Enough of the CT on both sides. Enough.
Much of what I do involves working on online databases, collecting stats and data, inputting data and, every once in a while, nosing around in data I shouldn’t oughta be nosing around in. It’s the same for everyone I work with. All of us have been overwhelmed by curiosity before, or have accidentally ended up where we shouldn’t be, and instead of immediately raising the alarms, gone where we shouldn’t oughta be.
It’s human nature. Humans are curious critters, but that curiosity doesn’t mean we’re evil or corrupt or intentionally plotting to Bring Down The Man. It means we’re human, flawed and annoying, prone to bodily noises at inconvenient times, a few of us evil, but most of us just doing what humans do.
Besides, people who work on databases this way are generally — usually? - so buried in data that their minds can only hang onto relevant data, the data needed to do whatever they’re doing.
Furthermore, third party vendors can and do screw up big time. Servers can crash at the least convenient moment, sometimes for days at a time. Databases can be hacked, they can suffer from someone pushing the wrong button or doing something over there that was supposed to be done over here, whatever. But it’s not just general inattention or idiocy that can get ‘em. Mother Nature seems to have a particular dislike for these monstrous databases because I’ve seen them taken out by heavy rains or blizzards or inconvenient lightning strikes or floods, sometimes hundreds of miles away from where I sit.
The person fired by the Sanders campaign is not some vile little cretin out to collect as much data as they shouldn’t oughta be collecting. They might have been fired because they were the lowest ranking critter in the campaign and someone had to go, or they might have been fired because maybe they got a little too curious. The others might not have been fired because they might have simply been told about it, gone to check, then ratted it out.
Or whatever.
Similarly, unless Hillary Clinton is now in charge of the entire world (which I know some people believe, what with stories of the Illuminati and the Masons and whatever else so readily believed by so much of the American public), there is no possible way she or her campaign could have engineered this minor debacle. Federal databases screw up all the time. Patches don’t work, they get overwhelmed, whatever. It happens.
Besides, the chain of command from Those in Charge to the dweebs running the things is convoluted, at best. Sure, someone in a well appointed office somewhere might have come up with An Evil Plan, but the road from that office to the whoevers and whatevers running the database is long and treacherous and ugly and no doubt leads to someplace somewhere else entirely occupied by people who wouldn’t do what that person in that office wants them to do to save their life. Office politics, all that, the kind of bureaucratic crap that makes institutions completely inefficient and nearly totally ineffective monstrosities.
CT is the stuff of wingnutters, although I’m well aware it’s also a near direct path to the wreck list. But we should know better. Then again, we’re humans and therefore each and every one of us kind of idiotic in our own way.
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