Why the NSA Can't Replace 90% of Its System Administrators 251
An anonymous reader writes "Curious about the recently purposed NSA cuts, Courtney Nash explores a few myths about systems automation 'In the aftermath of Edward Snowden's revelations about NSA's domestic surveillance activities, the NSA has recently announced that they plan to get rid of 90% of their system administrators via software automation in order to "improve security." So far, I've mostly seen this piece of news reported and commented on straightforwardly. But it simply doesn't add up. Either the NSA has a monumental (yet not necessarily surprising) level of bureaucratic bloat that they could feasibly cut that amount of staff regardless of automation, or they are simply going to be less effective once they've reduced their staff.'"
Outsource to China (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe instead of cutting staff numbers they can just outsource the administrators to China?
Better becareful posting that stuff (Score:5, Funny)
Don't you dare try to get rid 90% of system admins.
Better back off, or I will replace your management team with a 5 line shell script, and sell it to Obama as a way of demonstrating that he is serious about more efficient government.
Re:Laying off Americans, hiring Bangladeshi ? (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps NSA is not kidding
Perhaps they will just go ahead and lay off 90% of their admins, who are American citizens
And then, they will hire admins from Bangladesh as replacement
NSA doesn't need to be troubled by admins who are American citizens who understand the concept of Liberty, Human Rights, and Democracy - they can hire replacement admins from 4th world countries where nobody cares about any of those "Western Luxuries"
Actually this is a good point. If the sysadmins are not American citizens and are not based in America then the NSA can legally spy on them with no problems.
So yeah NSA outsourcing system administration to India might be a winner!
Re:Laying off Americans, hiring Bangladeshi ? (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps NSA is not kidding
Perhaps they will just go ahead and lay off 90% of their admins, who are American citizens
And then, they will hire admins from Bangladesh as replacement
NSA doesn't need to be troubled by admins who are American citizens who understand the concept of Liberty, Human Rights, and Democracy - they can hire replacement admins from 4th world countries where nobody cares about any of those "Western Luxuries"
Actually this is a good point. If the sysadmins are not American citizens and are not based in America then the NSA can legally spy on them with no problems.
So yeah NSA outsourcing system administration to India might be a winner!
Pakistan would be even better, then if any of them cause problems they can just send in a drone
Re:replace Windoze with Linux (Score:0, Funny)
Welcome to the OpenSource world, where no one seems to know how to code high performance async+multi-threaded code, but are great at forking processes and using IPC. Must context switch more!