I mean this completely academically, so please don't take it as an insult (I'm genuinely curious) - but was this perspective something you were raised with or did this develop out of experience / general personal exploration of the world?
As a producer, I can safely say that your entire job is based around one rule: the show must go on. That means you have backups. And your backups have backups. And your backup's backup's have backups.
Is it your fault when bad things happen? If you're good at what you do, probably not - especially when you consider the AMAZING number of things that can go wrong on any given day. However, it IS your fault if the bad things that inevitably happen cause the show to fail because you had no plan B.
Maybe it's a disgruntled employee with a set of passwords he really shouldn't have. Or maybe it's an outbreak of anthrax (yeah, I was on a job where that was suddenly an issue). Perhaps you're shooting on a beach and a dead body randomly washes up, suddenly turning your carefully chosen location into a crime scene crawling with cops and coroners (another true story / very rough day.) God forbid it's something really awful, like a bike messenger carrying an important batch of media getting hit by some asshole who was answering his phone instead of paying attention to the road, landing the kid in hospital, and turning your package into collateral damage (horrific moments like this, by the way, make the job seem suddenly unimportant).
Regardless, the show must go on. And if you have a good producer, it will. But losing TWO YEARS worth of work because one data center (effectively) went offline? That's seriously embarrassing. Also, very bad for credibility. And yes, reason enough to loose your stripes.
That's why every CEO is responsible for everything that goes on in their company, whether or not they knew every little thing that was going on. It's their responsibility to know, and put processes in place to ensure that they know, and if something still slips through the cracks, own up and take action to fix (or take the fall if it's a big enough issue).
What I think people are missing is that this doesn't absolve the perpetrator of moral, legal, and professional responsibility for a clearly malicious act. So two parties are at fault and should experience the pain in different ways. Fact remains, they should both experience pain.
However, that wasn't the assertion that I was intending to respond to :) I've seen this "its not the perpetrator's fault" argument used several times in the last few weeks, the most recent that I remember was the kid who hacked the PHPFog site. The same argument was used there, and indeed was spouted off by the kid himself - it wasn't the hackers fault the site got hacked.
This line of reasoning seems dangerous to me, as it obscures a criminal or unethical activity by the ultimate result of that activity. Wrong action is wrong action, regardless of who didn't cover their bases.
Should the producer take more precautions, and will they ultimately be burned? Most assuredely, but lets not forget the reason they were burned in the first place - somebody maliciously acted against them.
Having intent to destroy something on purpose is a different matter though, and I'm not sure that there is a good argument for it.
There is a sort of half intent by the developer. Yes, the developer had intended to delete the repository that was in his home directory, but he had no idea that it was actually a link to the master repository.
A symlinked directory, though, being made victim of a recursive rm command, just might result in rm traversing through the directory and deleting everything inside of it.