need to know") exists pretty much so that it's easier to determine who leaked, not so much to prevent leaks completely. But even if I treat "need to know" as something sacred, sure, not every member of the US Army needed to know that. But compartmentalized programs or agencies are totally different. As soon as the SEALs came back, everyone did know, and that didn't affect the success of the mission. In compartmentalized programs, you're prohibited from knowing, ever. That's a big difference.
ars_technician 13y ago
>How do you avoid thus when it comes to national security? You can't. The notion that you can know everything your organization does is ridiculous and naive. It might work if you restrict yourself to tiny companies, but it doesn't if you ever work for the government or any sizable company.
- bediger4000 13y ago
  Yes, but there's a big difference between "can't legally know, and in fact the knowledge about what knowledge is compartmentalized, too" and "MegaCorp, Inc has 45,000 employees, who work in 19 different divisions". Most ordinary corporations don't have formal compartmentalization. Compartmentalization would be too costly, and prevent any kind of synergy or economy of scale. There's nothing preventing a telco's outside techs from talking to the IT people that build and maintain the DSL testing app, other than inertia.

3 ms·

How do you avoid thus when it comes to national security? Not every single person in the Army needs to know that Bin Laden is getting rolled on tonight. I thi

by kenjackson 13y ago

bediger4000 13y ago
"Need to know" is just a doctrine, not a physical or mental necessity. I thought compartmentalization (a.k.a. "need to know") exists pretty much so that it's easier to determine who leaked, not so much to prevent leaks completely. But even if I treat "need to know" as something sacred, sure, not every member of the US Army needed to know that. But compartmentalized programs or agencies are totally different. As soon as the SEALs came back, everyone did know, and that didn't affect the success of the mission. In compartmentalized programs, you're prohibited from knowing, ever. That's a big difference.
ars_technician 13y ago
>How do you avoid thus when it comes to national security? You can't. The notion that you can know everything your organization does is ridiculous and naive. It might work if you restrict yourself to tiny companies, but it doesn't if you ever work for the government or any sizable company.
- bediger4000 13y ago
  Yes, but there's a big difference between "can't legally know, and in fact the knowledge about what knowledge is compartmentalized, too" and "MegaCorp, Inc has 45,000 employees, who work in 19 different divisions". Most ordinary corporations don't have formal compartmentalization. Compartmentalization would be too costly, and prevent any kind of synergy or economy of scale. There's nothing preventing a telco's outside techs from talking to the IT people that build and maintain the DSL testing app, other than inertia.