>I said, “I know enough C that I could kick the virus off the machines,” and I did. They said “Wow, that was really cool. Why don’t you do that again?” Then I started kicking off other viruses, and they said, “That’s pretty cool that you kicked all the viruses off. Why don’t you kick the competitors off, too?” >It was funny. It really showed me the power of gradualism. It’s hard to get people to do something bad all in one big jump, but if you can cut it up into small enough pieces, you can get people to do almost anything.

This rings incredibly true to me. Especially in my job field.

edit:

>The good news is that I’ve been on the other side of those automated script things. Their capability is incredibly dangerous, but the actuality tends not to be. >It would have been fairly trivial for me to go spelunking for people’s credit card information or whatever. I had four million nodes. I could have done it without anybody at the company even noticing. I was the guy writing Scheme, so I could have just put a text file somewhere and then made it go away, and there wouldn’t even have been an executable lying around. >But I didn’t. To do that, by definition you have to be willing to become a criminal, and that’s a little bit rare. So I’m not too worried about that.

I also think this is a good point. A lot of services out there could potentially ruin your life (or at least make it difficult) if there's a rogue employee who targets you (or targets a lot of people). An ISP employee looking at web logs, a Google employee reading all your emails... The same goes for the NSA, just the power that can be abused is even larger.

I think it's inevitable that human ability to access these kinds of things will never become impossible, so I hope that companies (and the NSA) are instituting controls and checks, including anomaly detection, to find rogue, malicious, or snooping employees.