The missing piece of the puzzle is that we never meet the idiot manager in the story. She's in an organizational situation where her team has oversight over a team in the government implementing on a project but does not have the ability to directly set policy, constrain goals, or otherwise apply direct managerial leverage. The idiot in the story is the guy charging full speed ahead with a deployment of a product that is already known compromised. Matt Cutts, meanwhile, is the head of her department, and also has no managerial oversight over the team she just called federal law enforcement on.
Because she is incentivized to make the product as good as possible, not hit deadlines and satisfy arbitrary legislative targets divorced from software engineering reality, it never occurred to her how much s* she was going to cause for the people in the direct chain of management by getting the FBI involved. It's probably the right thing to do... Ultimately, the software was compromised by domestic terrorists and the threat was real. But she's basically just wrecked any goodwill she had working with this department for the foreseeable future (especially if it turns out that somebody in the management chain that she has oversight over has actually managed to break the law due to negligence ;) ).
...the team she just called federal law enforcement on.
That's interesting, I didn't see it as reporting the other team to law enforcement. The law breaking was anticipated to be done by people outside government. The whole raise your right hand thing seemed weird (perhaps a formality) unless you think she was implicating specific people. In that case it makes more sense.
It's not precisely that she called law enforcement on them, poor choice of words on my part. It's more that, if you will, she turned the "eye of Sauron" on the project. If the team she had oversight on thought they were going to meet deadlines with open security holes, having the FBI actively looking at what they're doing pretty much torpedoes that hope.
It seems like the team wanted it torpedoed as well. Every higher up was aware but tied in bureaucracy. The team basically washed their hands and tried to deliver in order to pass the buck. Messing with things codified in federal law seems like a very poor career choice.
Your obsession with the token Racists in this essay is very funny. AND Sexism? There's an interesting conversation about "Humanity" happening, isn't there?
We have literal 17 year olds hacking the twitter account of Obama and a ton of other high profile people.
How can you possibly believe that a bunch of white supremacists are not a threat? You need only one marginally competent one to wreck your entire platform.
>You need only one marginally competent one to wreck your entire platform.
Yes exactly. Ultimately security is deeply involved with threat modeling. It is likely that the author's boss did not prioritize her pet security issues because they were a low risk in the threat model.
>How can you possibly believe that a bunch of white supremacists are not a threat?
Domain expertise. Frankly I am somewhat surprised that people with what is apparent to be a television soap opera level of understanding of american dissident activity make public posts on the topic with the confidence they do on here. Not you, of course, but others.
Unfortunately, the most believable interpretation of this story is very boring office politics: Our author, having failed to make a case to her boss, drummed up some internet post in an attempt to get her way. We've all known people like this... they have varying amounts of self-awareness. It is characteristic of such actors to manufacture exactly the sort of attack they imagine to be the most relevant. This is likely to be such a case. What gives her away is that this is some fantastical story that makes sense only in pop culture: if there is even one WS cyber attack on an american federal platform for every 10,000 chinese attacks I will eat my hat and livestream it. These are simply not people with competence in the field of cyber security.
I would also say that assuming that white suprematists are inherently stupid is wrong.
It takes a certain amount of rough intelligence to go against the modern norms (I.e. to justify your beliefs to others, to read just the right books) to keep these beliefs.
Thinking they are “just” idiots is an entirely wrong take if you are trying to play against them.
It’s like saying that Putin is an idiot because he’s against gay rights in Russia. But if he was really stupid he would probably be dead by now.
Because she is incentivized to make the product as good as possible, not hit deadlines and satisfy arbitrary legislative targets divorced from software engineering reality, it never occurred to her how much s* she was going to cause for the people in the direct chain of management by getting the FBI involved. It's probably the right thing to do... Ultimately, the software was compromised by domestic terrorists and the threat was real. But she's basically just wrecked any goodwill she had working with this department for the foreseeable future (especially if it turns out that somebody in the management chain that she has oversight over has actually managed to break the law due to negligence ;) ).