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Data Hysteria

It has been hard to find any non-emotional commentary on what is going on in America. The big reveal of federal workforce with aggregations by pay range and age range is so completely unremarkable - the same data has been long available here with person-level information. For a supposedly rockstar team working non-stop for weeks, one expected to see better. Whatever is really afoot is not visible but the hand-wringing is nonstop. This hot take for example, questions the fundamental security framework of Azure. If that is so dubious, isn't there a bigger problem to solve because the said data has been there for transmission and retrieval for many years already.

If identity and access management is this fragile in the government's IT infrastructure, we've had a long standing problem. Maybe the data has been breached many times over and we were not always informed. There seems to be the presumption that privacy and security is not being managed well and the system is not prime for the use of AI - those seem like pretty big problems irrespective of what is going on now. Did the system have any safeguards at all?

On one hand, it’s a pretty logical use of AI: Using AI to interrogate raw, disparate, and presumably vast datasets to speed up “time to opinion” makes a lot of sense on a purely technical and solution level. 

On the other hand, of course, it raises some serious questions around privacy and the transit of sensitive data, and the governance being applied to how data privacy is being managed, especially for personnel files, project/program plans, and anything impacting intelligence or defense.

All this reminds me of a perpetually flustered and non-technical boss I had a long time ago. He had expended a lot of political capital to build a system that was supposed to increase operational efficiency 50x or something like that. While he was well-intentioned, he had no ability to direct, manage or even understand what had been built by the engineers based on his chaotic set of requirements. 

So he lived in existential fear that the thing could collapse in a heap one day because there was stuff in there that no one understood. Reality is that he was the only one who did not understand, others did. To him every defect or issue in the system was a five alarm fire that the team had to work on 24/7 until fixed. If that defect remain unresolved, the whole thing would collapse to dust before the month was out. As it turns out the system survived fine and outlived his tenure. 

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