Dear worthless drone. In order to improve our national security, you have the honor being sacrificed for a greater cause. Remember that your experience with us is secret, and due to the necessities of the state we expect you will continue to do your protective duty in silence. As protocol dictates, we gratefully extend your $1432.67 severance for your 12 years, 5 months, and 3 days of effort. Thank you for your service. Goodbye.
This should be read as: "Government agency has been wasting taxpayer money by employing 900 people that they didn't need but didn't bother care to fix because the extra people justified their ballooning budget that they could use to spy more on said taxpayers."
Tomorrow's news today: "Chinese NSA break-in was caused by unpatched code, overwork and corner-cutting after staffing was reduced in the name of limiting access to secure data, sources say."
I wonder how much of this is related to virtualization -- one of my previous positions was obviated due to this.<p>Instead of having system admins maintain the software state and hardware state on a forest of servers, it's a lot simpler to have VMs that delete and reprovision themselves whenever they have a software issue.<p>When you add in virtual HDDs or UNC paths for data locations, then the system is completely abstracted from the underlying hardware. If one of these physical hypervisor host systems has a hardware problem, the virtual servers on it can usually be live-migrated to other hosts, and the hardware can be repaired/replaced by a low-level hardware-only tech. When the hypervisor OS has an issue, it can be automatically reimaged as well.<p>Changes like this have made Office365 much more efficient than BPOS, and are likely at play in AWS and other datacenters as well as the NSA's.
"I've been feeling guilty about my job at tricking the people as a systems admin for the NSA, but the money is great, so i keep my mouth shut... wait... i'm fired?... ctrl+a, ctrl+c.. ctrl+v.... send"
Originally reported and published by Reuters:
<a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/09/us-usa-security-nsa-leaks-idUSBRE97801020130809" rel="nofollow">http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/09/us-usa-security-ns...</a>
I have to wonder what they had the sysadmins doing. One of the primary functions of the job is usually automating common tasks. Had they already done this and they just never downsized the department? If not, I doubt they can cut 90% quickly, that's a lot of automation that needs to be put in place. Guess whose job that is?
It's never good when so many people lose their jobs but I can't stop thinking that if so many people can be replaced by automation, something must have gone awfully, awfully wrong in the process of wisely spending taxpayers money. Why were they using people in the first place to perform tasks best left to machines?
The title of the article seems to imply immediacy. the article itself though says that they plan on automating 90% of the employees out of a job. So I suspect a lot of people will work really hard in hopes that they remain part of the 10% and the smart ones are working on their resumes. Though the whole layoff itself is probably at least a year away.
Huh... I figured they'd need twice as many sysadmins with the new "two-man rule."<p><a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57594486/officials-say-new-anti-leak-measures-set-at-nsa/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57594486/officials-say-n...</a>
If these sysadmins are a security risk, giving them notice of redundancy can hardly improve security (in the short term). Especially for an organisation with such recent history of trouble with disgruntled ex-employees.
I wonder how many are agents to help further NSA penetration of civilian systems and networks. That's a lot of talent going on the labour market but I don't think I'd be prepared to knowingly hire anyone with this kind of experience and connections.
In the short term, they'll probably be replaced by a legion of contractors who will be tasked with automating the work formerly performed by the sysadmins. It's not like a NSA contractor has ever leaked sensitive material before though...
Well, we know that a lot of the work has been automated, as they have on-demand access to the likes of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.<p>Once this setup work has been done, they can make do with fewer admins.
For all of those who are commenting about sysadmins grabbing as much data as they go out, I highly suspect that all of the newly unemployed sysadmins were or have been escorted by armed guards.
This could be great news - I'd imagine there are a whole bunch of sysadmins at the NSA right now thinking about what variety of backdoors and "I accidentally the data" bugs they can work in before they're kicked out.