Unachievable Perfection
Posted On: 12/15/2006
There's an old joke from Great Britain about "the National Health" (their system of socialized medicine).
A hospital administrator is being interviewed about the challenges of his job, and he says: "the effective
and efficient administration of this facility would be ameliorated if it weren't full of sick people".
That's the feeling I get from PeopleSoft Security Administrators sometimes: Security would be much easier
if no one had access to anything. OK, no one could do their jobs, but the Security would be rock-solid!
My first job after engineering school was as a Special Assistant to the Prime Minister of Canada. It was
my responsibility to help modernize the office (when we arrived in 1984, our switchboard was one of those
ones from Green Acres with cords and plugs). As part of the process, we upgraded a lot of the word-processors
and added some PC's (remember – 1984). We also added secure telephones. That was an eye-opening experience
for me. The good folks at the CSE (Communications Security Establishment, the Canadian NSA) showed me how it
was possible to read the screen of any word-processor in the office from across the street, in a van, with
stuff you could buy at Radio Shack. So, we added some Tempest workstations too. But the lesson I learned
was that the amount of money you could spend on security was limitless. The amount of money you should spend
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