know I made a post upthread about the 001, but I would like to turn to the breach and the implications therein.
Also to repeat from that post, I am not disc staff.
A lot of the reasons I've seen regarding demotion from staff mentioned upthread concerns the breach of trust between Cerastes and staff as a whole. This was caused by not disclosing the details of a security breach on their own, and instead volunteering information after being asked about it at a later time.
This constitutes a breach in trust because we assume that if something like this would happen, staff would inform the people involved and it would have been taken care of without having to explicitly pursue information.
I bring up this point because one of the fears regarding a breach has to do with privacy and security. A breach affects all people in staff chat. This is important because, while Cerastes did not inform any other staff as to the breach for 12 hours, a large percentage of staff was not informed of the breach for weeks. This means that, many, many affected persons were not told that people have had access to staff conversations that had taken place. People may have wanted to change passwords or usernames or ids based on this information, but it was not passed along.
I make a point of this because we are saying Cerastes should be demoted for breaking the trust of staff. However, I posit (and I believe others agree, as indicated in UE's post), that the staff members who were aware of the breach and did not bring it to the attention of staff in general have also lost the trust of some of the staff.
If this trust is something that is so important that losing it is grounds for demotion, then it feels like we are using a double standard. Upthread, it is cited that staff are meant to be held to a higher standard, and by virtue of that, should our moderators, admins, etc be held to a higher standard than our operational and junior staff?
Right now, it appears that a significant percentage of staff do not trust the actions of disc and adcap based on the way they handled the communication around this problem, as well as the conclusions that are being reached regarding Cerastes. The thing with trust is that, it's a two way street. If we are supposed to trust adcap/disc to make the right decision when we are not looking, then it follows that they need to demonstrate that same trust in the rest of staff, which currently does not appear to be present, both as indicated by the current barriers to communication between different groups of staff, as well as the insistence that Cerastes must be censured for this transgression.
If the response to the issues brought up about staff communication should not be dealt with at an individual level, but rather a systematic level, then I believe Cerastes' case should be dealt with also systematically by implementing more clear procedures and avenues of communication for people to go through when a breach like this happens. This way we are demonstrating to all parties involved that the trust still remains from the top down. Additionally we can build trust in each other by attempting to take long lasting changes rather than claiming the loss of trust in an individual.
I am not disc staff, but I would advocate for no action to be taken at an individual level. Rather these problems should be addressed at a systematic level.
