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Inside the Obama Tech Surge as It Hacks the Pentagon and VA

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Re: Inside the Obama Tech Surge as It Hacks the Pentagon and VA

#141

Post by Bartweiss »

DannyBee wrote: post #77
sliverstorm wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are pretty sensitive about government financial workers committing fraud, similar to how they are rather sensitive to government police committing murder.

Sadly, in neither case will you ever have 100% compliance. Pretending it's achievable, and trying to achieve it, is IMHO, silly. Remember the regulations do not prevent fraud, enforcement prevents fraud. There already exist plenty of things saying it's not okay, etc. Saying "and also, don't do that" is probably not actually necessary most of the time, in the same way saying "don't shoot people" is sufficient. Saying…

This is a good summary. At a certain point, you honestly can just have a rule against stupid or malicious behavior. The trick is to enforce it carefully and sensibly, rather than to pursue comprehensive objective rules.

Anyone who's played rules-lawyering games like Nomic will be aware that banning all misbehavior explicitly is impossible. You're basically limited to whitelisting approved behaviors, or implementing a general rule against malfeasance. Unless the consequences of misbehavior are enormous, the second option tends to be more efficient.

Re: Inside the Obama Tech Surge as It Hacks the Pentagon and VA

#142

Post by Bartweiss »

sliverstorm wrote: post #82
DannyBee wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, in neither case will you ever have 100% compliance. Pretending it's achievable, and trying to achieve it, is IMHO, silly. Remember the regulations do not prevent fraud, enforcement prevents fraud. There already exist plenty of things saying it's not okay, etc. Saying "and also, don't do that" is probably not actually necessary most of the time, in the same way saying "don't shoot people" is sufficient. Saying…

I don't think we can take this much further without knowing what's actually in the regulations, but I imagine they consist more of "officer's dash cam will be run 24/7 and backed up in triplicate", "officer will learn proper gun handling techniques X, Y, & Z", etc rather than "don't shoot people", "don't shoot handcuffed people", "don't shoot clowns", "don't shoot children". Or, in the fraud case, "books will be audi…

In the travel regulations case, we can see, and horrifyingly it's more of a "fraud is illegal on Monday" situation: https://www.defensetravel.dod.mil/Docs/perdiem/JTR.pdf

There are some sensible regulations there, like having someone approve travel requests, but there are also a lot of very narrow restrictions obviously added by someone who wanted to prevent Fraud X, but lacked the authority to change what was already written. The result is that you get more overhead with depressingly little payoff.

In principle you're right about the trade-off, but that's only the case when rule-writers have the authority to sensibly restructure what already exists.

Re: Inside the Obama Tech Surge as It Hacks the Pentagon and VA

#143

Post by sailfast »

zacharycohn wrote: post #108
sailfast wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love your second sentence, but really wish they would stop calling it a "tour of duty". It's still a pretty solid amount of money (nevermind Federal benefits) but to really transform we need people willing to work over the long haul not just parachute in for short terms. Also (slightly biased of course) I bet you get a bit addicted to the mission and that provides a non-monetary incentive to stick around a bit longer…

[Disclaimer: I work at 18F.] It's referred to as a tour of duty because most of us are on 2 year appointments. At the end of that 2 years, there's an optional 2 year extension. These orgs haven't been around long enough for anyone to run out their second two years yet. Personally, I love this format. It never would have even dawned on me to consider applying for a career position in the federal government, but when t…

I love the format as well, and think it's a great idea. I'm currently on a two year term right now at a different org. The two year thing solves a lot (though non-status positions make it hard to hire for the longer term). I'm not objecting to that and agree that we have to start somewhere.

The thing that bugs me is more pedantic. Calling it a "tour of duty" immediately draws a comparison to a military tour of duty undertaken by our military which implies hardship, sacrifice, etc. I get that some people might be taking pay cuts to join or that it might require leaving your comfort zone, but I'd prefer that some sort of sacrifice on the level of heading to Iraq for a year without your family is not implied in the naming.

Re: Inside the Obama Tech Surge as It Hacks the Pentagon and VA

#144

Post by Bartweiss »

stvswn wrote: post #118
leg wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that state and local governments are mostly more corrupt, more poorly run, and less well supervised by the voters.

Care to provide evidence for such a claim?

Well, I'll do a bit of it.

Voting rates for local/state elections are awful, and only rise when they share a ballot with national elections. 'Special districts' are a legal fiction helpful for organizing things like sensible fire department jurisdictions, but they've become a way to ensure that there are few or even no voters for a specific issue, and to minimize state oversight of a given budget. Lobbying groups and special interests may influence national bills, but they write state and local bills, often getting their "sample texts" passed completely unchanged. John Oliver has covered all three of those topics, but I could dig up real sources if you actually doubt them.

