> But root can access anything anyway, and can 'su - bloggsj' too.
Yeah but if "Joe Hacker kid" has just gotten root on your system
and he wants to steal some extra accounts (so that he can get
in again when you find him), he'll be wanting to get passwords for
other accounts. As root the only thing he can do is change passwords
(something that will be noticed fairly soon by the owners of those
accounts).
However if he can read your log file as root and get the passwords
nobody may ever know he has stolen other accounts. root might be
privliged but if there's no need for root to know user passwords
(and there isn't) they should be hidden from him/her too.
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