I think this is a social and ethical issue rather than anything much to do with the sysadmin function. If an organisation is doing something that its employees may regard as unethical - like unacknowledged collection of information on the activities of law-abiding citizens without oversight - there's a chance that someone will rat on you sooner or later. The type of people who might rat/whistleblow are actually pretty much the type of ethically grounded people who would be given security clearance. The risk is that they might have better ethics than the organisation. Plenty of non-sysadmins have been whistle blowers; in those cases something else handy, eg, the office photocopier, becomes a diversionary target in preference to the unsettling task of scrutinising organisation's activities.
Being a sysadmin doesn't have lot to do with it, except perhaps that time spent learning to be a sysadmin isn't time spent in the intelligence community being indoctrinated with a fortress ethos. Jim _______________________________________________ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link