Posted on 08/08/2013 10:41:56 PM PDT by gandalftb
The National Security Agency, hit by disclosures of classified data by former contractor Edward Snowden, said Thursday it intends to eliminate about 90 percent of its system administrators to reduce the number of people with access to secret information.
Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, the U.S. spy agency charged with monitoring foreign electronic communications, told a cybersecurity conference in New York City that automating much of the work would improve security.
"What we're in the process of doing - not fast enough - is reducing our system administrators by about 90 percent," he said.
The remarks came as the agency is facing scrutiny after Snowden, who had been one of about 1,000 system administrators who help run the agency's networks, leaked classified details about surveillance programs to the press.
Before the change, "what we've done is we've put people in the loop of transferring data, securing networks and doing things that machines are probably better at doing," Alexander said.
Using technology to automate much of the work now done by employees and contractors would make the NSA's networks "more defensible and more secure," as well as faster, he said at the conference, in which he did not mention Snowden by name.
These efforts pre-date Snowden's leaks, the agency has said, but have since been accelerated.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
This is Barry’s plan. If anything goes wrong over the next few years, Barry will blame Snowden directly and indirectly the entire group clammoring to rein in his domestic spying apparatus.
Time to eliminate those that make that decisions....
so.....the remaining 10% are willing to pick up all of that overtime?
I don’t think so.
Wouldn’t removing 90% of the SA’s result in the remaining 10 being overworked and more prone to making errors? Either data loss or a large security oversight could result.
This news sounds like managers talking (maybe liberal managers since reality is being denied) and scrambling to save their positions with pie-in-the-sky pipe dreams. This size reduction would seem impossible in practicality.
. Just an RJ45 cross over cable and sshd on the un-secured laptop. He could easily get his secured laptop IP, assign the un-secured laptop in the same subnet; transfer. Easy peasy..
This raises another question: If they can do without 90% of their DBA, how much redundancy do they have?
And if they simply need to replace that many, how will they after having PO’d so many good hackers and IT security people?
ping for later
They’ll be transferred to the IRS. The IRS needs lots of people so they can continue to spy on citizens.
So they are saying “We didn’t need 90% of the sys admin people we pay.” ????
Prolly not a good idea to fire 90% of your admins.
How long before they start yakking? This is gonna be good, pass the popcorn!
Dwight D. Eisenhower exit speech on Jan.17,1961.
Warning us of the military industrial complex.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY
Are we there yet?
Let's just say that it would be an awful lot of fingers in the pie - I am a sysadmin, and if my shop had ten times the staff it does, it wouldn't run better, it would be absolute chaos.
I don't do data mining - that's for the DBAs and their minions. Not that someone with sysadmin access and the necessary chops couldn't do data mining but that's pretty much a full-time job, even at this little place. You could fire a bunch of us sysadmins and the data mining would never skip a beat, at least until the hardware started to break.
So, once again, meaningless words, carefully parsed, from a government that isn't even slightly inclined to reveal the truth. You could just as easily address this issue by firing 90% of the bus drivers.
The most secure of Unix-like systems are a couple of BSD variants. Good systems administrators for those systems need several years of independent practice before being paid for the work. So on average, they tend to be more principled than the in$tant wonder$kind, who receive their training by the university $poonful for operating the more certified, authorized, out-of-the-box kind of $y$tem.
“Who really believes anything these gangsters say anyway?”
Exactly.
And just who is going to pick up all the slack for the 9-out-of-10 employees taken out of the loop?
Snowden can do it, he just needs a VPN passcode.
Talk about shutting the barn door after the cows have escaped.
I don’t suppose they’ve tightened security or decided perhaps a Private Third Class or a six month employee might not deserve full security access.
Bammy finds out gov't operations from the media. He apparently has NO chops hisself.
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