In response to Edward Snowden's outcry to the National Security Agency's (NSAs) surveillance activities of the general public, NSA plans to remove 90% of their system administrators. NSA says software automation would replace the administrators that would improve security efforts. But Courtney Nash, O'Reilly Programming, says this equation doesn't add up. From talking to people who are familiar with this kind of software that automates traditional “sysadmin tasks,” she learned the software is meant to increase the bandwidth of an existing group of operators. The products do not attempt to replace manual labor with fewer people. In this article, Nash gives her opinions on why the NSA lacks fundamental understanding of automation and tackles two of the biggest automation myths around today.
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