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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

Compare this to the conversation on stackexchange yesterday where a small company CTO was worried about lying about pentesting.

The exact same ethical issues and commercial in entices apply in 10 person teams and 2BN grants.

It looks to me like we need something like professional engineer status at any given organisation that has independent and legal personal sign off

(ie a railway engineer can simply stop for example the 10bn pound HS2 railway project by simply not signing off one piece of paper. And the management know that. And so they have to deal with him, whoever he is.

The CISO of even penn state has no such leverage.

Edit: I think we should look first to see what balance of powers exists in an organisation - labour represented by unions? Management vs tech? sales vs everyone else ?

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This is an interesting notion, but I wonder if there would really be support for such laws.

In Canada, you can't even call yourself an "Engineer" if you aren't an accredited P.Eng license holder. And a P.Eng who signs off on safety related designs that aren't safe (or signs of pretending to be a P.Eng) can actually go to jail. And that's something I fully support.

But would people support similar laws for information security? I would, but would enough people that the government would pass such rules? Hard to say.

It took, depending on when you say who the first "engineer" was, several hundred years (let's go from Christopher Wren to the 1828 charter of institute of civil engineers).

So we have time. But we could easily establish minimum best oroactises for computer security, data security, PII management etc (we more or less have with say SOC2). This is why the people that asked "when was your last penTest" got it wrong. They should have said "show me your SOC2 certificate". Then whatever lies the salesman says are obviated by going and asking the accreditation agency.

All we need to do is migrate the SOC2 from a paid for box ticking exercise into something valuable

Some states, like Oregon I believe, have similar prohibitions about the word "engineer" being one's job title. Others only prohibit signing off as a PE unless certified.

Most life critical systems, such as medical devices, bridges, and buildings, require a PE to sign off in the states.

Removing the "engineer" from a title or position that doesn't require a PE is not likely to happen, and is really just semantics.

The bigger issue I see, especially with DoD IT systems, is that the federal government career field that manages those requires NO education.

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