[LINK] No more human sysadmins??

Jim Birch planetjim at gmail.com
Wed Aug 14 10:18:14 AEST 2013


I think this is a social and ethical issue rather than anything much to do
with the sysadmin function.  If an organisation is doing something that its
employees may regard as unethical - like unacknowledged collection of
information on the activities of law-abiding citizens without oversight -
there's a chance that someone will rat on you sooner or later.  The type of
people who might rat/whistleblow are actually pretty much the type of
ethically grounded people who would be given security clearance.  The risk
is that they might have better ethics than the organisation.   Plenty of
non-sysadmins have been whistle blowers; in those cases something else
handy, eg, the office photocopier, becomes a diversionary target in
preference to the unsettling task of scrutinising organisation's
activities.

Being a sysadmin doesn't have lot to do with it, except perhaps that time
spent learning to be a sysadmin isn't time spent in the intelligence
community being indoctrinated with a fortress ethos.

Jim



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