Greg Twyford <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Tim Churches wrote: > > 1) NSW Police is not HeSA and to equate the two as you do in your > > message subject line is not sensible. They aren't even in the same > tier of government. > > Tim, > > I guess Horst's point is that if a public authority in such a > security-sensitive an area as counter-terrorism can stuff-up like this, > then how can one trust other, arguably much less sensitive, areas.
My point is that absolutely nothing can be inferred, neither positive of negative, about the competence or lack thereof of a Commonewealth govt agency call HeSA, located in Canberra, who outsources many of its operations to a private sector agency in Sydney called BeTrusted (or whoever owns it this week), from the fact that a Web server administrator for an Internet mailing list operated by a NSW govt agency (a list intended to distribute press releases which are by definition public documents) has stuffed up big time - unless you take the view that "guvmint=idiots" - a view which has simplicity in its favour but may not be completely true in every single case. > Levels of government are irrelevant, in my view. Especially when, as he > has been campaigning about for ages, HeSA has no really good reason for > generating GPs certificates in the first place. I think that I have been as voluble as anyone on this list about the nonsensical nature of the HeSA key generation arrangements, and I am not defending them. I was merely pointing out Horst's non sequitor. > I'm also mindful that the now much-streamlined-but-still-cumbersome > procedures for using HeSA keys and HIC Online were largely due to the > efforts of the likes of Horst and Oliver Frank when HIC/HeSA came up > with their first iteration of nonsense. No one would touch all of this > when it involved 130 page contracts that only meant anything to security > specialists, reams of application paperwork and security hurdles, some > of which are still there. > > I still have to sit with GPs and walk them through the web forms for > applying for their HeSA keys and HIC, sorry Medicare, Online. Many GPs > have never used a web form before, apart from Internet banking perhaps, > and certainly the requirements of the online registration are not > obvious to the first time user. Sure. Having just been through the process of obtaining a HeSA location certificate, I can confirm that the process was almost bizarrely Kafkaesque - layers and layers of redundant checks intermingled with gaping holes in the security of the application process that any mildly intelligent baddie could drive a truck through blindfolded. However, that fact that a police dept system administrator or programmer in Sydney happened to stuff up has no bearing one way or the other on this sad state of affairs. Tim C _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
