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Comment by joebananas | Hacker News Reader

You don't give some random army grunt access to your on/off switch.

Actually, I happen to work for the Army so I am often near well armed "grunts" with access to that off switch. It's a judgment call, but I assume walking around the Pentagon is probably safer than driving which I am also willing to do. More to the point, I think being respectful to well armed people is prudent, hiding under the bed is pointless. So, while I recognize the risk to life and limb at some point you need to focus on risk mitigation rather than avoidance.

PS: To put this into perspective, one of the guys I work with was there for 9/11. He sustained significant injury while several people in the room with him died. Yet, he is also willing to work in the building and most people in the building where not harmed.

Not interested. My original post was not about your completely-missing-the-point simile, but about the fact the the US government demonstrably sucked at IT security when they let the great unwashed have the kind of access they had to State Department cables.

IMO, the government does a reasonable job balancing how well it protects information and the costs of that protection. The current strategy will lead to leaks, but so did paper documents. Millions of people work for the government and many of them are going to try to cause problems.

So, if you are going to equate a single low impact release with “sucking” the go for it. But, I would point out unlike banks which often lose large numbers of SSN’s the government keeps the hole list for everyone and that has not gotten out. And (as my original post pointed out) sometimes when dealing with hard problems mitigation really is the best you can hope for.

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