3 of 4 Charges Against Terry Childs Dropped

phantomfive writes "Terry Childs, who was arrested nearly a year ago for refusing to turn over the passwords to San Francisco's FiberWAN network, has been cleared of three of the four charges against him. The dropped charges referred to the attachment of modems to the network; the remaining charge is for refusing to turn over the password. The prosecutor has vowed to appeal, to have the charges reinstated. We have the original story, and the story where Childs tells his side, for those who want a refresher."

Comments

Excelent way to link to that interview.

[MartinSchou]

Link to an old Slashdot story that then links to an archive page that doesn't even have the word Childs on it.

You have to go to page three of the archive to find the bloody interview!

Why the hell is it so difficult to provide direct links to the actual articles?

Charges were not dropped...

[Anita Coney]

I don't have to read the article to know that. If the charges were dropped, the prosecutor would not be vowing to appeal. When a judge gets rid of charges, they're dismissed. When a prosecutor voluntarily gets rid of charges, then they're dropped.

Overzealous prosecutors

[MikeRT]

It's a little known fact that prosecutors cannot be sued for anything they do in court to a defendant. Prosecutors are truly the worst part of the system since they are unaccountable to the public and are rewarded for getting convictions, not enforcing the law wisely. As a profession, they are so corrupt that they make civil lawyers look sympathetic since civil lawyers are at least limiting themselves to cases where you can kinda sorta see how their client was genuinely harmed.

Re:Pathetic accusations

[walmass]

IIRC, he allegedly changed the Cisco configs but never saved them on NVRAM. You can power-cycle Cisco devices and have a 60-second window to get in without knowing the password That was the big problem.. had he saved the configs to NVRAM, the City could have just power-cycled the devices during a maintenance window, gone in and reset the passwords. But the configs being only in volatile memory meant that if they tried that, the boxes would have lost the config, resulting in the "full system failure"--they City network would have gone down.

He did everything by the book

[dbIII]

Here's a chunk of the SF password policy, shamelessly taken from a post by Jeana Pieralde at http://www.burbed.com/2008/07/15/terry-childs-and-the-san-francisco-fiberwan-computer-network/

"Password Policy"
As such, all County employees (including contractors, vendors, and temporary staff with access to County systems) are responsible for taking the appropriate steps, as outlined below, to select and secure their passwords.
All system-level passwords (e.g., root, enable, NT admin, application administration accounts, etc.) must be changed on at least a monthly basis"
"Do not share County passwords with anyone, including administrative assistants or secretaries.

All passwords are to be treated as sensitive, confidential County information.

Here is a list of things to avoid
-Telling your boss your password.
-Talking about a password in front of others.
-Telling your co-workers your passwordwhile on vacation."

http://www.sfgov.org/site/uploadedfiles/dtis/coit/Policies_Forms/CCISDA_security.pdf

So announcing it at a meeting was right out.
The person that should have taken this all into hand and resulted in a normal dismissal instead of an arrest is Chris Vein. He was originally an accountant but many CIOs are and some manage to pick up management skills and familiarity with technology along the way.
Here is what http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=4692 says about him:

San Francisco's CIO Chris Vein calls himself an "accidental CIO." His background includes working in and around the White House during Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations. For the city of San Francisco, Vein's political background has turned out to be an important asset.

It's still possible he got there by merit, but it starting to look like a political appointment. On his linkedin page he describes himself as "Delivering strong and effective leadership", which often means someone that fires people for no good reason to show they are "strong" but maybe I've just seen too many bastards in action that like that word. These things may give an insight or maybe not, but the end result of getting the police involved in a workplace dispute demonstrates to me that he is not paticularly effective, let alone the situation where there was only one person that could do the job. BTW San Francisco, do you have your free WiFi from 2006 yet? If not you now know the name of the guy that was in charge of delivering it.

Re:Actual crime

[dbIII]

I withdraw my wild accusation. The security officer was promoted internally to the post and when she rang the CIO to complain about being caught doing what she was previously not authorised to do it doesn't mean she knew him personally. It's looking like office politics that has been mismanaged so badly that it has been allowed to escape into the legal system with some incredibly wild claims to stop it looking like an over-reaction, just triggered by an employee that wouldn't do what he was told without a reason. The secret promotion thing was just too weird, I would expect at least an email saying "your new computer security officer appointed today is X, please assist her in her work" instead of secret security audits by someone secretly assigned to the position. That shows a both a spectacular level of distrust of employees and poor management.
It really looks like he made someone angry and they decided to put him in jail in revenge.

Re:1M bail and 1yr in jail...?

[Zombywuf]

He didn't say he'd forgotten it because he was simply doing what his job description told him to do. He was called into a room with a dozen people he didn't know, he refused to hand over the password to these people. When a single person (the mayor) who was authorized to know the password asked for it, he handed it over without hesitation.