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A survey of U.S. government scientists by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) was flagged as spam at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Computer Security Incident Response Center. UCS's Center for Science and Democracy director has attributed the low response rate at EPA and other agencies to a "culture of fear":
A periodic survey of U.S. federal scientists by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) caused a bit of a kerfuffle at U.S. EPA last month. For the ninth time since 2005, the science advocacy group sent out a survey to more than 63,000 federal scientists across 16 agencies to gather information about what's happening inside the federal government in relation to scientific integrity. Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at UCS, said his staff reached out to the agencies to let them know the survey was forthcoming: a memo EPA apparently missed.
"The unannounced, unauthorized, and perhaps illegal message found below this message was sent to me today," Brian Melzian, an EPA oceanographer in Rhode Island, wrote in a Feb. 12 email to EPA's Computer Security Incident Response Center (CSIRC) and others obtained by UCS. [...] Melzian continued: "Finally, if the message found below is legitimate and not bogus, these organizations have been grossly negligent and incompetent for distributing this message without first being authorized and approved by EPA." Rosenberg said while UCS did inform EPA the survey was coming, he is not required to do so and it's up to the agencies to choose whether and how they inform employees about it.
[...] While the survey will remain open for another couple of weeks, the response rate so far has been low — a fact Rosenberg attributes to fear of retaliation. "It suggests the climate and culture for scientists is really fearful," he said. "The culture we've seen more broadly in this administration has been either dismissal or hostility toward science." A spokesman for EPA said it didn't make sense to him that employees would be afraid to fill out the survey since it is anonymous but declined to comment further.
As of March 2, response rates for EPA hovered around 2 percent, with 296 completed surveys, compared with NOAA's response rate, which was 4.1 percent with 460 completed surveys. Still, in 2015 NOAA's response rate was 19.6 percent with 2,388 completed responses.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16 2018, @08:31PM (2 children)
This is totally 100% obviously spam.
Also, even if it isn't a computer security problem, it looks like one. Any employee who would answer it is an employee who would fall victim to phishing or click to install malware. Some of those employees can be trained to be a tad more secure, and some of them are worth the cost of training, but the others need to lose their computer access. If they can't do their jobs without computers, then they get fired.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 17 2018, @02:55AM
Yeah, who cares if the EPA loses 80 % of its scientists. It's not like the environment matters to anyone. I'm happy to breathe whatever chemicals come out of exhaust pipes and drink the water as long as it's less yellow than piss.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday March 17 2018, @03:33PM
Has anyone seen that in real life? I vaguely remember that from a PCI/DSS comsec class along the lines of some phishing attack being fill out 19 totally innocent looking survey questions for a chance to win a gift card (you know, like a vendor survey) and after 19 questions that are boring and corporate ("We are considering a rainbow color sock puppet for our new corporate mascot, please rate this decision from 1 to 10") then there's one random question like "to prove you're a human and not a bot automatically clicking checkboxes for more chances to win, please enter your building's security door keypad code in the text box below, don't worry all responses are anonymous (LOL, they aren't)"