NSA can't trust 'brilliant' people, will automate sysadmins

Re:NSA can't trust 'brilliant' people, will automate sysadmins by banachtarski on Monday September 02, 2013 @02:10AM (#6313674)

This is hilarious? What's harder, doing things manually, or automating things in a way that the automation itself doesn't break, is self-healing, etc?

The kind of people that need to automate these sort of systems need to be even stronger systems programmers and administrators than the incumbent batch. Automation can be backdoored as well.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:NSA can't trust 'brilliant' people, will automate sysadmins by bigiain on Monday September 02, 2013 @03:25AM (#6313881)

And this explains what's _really_ going to happen. The 90% of their sys-admins who've already morphed into dev-ops staff, are going to get officially re-classified as "not sys-admins" – and will continue to have unfettered access to the VMs, hypervisors, storage pools, hadoop clusters, and password databases that the analysts and management at the NSA use. (Only they'll invent some new rules, so it'll probably become a _double_ capital offense to embarrass the US government, the next Snowden-scale whistleblower will face getting assassinated _twice_…)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:NSA can't trust 'brilliant' people, will automate sysadmins by visakanv on Monday September 02, 2013 @02:35AM (#6313739)

"We'll just build God" "But who's going to build the God-Builder?"

IT'S TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:NSA can't trust 'brilliant' people, will automate sysadmins by rhizome on Monday September 02, 2013 @02:50AM (#6313774)

I'm sure those stronger systems people won't mind also being on call when the automation breaks down at 3am on Labor Day morning.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:NSA can't trust 'brilliant' people, will automate sysadmins by nraynaud on Monday September 02, 2013 @02:22AM (#6313705)

I'm just imagining the NSA sending an NSL to Amazon to get engineers to do their magic...

[ Parent | on HN ]