Accused Rogue Admin Terry Childs Makes His Case

angry tapir writes "He's been in jail for seven months now, but former San Francisco network administrator Terry Childs says he's going to keep fighting to prove he's innocent of computer crime charges. Childs was arrested on July 12, charged with disrupting the City of San Francisco's Wide Area Network during a tense standoff with management. Infoworld has also conducted an interview with Childs."

Comments

from the yeah-good-luck-with-that dept.

[u38cg]

Thanks for just blowing away presumption of innocence, Taco :-/

yet more 'facts' in the Childs case ..

[viralMeme]

"On Friday, June 20, there was an altercation between Childs and Jeana Pieralde, the new DTIS security manager at the 1 Market Street datacenter in San Francisco. Until her promotion, she had been a city network engineer who worked with Childs"

Why didn't anyone tell Childs of this promotion, and who got her the 'promotion'?

"Childs disputed this interpretation of events, claiming in court documents that Pieralde was conducting clandestine searches of DTIS employee workspaces and had removed a hard drive from an office when he confronted her. He also denied taking photos of Pieralde"

Were there or were there not photographs taken of Pieralde by Childs. Was Pieralde authorized to conduct such audits and where now is this 'SF Owned cell phone', and what exactly did Childs intend to do with these photographs.

"the city stated that Childs was placed under surveillance and was arrested on the evening of July 12 as he was parking his vehicle near his home in the suburb of Pittsburg. At the time of his arrest, he was found to have $10,000 cash on his person and receipts showing that he had traveled to Sparks, Nevada, where he had looked at renting storage units. Following his arrest, police searched his house and workspaces. Police turned up 9mm and .45 caliber bullets, but apparently no weapons"

Like, if he was under surveillance (and his cell/pager conficated), wouldn't they have noticed that he wasn't actually near a computer whern the pager went off ?

"Considering that normal bail for a murder case is $1 million -- one fifth of what Childs' bail was set at -- this filing was unexpected"

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"it is a mystery what exactly Jeana Pieralde was doing performing an unannounced, after-hours "security audit" in a City office other than that in which she herself worked. It was during that secret "security audit" on the evening of Friday, June 20th, 2008, in which Jeana Pieralde took a hard drive from another City employee's office and was photographed by Terry Childs as she did so"

"The office from which Pieralde removed the hard drive belonged to DTIS Security Officer Nancy Hastings (who naturally was not present in the office because the "security audit" was being conducted after hours.)" "Terry Childs had returned late to the offices (which do include his office and do not include Jeana Pieralde's office) at about 5:15 P.M. to find Jeana Pieralde (who does not work in those offices) taking a hard drive from one of Terry's co-workers offices. Terry photographed this act with the camera in his cellphone"

Did Pieralde really remove a harddrive. What was the name of this co-worker, where is this harddrive now. What motovated Pieralde to remove the harddrive. What's really going on here. Was Pieralde caught with her-in-th-cookie-jar, and someone decide to frame Childs to distract from something?

Re:Mmmmm... No.

[DavidTC]

Well, congratulations on making up laws, but, no, there's no law requiring you tell people passwords, even to their own systems. At all. Barring some sort of court order requiring that, which does not exist in this case.

And that's not what he's charged with. He's charged with, essentially, doing his job, with lots of evidence of doing his job introduced as evidence.

Like keeping detailed diagrams of the network at his house....the network he built by hand.

Or installing network sniffers...commericial network sniffers that monitor the network for viruses and hack attempts, like he was supposed to as part of his job.

Or having a modem installed...that paged him in case of network problems.

Or configuring routers to not let people do a 'password reset'...in unsecured locations, like thousands of network admin do to routers they can't lock up to keep people from screwing with them.

Or confronting someone who claims they're doing an 'audit' of his systems and, as he claims, walking out with a hard drive. (They were doing an audit, but he didn't know that.)

They have decided all this means he was planning to bring the network down for some unspecified reason. Of course he could bring the network, any network admin knows enough to bring the network down. If they don't, they don't know enough to do their job keeping it up.

Re:Equal Protection?

[A nonymous Coward]

Oh, and bail is refunded if you show up for court.

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge." -- Anatole France

So very useful, to know that if you could only have borrowed a frightful sum of money many times your yearly income, they would let you have it back years later after the wheels of Justice have ground ever so slowly.

Here we have a classic example of how the law screws the less than wealthy. This guy is thrown in jail at taxpayer expense when an ankle bracelet would have been good enough to keep track of him. He also has no income and gets deeper and deeper into debt.

He is being punished for being charged with a crime, not for being guilty.

Is the government going to pay him for lost wages if he is found innocent? Will they keep up mortgage payments while he is in jail before the trial?

I kinda fucking doubt it. You show me the justice.