I wouldn't care to speak to the fraud claim, but surely it isn't controversial that voter engagement is lower - and N dollars of corporate spending buy more influence - when the stakes are lower?

Re: Inside the Obama Tech Surge as It Hacks the Pentagon and VA

#145

Post by Bartweiss »

nitrogen wrote: post #84
sliverstorm wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are pretty sensitive about government financial workers committing fraud, similar to how they are rather sensitive to government police committing murder.

I don't think that necessarily has to be the case. The public conversation could conceivably shift to a cost/benefit analysis of varying levels of enforcement vs. fraud, if only the media would cooperate.

This is definitely the case, because we already see different analyses for different topics.

When it comes to NSF, people worry about overhead and waste. When it's welfare or food stamps, people worry about fraud instead. Some of this is moral - people care about the 'undeserving poor' more than 'undeserving scientists' - because we tend to hate abuse of charity. But it clearly shows that there are different categories of concern, and that the public is capable of examining both topics.

Re: Inside the Obama Tech Surge as It Hacks the Pentagon and VA

#146

Post by Bartweiss »

nickparker wrote: post #53
saosebastiao wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure the only OS that is approved for electronic voting systems is Windows XP, which has obviously become a problem, but a new OS would likely take two or more years to go through the approval process. Ubuntu changes so much in two years that by the time it is approved, it would have lost 2/3rds of its life even as an LTR. I would assume that the main reason that Oracle is preferred is due to lobbying, but…

Does anyone else find it extremely discomforting that the voting machines even have a full fledged OS? It's a throwback to this xkcd https://xkcd.com/463/ In my mind, the ideal electronic voting machine: - Has mechanical buttons which simultaneously punch a paper ballot in a manner observable to the voter - Runs on a small (open source) microcontroller that's been audited for backdoors. - Runs (open source) crypto di…

This is my reaction too. There are systems with no security flaws, but they tend to be small-surface devoted hardware. Something the size of Windows will consistently turn up zero-day flaws that could be used against voting, whereas plenty of on-metal microcontroller programs have no holes at all.

Frankly, a really reassuring voting system would be the exact opposite of what we have: it would be open to all security researchers and consist of minimal, verifiably-safe code to count vote totals.

Re: Inside the Obama Tech Surge as It Hacks the Pentagon and VA

#147

Post by vonmoltke »

di4na wrote: post #133
vonmoltke wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does dropping the OS mean you have to run on microcontrollers and write everything from scratch? All it means is your software needs to incorporate the OS functions that it needs for interacting with the hardware. You can still use any hardware platform you want and any third-party libraries available for said platform.

Which is exactly what micro controllers programming is. I worked and still do some work for embedded programming. If you never did it before : OS make life super super easy. Really.

Well, yeah, most microcontrollers require bare-metal programming. That's not my point. My point is any device can be developed for that way, and that going OS-less does not mean having to write everything from scratch. After all, that's what the OS is: a bare-metal application that functions as middleware (amongst other things) for the hardware platform.

Also, I know having an OS makes it easy. If you have full control over the hardware platform and environment, and user interaction with the system is limited to a relatively small set of UI objects, you shouldn't need a full OS. Something bare-bones like DOS or FreeRTOS should be fine. Even on the box I worked on that used RHEL we stripped almost everything out. I'm still not sure why they decided to go with RHEL as the base, considering the amount of work that went into customizing it.

Re: Inside the Obama Tech Surge as It Hacks the Pentagon and VA

#148

Post by knowaveragejoe »

my_first_acct wrote: post #120
joeyo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of it comes down to agencies needing to protect themselves from congressional witch-hunts. Consider a congressman or political party that has ideological objections to an agency even existing and wishes to neuter or eliminate it. A stellar way of achieving this is by making the target seem wasteful and fraudulent [1]. If there is actual fraud, no matter how small or how much of a corner case, this task becomes e…

A Democrat, the late Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin, was well known for mocking frivolous-sounding research projects. From the Wikipedia article[0]: "In 1987, Stewart Brand accused Proxmire of recklessly attacking legitimate research for the crass purpose of furthering his own political career, with gross indifference as to whether his assertions were true or false as well as the long-term effects on American…

It's good to see examples from both sides. That being said, what the above mentions is Republican doctrine, as opposed to isolated cases of politicians(on either side) simply blindly furthering their political careers.
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