From johnp@orbital.addikt.com Mon May  8 12:17:23 2000
Date: Mon, 1 May 2000 01:28:43 -0700 (PDT)
From: John Pignata <johnp@orbital.addikt.com>
To: carl_pitchford@icgcomm.com, noc-staff@noc.icg.net
Subject: Security miscellanea


-- http://www.cedmagazine.com/pmr/98sm/98smb.htm 

I love the picture reversal. It's okay, Fred, I respect your 
self-appointed absolute authority. Truly. But I wish to politely name a
few points:

As this article illustrates you have many years of experience in security
implementation and have a multitude of incredibly structured and right
ideas about the way things should be ran. 

As your behavior indicates you neither understand nor care about tact or
transition. You only seem wholly consumed with establishing your new
Reich and having all of the underlings recognize the new order of things
which you generously sparkle with unpleasantness and stern
indifference. You make no attempt at establishing a standard of
respect between yourself, your peers and the people whom you are
charged with protecting -- as you recognize, that is your role with
ICG. To not only physically ensure their protection but to protect their
company's "assets" and as such their jobs.

Our role is to fix the network and protect *your* job and *our*
company's future. It's a wonderful, albeit vague, co-dependency that
perhaps you choose not to recognize. If policies continue to suffocate the
life out of NOC then, say, there will be nobody with enough clue left to
fix major hub outages and multi-million dollar contracts will be past
tense. If policies are curbed, then perhaps ICG will lose a PC or two. Or
maybe a potted plant.

Hmmm.

Point being, instead of worrying about which ex-employee is at race 
visiting friends under supervision, you should consider working on
securing all 200-plus legacy Netcom POPs and ironing out all of the
remaining access issues which plague NOC daily. Maybe you can work in
tandem with all the folks who kick ass daily instead of actively
positioning yourself against them. It's nice and good and swell to request
that people wear their badges but is it fundamentally necessary to
sacrifice personality at the sake of ubersecurity? It is possible to
maintain a secure work environment without the slightest scent of Fascism?

Is race truly a high-risk facility?

Just some thoughts. i'll try to stay away from your building and all that.

-johnp, badgeless and on The List