Let me be very clear: no, I don't work for the government, I work for a private corporation that has a CONTRACT to perform work for the government*. However, all the computer systems I work with are PROVIDED by the government because the work I do involves government computer networks, thus for things like software licensing they go through government procurement.
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* The specific job I do can only really be done via a contract, as it involves auditing the security and conformity to standards of State department computer systems. Contractors hired to make such systems have obvious conflicts of interests in performing such an audit**, and likewise the customer FOR those systems*** have conflicts of interest in performing said audit as well, thus the need for a third party.
** Those fuckers will do ANYTHING to avoid having to conform to even basic fucking IT security standards if they can because they don't want to take the time and effort to do the most basic of IT standup work. Never trust development teams on security, they only care if their system does what they were hired to have it do, anything beyond that including the most basic of security, is extra work they hate doing. Lazy asses.
*** They are only concerned with two things: is the system doing what it's supposed to do and is it online. Anything beyond that they are willing to give a pass too... at least until there's a massive data breech that exposes American PII, then they love to start pointing fingers and claim everyone but themselves were not doing their job and that nobody told them there were these issues. Which is where, once again, we come in. We give them a report that they have put SIGN that says they recognize the risks we identified and accept them, so no wiggle room if a data breech occurs, the government bureaucrat is on record as accepting the risk that was exploited.
