FW: sad news - latest "Memorial" press release

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Boris Dagaev wrote:

> Paul B. Gallagher wrote:
> 
>> Without understanding how each of these factors affected the
>> situation, it's impossible to judge how much data was lost and how 
>> (ir)responsible the owners were.
> 
> Paul, there was no call in my message to jump or even come close to 
> such far reaching judgmental ends. ...

No, but you did raise the question, which I agree is a valid one, and 
asking a question invites us to answer it. My position was that we can't 
yet answer it for lack of information. And that's why I've reinstated 
the subordinate clause ("without understanding...") you deleted.

> ... and so I was in this contemplative, meditative, lenient mood when
> your and Olga's rejoinders arrived...
> 
> As it is said in the other Memorial article Robert posted a link to:
> "[T]he country has changed." Well, that much is certain.
> Unfortunately, Memorial evidently has not. One simply cannot go out
> anymore with press releases like this. Practical and pragmatic
> questions would immediately be asked: did they take care of the
> fundamental concerns of their business? did they protect their most
> essential informational assets? did they reasonably anticipate and
> mitigate predictable risks? etc. Their personal contributions to the 
> cause notwithstanding, did the officials (Roginsky, Flige, and
> others) make every reasonable effort to prevent highly valuable
> materials from falling into the hands of the very people whose
> murderous forefathers dispatched the innocent to the realm of the
> dead?

These are all very good questions, and I hope we learn the true answers 
someday soon, both because of the value of Memorial's database and so 
that others can learn from any mistakes they may have made. It is the 
nature of human behavior that people do not change their behavior until 
it hurts (or sometimes if they see someone else hurt). When I was first 
starting out in computing in 1985, I lost an entire day's work because I 
failed to back it up, and ever since I have been religious -- some would 
say obsessive -- about complete, regular, and reliable backups.

> So, having read all your valid points, I called a couple friends of
> mine who are in the IT business... "Baloney! For the database this
> important, they should have hired the right people, paid for enough
> bandwidth, encrypted the database, established scheduled backups, and
> stored them in multiple places, in a foreign bank's vault, if
> necessary. In this day and age, not that hard, not that expensive. At
> worst, they should've lost no more than a week of incremental 
> backups."

They're right, of course, they SHOULD have taken the appropriate 
precautions. The partial list I offered was a list of ways ordinary 
people could have gone wrong. You may characterize them as irresponsible 
people; I wouldn't argue the point. But these sorts of mistakes are made 
every day by ordinary people in a wide variety of businesses, and these 
ordinary, well-meaning people lose data every day.

Your experts' phrase, "not that hard, not that expensive" is accurate at 
the purely technical level -- it can be done. I just got an ad from one 
of my vendors offering a 1.5 TB (that's 1.5 million MB) portable HDD for 
$390, and I'm sure Memorial could put everything it had on one of those 
and send it off-site. But it isn't nearly so "easy" or "inexpensive" at 
the psychological level. Critical leaders in the organization must make 
the commitment and follow through to ensure that the safety measures are 
fully implemented. We see other disasters in the news every day due to 
negligence, inattentiveness, and general lack of commitment by otherwise 
good people. People die in fires from smoking in bed, not because they 
don't understand the risk, but because they convince themselves it won't 
happen to them. Diabetics lose their eyesight because they don't make 
the consistent daily effort to keep their blood sugar under control. 
Some important things take hard work, and importance alone is not enough 
to get it done.

> And I am sure you can easily understand, if not agree, why it is
> almost impossible for practical people like me to take some of
> Memorial's claims about the government's evil deeds seriously....

It's a good question to ask. And yet, even if the Memorial staff were 
negligent in protecting their data, that doesn't make the government's 
deeds proper, which is a separate question. If a policeman fires at you, 
the fact that you chose not to wear your bulletproof vest that day does 
not excuse his behavior.

> A no-nonsense answer to my thought would have been: "We got in touch
> with Roginsky (or Flige, or whoever), and yes, the database had been
> backed up, but some vital activities cannot go on as before, because
> it is obviously harder to work with remote materials even in the age
> of the Internet." Something along those lines (as opposed to all the
> horrors you and Olga managed to summon) would have completely
> sufficed to quench my moderately inflamed curiosity.

That would have been a reassuring answer, yes.

> From this perspective, I have to conclude that the press release,
> however true it may be in other respects, is deeply flawed,...

That may well be, but how flawed will depend on its purpose. If it is 
effective in recruiting support for the cause, a little sloppiness in 
describing the data's security is forgivable. But if that sloppiness 
causes potential supporters to tune out because Memorial appears 
negligent, that's a horse of a different color. Once again, a question 
we cannot yet answer.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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