Bullshit. They're adults who chose to do what they did and work where they work.
They did, but that presumes they knew all that was going on. I suspect that very few people did. Ask people at Microsoft and Google if they were servicing these FISA requests from the govt and I bet very few had any knowledge about it until the stories broke. Or ask someone in the Air Force if they know about random secret op anywhere in the world and they probably don't know.
Now you might say, "they should have known". I don't know if they should have. Someone later in the thread mentioned a female that thought the systems would be better locked down -- and I suspect they are for most employees. But there probably are some people for whom needed the system for their day job, but it wasn't properly locked down so they couldn't check on their 'ex'.
At the end of the day how much more to blame is a Chinese language translator at the NSA than someone who does crypto at DIA, or a FISA judge, or a US citizen who continues to pay taxes, rather than change residence...
They did, but that presumes they knew all that was going on. I suspect that very few people did.
I agree, but doesnt't that just imply that the "compartmentalization" system can be used for more than limiting damage due to disclosure? A compartmentalized organization can be led down the proverbial primrose path, responsibility is so diffuse that accountability and even ethical behavior is impossible.
I think it also implies an ethical duty not to work in a compartmentalized organization. You can't know if you're doing ethical work if you can't know all that's going on, even theortically.
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.
"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.
>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.
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.
They did, but that presumes they knew all that was going on. I suspect that very few people did. Ask people at Microsoft and Google if they were servicing these FISA requests from the govt and I bet very few had any knowledge about it until the stories broke. Or ask someone in the Air Force if they know about random secret op anywhere in the world and they probably don't know.
Now you might say, "they should have known". I don't know if they should have. Someone later in the thread mentioned a female that thought the systems would be better locked down -- and I suspect they are for most employees. But there probably are some people for whom needed the system for their day job, but it wasn't properly locked down so they couldn't check on their 'ex'.
At the end of the day how much more to blame is a Chinese language translator at the NSA than someone who does crypto at DIA, or a FISA judge, or a US citizen who continues to pay taxes, rather than change residence...