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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   34791 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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Secret documents get leaked regularly too. Should somebody be held responsible or the approach is like que sera, sera?

I think first one would need to show that there's a viable alternative. As @Quantumfreakonomics pointed out, someone needs to do janitor duty in the closed area. That person needs to have a security clearance so that they can go in there. That means that no matter how unreasonable it may seem on its face, literal janitors are going to be granted top secret clearances. I don't necessarily disagree that this seems dumb, but I also don't know that I see a better way.

someone needs to do janitor duty in the closed area

True, but the secret documents don't have to be laying around, ready to be photographed, when they do it. There are such things as safes.

literal janitors are going to be granted top secret clearances

Don't see how it follows. Getting physical access to where the safe stands and getting inside the safe is two different things. That's kinda the whole point of the concept of the safe.

I had a very close friend(RIP) who worked in engineering in Lockheed-Martin's test lab, and was briefly looking at signing on for blue collar work(in this case maintenance, not janitorial) in the facility in question. While I'm too involved in political radical groups of multiple descriptions to have thought it worth trying to get through the years long process of getting a security clearance to work in the trades in a military test lab, it seemed like even the lowest blue collar functionaries absolutely needed to be trustworthy and trained on information security to prevent leaks from things like improper trash disposal, and also to catch breaches of protocol by the people who worked with the information in question.

True enough, but you've just moved your point of failure to "is everyone going to always put their documents away". Which, having had enough experience with users, I feel very confident in saying they definitely will not.

Perhaps this is a potential market for Boston Dynamics. An airgapped robot with janitorial tools instead of hands seems fairly hack-proof, or at least less likely to access secret information than a human.

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