Flawed Operators Theory v. Flawed Design Theory
Posted by Ricky in Opinion under National | on Nov 24 2007
It may seem disrespectful to the victims of Chernobyl to draw analogies between the causes of that disaster and those leading to the release of 25 million personal records into the wild, but the parallels are there: critical safety systems have to be inherently coherent and workable, and must be designed to predict, allow for, and prevent, all conceivable operator errors.
The rules governing the security of this sensitive data were in place, but not allowances for, nor measures to counter, operator error. The government should not point to the responsibility of the operator to follow rules, when the safety systems to ensure that the rules are followed, for which it is directly responsible, are badly designed or incomplete. With the repeated evidence of vulnerable, fallible IT and data systems, the potential for a really huge disaster is frighteningly visible.
