An automated computer system can only do what it's told. It perfectly carries out the instructions it is given. A human being can really screw everything up using their judgement and coming to the wrong conclusion.

The problem here is that AT&T employed a human being to design an automated system who didn't know enough about the automated system to ensure that it was correct. And then this automated system did exactly what it was told to do and made AT&T look bad.

But the fact that the code running on the webserver didn't reflect the intent of some AT&T exec or their company policy isn't the fault of those accessing the webserver. It's AT&T's fault for doing a really terrible job of QA/QC on their own systems prior to a really big launch.

The bad analogy can be extended to mechanical devices, such as a lock. The lock is also an automated system, and it is a system that will also perfectly do what it is told with even higher fidelity than a computer due to its relative simplicity.

I with my lockpick tell pin 1 to move up so many millimeters, I tell pin 2 to move up so many millimeters, and so on, and suddenly the lock opens. Suddenly I'm in, and it should be legal because the lock wasn't designed as well as it could have been and because all I did was follow a legal protocol with the lock.

Bad analogies like this are so common here when discussing technology issues, and it is a never ending irritating game of come up with the least-worst (but still bad) analogy. People here also often confuse their understanding of technology with legal/ethical sagacity, which is laughable.

Even though conscious human beings aren't able to follow a list of access rules quite as well as a computer system could, I won't hold that against them. There's nothing in my example which requires the librarian to make a judgment call. Barring mistakes caused by fatigue, laziness, corruption, and so on, the librarian should be able to perform nearly at the same level as the computer.