Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

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It's a trite trueism that all systems are vulnerable to fraud and abuse and it's no suprise the GAO was able to demonstrate the potential for abuse fourteen years ago.

What would be more interesting would be a historic examination on the amount of fraud and abuse that actually takes place in the Energy Star program and whether the various decade plus old recommendations:

  We briefed program officials with the Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and EPA OIG as well as attorneys with the Consumer Protection division of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on the results of our work, and incorporated their comments concerning controls in place to protect the Energy Star label from fraud and abuse.

proved useful in finding such fraud or in decreasing any occurance.

Every couple days I get a pretty blatant spam email in my inbox. It's frustrating that gmail's spam filter doesn't catch these, especially since I recall it working better in the past. But I'm not going to turn off the filter because it still catches dozens of spam emails a day.

Showing that a system has flaws doesn't necessarily prove that a system is useless. You have to look at the overall impact. In cases where you have an imperfect but useful system (such as most government regulation and enforcement) finding vulnerabilities is an important part of improving the system. A police department which only catches some murderers should work on catching more criminals rather than deciding it's hopeless and we might as well make homicide legal.

Overall levels of fraud are almost by definition hard to measure precisely. Demanding precision is simply a way to duck the issue. It's easier to precisely measure red teaming efforts, because then you know the denominator.

There is no incentive to run these programmes well and no downside to failing so you should assume fraud is rampant. When the GAO got a gas-powered alarm clock approved, who in the department lost their jobs? Did the head of the EPA get fired? Did they all lose their bonuses? No, they held a meeting where they claimed it didn't matter because the industry self-polices.

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