The Trouble with Politicians Sharing Passwords

Re:The Trouble with Politicians Sharing Passwords by saulrh on Monday December 04, 2017 @10:14AM (#15844399)

    This is exactly how MPs offices have always worked, staff
    open and respond to letters with little oversight. Now they
    do the same with email.

This isn't just the email password, nor is it just the password to the "letters from the public" email. The original offense was "downloading porn on a work computer", indicating that this is the core network account, AD or LDAP. And that means that it's granting access to everything, every email and every file. These interns don't need access to every email she sends to another MP. These interns don't need access to the drafts of upcoming legislation. These interns don't need to know what kind of cat pictures she likes. What do you want to bet that the whole "Using personal email for official communications" fiasco over here started when someone said "I need an email that the interns can't read and they won't give me two user accounts"?

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Re:The Trouble with Politicians Sharing Passwords by mschuster91 on Monday December 04, 2017 @11:27AM (#15845045)

> What do you want to bet that the whole "Using personal email for official communications" fiasco over here started when someone said "I need an email that the interns can't read and they won't give me two user accounts"?

Possible, but I also guess the reason was along the likes of "I want to be able to send and receive 100MB powerpoint slide decks, but central IT has a 5MB cap"... this one is something I regularly hit with clients back in ye olde freelance time. Record low was a client with 1MB attachment cap and 100MB of quota.

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Re:The Trouble with Politicians Sharing Passwords by TeMPOraL on Monday December 04, 2017 @02:09PM (#15846519)

IT is directly responsible for a lot of those things. In some places, it seems like IT departments try to make their own lives easier by ensuring the infrastructure is so ridiculously constrained that nobody wants to use it (no users = no things broken by users that need fixing!). Users instead will make due in creative ways, which make organizations vulnerable (and people unhappy).

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Re:The Trouble with Politicians Sharing Passwords by jpindar on Monday December 04, 2017 @02:19PM (#15846588)

Of course they'll say it's for security reasons... and indeed, the most secure network is one that no one uses.

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Re:The Trouble with Politicians Sharing Passwords by MistahKoala on Monday December 04, 2017 @02:59PM (#15846877)

> These interns don't need access to every email she sends to another MP

How do you know this? The Members themselves are best placed to determine the type and scope of this. Not all MPs will share and delegate, and not all interns will have such facilities extended to them.

The prescribed way is to have staff undergo vetting, then be assigned network privileges (with whichever delegated rights are specified). But this is the real world, where we know that trusted individuals in teams share credentials.

None of this precludes MPs (at least, those not on Government payroll) from setting up and using third-party accounts for their sole use - which is exactly what MPs do.

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Re:The Trouble with Politicians Sharing Passwords by dazc on Monday December 04, 2017 @12:33PM (#15845634)

'The original offense was "downloading porn on a work computer".......'

There wasn't an original offence, there has been an allegation which has been strongly denied.

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Re:The Trouble with Politicians Sharing Passwords by saulrh on Monday December 04, 2017 @12:54PM (#15845883)

Fair enough. Allow me to rephrase, then, since the choice of refutation is enough to support my argument and I don't need to bring the validity of the accusation into it:

The refutation alone, that nobody would know who had downloaded porn even if it had happened, implies that this is a shared network account and it was being used to log in to desktop sessions.

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