…Doesn’t know the extent of the Snowden damage:
This is criminal. Every single thing he did should have left an audit trail, both as a guard against misuse, and for damage assessment in a case just like this.
I didn’t say “criminal incompetence,” because if the need for an audit trail is obvious to such as me, it surely must have been obvious to higher-ups at NSA. If the systems lack the capacity for this, it’s because somebody doesn’t want the records kept. That suggests abuse at a systemic level. (It also undercuts claims of extensive auditing here.)
Then there’s the incompetence of letting someone like Snowden have such free-ranging access to the system: “The NSA had poor data compartmentalization, said the sources, allowing Snowden, who was a system administrator, to roam freely across wide areas. By using a ‘thin client’ computer he remotely accessed the NSA data from his base in Hawaii.” Snowden and Bradley Manning. That’s who’s in charge of our secrets?
Hey, I’ve got an idea! Let’s put the federal government in charge of our health care!
Obamacare navigators wont even be government employees. I thought Democrats were against outsourcing functions of government to the private sector? Oh Democrat activist groups will be doing the work. Surely they will be ethical in the way they access and distribute medical records. It’s not like Democrat activists have a terrible record of unethical and illegal behavior…
How did the party who freaks out if the government knows what library books you read get so twisted that they want the government to know what you ate for breakfast, how many drinks a week you have, and whether or not you have a third nipple?
We need doctor patient confidentiality as strong as with lawyers. Doctors need to be able to send records to other doctors but they don’t need to send them to the government first.
Wodun, if the rumors I hear from inside the medical community are true, the whole ball of ‘patient records’ is protected in a pretty pathetic fashion.
After jumping through hoops to get every patient to sign their HIPPA forms “Yes, we promise to be -very- careful with your records! Not even your sister can hear the slightest peep from us without written authorization!” …
But anyone actually -in- the medical profession can peek, from anywhere.
That is: “Hey, let’s make a database where everyone can access -everything-, and hand out root passwords to everyone from the candystripers up.”
And, as a patient, I’ve already asked if I could have a list of people that have accessed my records. The answer is “Hell No.”
The entire apparatus of classified material handling is designed for two things: knowing who has had access to each specific piece of classified information, and knowing if a particular item of classified information either has been or could have been seen by an unauthorized party. That’s it. They know they can’t keep people from stealing stuff, so the entire emphasis is put on knowing that something has been stolen. And not just “something,” each specific item of classified information. What this report indicates is that the NSA hasn’t been doing the basic job of handling classified information correctly. Yep, this is scary indeed.
The point was that Snowden, a system administrator, should have had access to none of it. This is actually the failure of mandatory access controls, decades ago.
Opposition to the healthcare plan created by His Excellency the First African-American President Barack H. Obama BA JD (pbuh) be raciss.
There are some misconceptions here.
First…If you have root access, you really have root access. If you have log access you should not have root access; or vise/versa. Most operating systems have a difficult time with this. System admins are a vital part of any large system. They need access to do their job; but that access is a risk.
Second…He did not have free ranging access. The NSA is compartmentalized and his range was stopped at the walls of his compartment. But even with the walls, his access has led to great damage; mostly due to the erroneous public perception created by him of what the NSA is and does.
Third….Audit trails are of primary importance but they don’t rival the importance of integrity and multiple levels of oversight.
Fourth…Successful missions are team efforts; or, at least fragmented efforts joined to each other to form a mission. To effect this requires networking pieces of information into a telling mosaic. Gorelick’s wall limited intelligence access to the detriment of intelligence usefulness. This was one part of why 9/11 happened.
Fifth…It isn’t Obama’s NSA and Obama isn’t responsible for what was happening. The NSA reports to both the President and to Congress and is subject to the same laws any agency is. The NSA lives above politics doing it’s job as best it can serving it’s masters: the elected government of the People.
There are three types of harm done to our country through Snowden. He has alerted our avowed enemies as to our methods; he has made it hard to be America’s ally; but most of all he has wrongly damaged America’s opinion of what the agency does. The public, and the myriad of opinion writers cannot possibly understand the NSA through the occluded lens that Snowden has provided. His desire is not the uncovering of truth but the elevation of his own persona. He releases what he thinks will make a big splash when read by unknowing eyes. The news is full of scary words that have specific meanings that would remove the fright if understood in their contextual meaning. This is the job of the Congressional committees, to either find the offenders or reassure Americans. The Constitution hasn’t been overthrown and the NSA is not above the Constitution (nor do they believe that they are).
The NSA has no business, nor need, nor desire to spy on Americans. If there are some that stepped over the line they should be sought out and punished (as they have been in the past) by the Congressional committees that have responsibility for that oversight.