Jailed SF network administrator faces fewer charges
A judge has dismissed most of the charges against a former San Francisco network administrator accused of hijacking the city's computer network he designed and maintained.
San Francisco Superior Court Judge Kevin McCarthy on Friday tossed three tampering charges against Terry Childs, while preserving a lone charge of denying city authorities access to the network, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle. Childs, who has been in custody since July 2008, had worked at San Francisco's Department of Telecommunication Information Services for five years. Childs, 44, is being held on $5 million bail.
Childs had formerly been accused of tampering with the city's Fiber Wide Area Network after allegedly being disciplined for poor performance. He was also accused of electronically spying on his supervisors and their attempt to fire him.
Childs is still charged with denying other administrators access to the system, which maintains about 60 percent of the city's law enforcement, payroll, and jail-booking records. Childs reportedly refused to surrender secret codes that would allow access to the system.
However, after a week in the city's jail, Childs agreed to give the access codes to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom during a secret jail house visit. The meeting reportedly was so secret that the police department and district attorney were not informed of the meeting ahead of time.
Childs' attorney has claimed that there was no destructive intent and that Childs was merely protecting the network from incompetent city officials who were trying to force him out of his job.
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. Before joining CNET News in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers. E-mail Steven. 
Quit making it sound like there's some sort of sorcery involved already.
2) you get to these things either via serial cable, or remotely. They don't come with terminals or keyboards ;)
3) my avg. password lengths are well over 8 chars.
4) it's still just a password/phrase/whatever... not some Tom Clancy inspired wet dream :p
Thou shalt not anger a petty bureaucrat?
begin
print (sysread(address1));
print (sysread(address2));
end;
I refused to give the other "administrators" where I worked the root passwords to our Blackberry or Exchange servers, or any of the BSD boxes simply because it was MY job to maintain them and the others didn't know what they were doing apart from password resets and the odd backup / restore. yes, this made more work for me, but the system was SECURE.
I didn't deny anyone OPERATIONAL access to the network, just ADMINISTRATIVE.
Of course, when they sacked me for refusing to lie to the auditors, I was under no obligation to reveal ANYTHING to them.
SIGHUP references the CFR which is federal law. Unless he's up for a federal crime it doesn't apply.
Clue: physical access = a bit of downtime, but still easily changeable passwords, no matter what OS we're talking about here. And if you think that mere laws can prevent your former employers from telling potential future ones about your antics, you're way more naive than I thought...
My boss can get root on my machinery any time he wants, though he has to open the department safe to do it. He may get lost in a basic bash session, but I trust him --and my colleagues-- enough to not go mucking around in there without doing change management. If I got hit by a bus tomorrow, at least the machinery I left behind are still useful and can be administered w/o downtime, FFS...
Obama wants to "reform" the health care industry? He needs to begin with cleaning up his own damn house first. The sheer WASTE within our government is out of control. Start with FIRING dead wood. These idiots think they can do nothing and, well, of course they do -- they cant be fired! The very small percentage of government workers that actually work is what keeps the gears going. The rest are just dead wood and need to be cut out. There are plenty of good, hard working folks out there who would LOVE to have a job, period.
Time to clean up your own house first Mr. Obama. Leave health care reform to the people who know how to do health care. The average Congress doofus has NO CLUE how things should work in the real world because they are so far removed from the real world they'd be sucking their thumbs in a fetal position God-forbid they ever had to go to the post office or pump their own gas, let alone drive their own car from point-A to point-B. And, oh, even if they COULD reform health care -- do you really believe that they could have done so over the past few months with all of their vacations, golfing, visiting, trips to here and there on OUR tax money, etc?
**** no.
I mean ****, you can kill somebody can get less jailtime/bail than that. I'd like to know what law they're holding him under at this point.
What is it that makes computer crime / hacking far worse than murder, rape and drug dealing? Oh, that's right, we live in a world now where sharing 24 songs is equal to $1.92 million... but if she shop lifted the CDs she would have got nothing more than probation. Add a computer in the mix and your crime becomes so unimaginable to the old way of thinking. You would think that some of those in authority still believe that punch cards are the devil's work ;)
My real life example is this. Yes it really did happen.
An IT admin guy similar as this man was hired. He fixed everything. Our network was faster and no more down time. So he sat and read up on IT admin books and learning his trade as he should.
This means if your IT ADMIN is always running around fixing/tinkering with the network then he doesn't know what he is doing. This Admin at my work was clearly fit for his job but a manager(not his) was sick and tired of seeing him sitting and reading so he fired him. I heard this going on so I went to the managers boss and got the manager fired for being noob manager. Sadly the admin guy did not want his job back and rightly so! It is a VERY good sign to see your admins just sitting and reading IT technical manuals all the time and the network has no problem THAT IS A GOOD THING! If your staff is running around always messing with things then you need to question their skill set and fire them.
He is also the #1 person who infects their pc 5 times a week.
So I remove admin rights and he complains about not having webshots on his computer.
Look people if you can't do your job then just say so and quit.
I'm assuming the company you work for has a computer and internet usage policy that governs the conduct of employees in regards to electronic resources. If you don't you should talk to whoevers in charge about publishing one. That way you have backing to do your job.
- by NKnow August 24, 2009 1:56 PM PDT
- Pft.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(29 Comments)You people who are defending this guy are missing the obvious point.
I'm a Network Engineer at a financial institution. What if I took it upon myself to secure my network by crippling it if I were to be fired? I don't own these systems. I'm simply paid to maintain and administer them. If I don't like management I can leave the company like any other sane person.
What he did was inexcusable and he should do a lot of time for it. As far as I'm concerned he gives people in my profession a bad name.
And what the hell does this have to do with Health care again?