Every once in a while, the San Francisco Chronicle forgets its prime directive of inserting obsessive Giants and 49ers coverage among its daily minimum requirement of Christ and Christian-hating drek by actually reporting the news. One such slip-up occurred today with mention of how a San Francisco city IT worker decided the best way to ward off his looming termination due to workplace incompetence was adding malfeasance to the mix by doing what comes naturally for IT people: set up your own super-password, thereby making yourself master of the domain. And company network in addition to the domain (small bit of Internet humor there).
Two items about the story warrant attention, the first being that anyone is surprised at such a thing. Even with daily reports of identity theft, the most lackadaisical laissez-faire attitude toward digital security isn’t coming from consumers, or for that matter business as a whole. It’s the IT department within those businesses. Why? Half arrogance (“no one can penetrate MY security!!!” will go down as one of the ultimate examples of Famous Last Words). The other half? Simply put, they don’t want to spoil their fun.
I’m not spilling state secrets from my days in IT to mention how playing the snoop-snoop game is one of most every IT’s departments most heavily indulged-in pastimes. There is legitimate reason for examining the assorted files and electronic missives of co-workers, namely a properly grounded suspicion that illegal and/or unethical activities are taking place. That said, the vast majority of perusing has nothing to do with such pursuits. It’s looking for the immoral or just plain moronic. Why waste your time searching for porn when you can get someone else to do the work for you? A slightly more genteel side of this is the opportunities for tremendous amusement at the expense of someone else’s follies, preserved for all with access to see by quietly wading through various documents and images placed on the network or the hard drive of someone’s work station without a great amount of thought devoted to… oh, thinking things through before saving whatever where anyone with a password and an attitude can open it as easily as its originator saved the embarrassing item in question. It’s not much of a leap to go from this mindset to deliberate sabotage by inserting oneself as sole holder of the keys to the kingdom, although in this particular case the logic of believing felony charges are somehow negated by maintaining refusal to hand over your passwords escapes me.
The other element about this news item giving just cause to raised eyebrow is this quote from San Francisco district attorney Kamala Harris when queried about possible motive:
Motive is not necessarily an element of a crime.
Mmm-hmm.
It’s not overwhelmingly surprising that Ms. Harris would make such a statement. After all, it’s common knowledge people commit felonies for the sole purpose of being able to cross it off their to-do list for the day. Beats cleaning out the lint trap or rearranging your sock drawer by a mile in the fun department. Ten to twenty years in a federal penitentiary? Aww-right! I’ll get on it first thing after lunch.
Sarcasm aside, such a statement provides a quite illuminating look into the mindset where individual responsibility, right and wrong, good and evil, and all those other inconveniences accompanying this whole God-Jesus-man-sin-Cross thing are set aside. All we have to do is compartmentalize everything into neat little cubes, believing doing so absolves us of any genuine responsibility since there is no genuine interaction between the different elements of our lives. And of course there’s no such thing as, you know, evil or sin. Just because we might do what in modern society’s definition are bad things doesn’t mean we’re bad. Aren’t we all just fine the way we are?
Aren’t we?
