Pensieri di un lunatico minore

A bleak future

In a discussion with Bruce Schneier, Marcus Ranum lays out something I think most security people have been worried about for years:

Another trend I see getting worse is government IT know-how. At the rate outsourcing has been brain-draining the federal workforce, by 2017 there won’t be a single government employee who knows how to do anything with a computer except run PowerPoint and Web surf. Joking aside, the result is that the government’s critical infrastructure will be almost entirely managed from the outside. The strategic implications of such a shift have scared me for a long time; it amounts to a loss of control over data, resources and communications.

I’ve watched it for the past 15 years, and not just around security. Any more, there’s simply few technically competent people left in the federal government. They are 99.998523% dependent on “contractors”, who are little more than mercenaries and loyal only to their paycheck. This is terrifying to me, as a tax payer, and as a practitioner in the field. While it does help keep me employed, it doesn’t help me sleep at night.

Who watches the watcher, when they are all blind?