Slashdot Mirror
Terry Childs's Slow Road To Justice
snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia provides an update on the City of San Francisco's trial against IT admin Terry Childs, which — at eight weeks and counting — hasn't even seen the defense begin to present its case. The main spotlight thus far has been on the testimony of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. 'Many articles about this case have pounced on the fact that after Childs gave the passwords to the mayor, they couldn't immediately be used. Most of these pieces chalk this up to some kind of secondary infraction on Childs's part,' Venezia writes. 'Just because you give someone a password doesn't mean that person knows how to use it. Childs's security measures would have included access lists that blocked attempted logins from non-specified IP addresses or subnets. In short, it was nothing out of the ordinary if you know anything about network security.' But while the lack of technical expertise in the case is troubling, encouraging is the fact that the San Francisco Chronicle's 'breathless piece reporting on the mayor's testimony' drew comments 10-to-1 in Childs's favor, which may indicate that 'public opinion of this case has tilted in favor of the defense,' Venezia writes. Of course, 'if [the trial] drags into summer, Childs will have the dubious honor of being held in jail for two full years.' This for a man who 'ultimately protected the [City's] network until the bitter end.'"
PR like this puts him into a category beyond HR people. Speaking tours are one possibility. If he continues to work in IT, CEOs will be making cold calls to him personally.
Yeah, in some strange fantasy world that doesn't exist.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I read that, and that's complete bullshit. That's what we would call a willfully oversimplistic reading of that agreement.
City bureaucrats are specifically delegated to manage the portion of the city government that they work with. His direct managers, unless very specifically taken out of the loop, are duly authorized to manage that contractor and the equipment assigned to their department. You might see such policies in places like the intelligence community or the military, where data and access is very carefully compartmentalized, but you wouldn't see it in a municipal IT department.
Again, the fact is that the IT department managers had every right to ask for the passwords while he worked there, and he had every right to forget about them after he was terminated. All this case demonstrates is that the SF IT department has been staffed with functional morons, including apparently Childs himself.
As I have said before, it's harder to tell who is dumber here, the incompetent IT management or the guy who got terminated who allowed himself to sit in jail for two years because he wanted to make a point about not life, not liberty, not even the pursuit of happiness, but a damn computer network. I sincerely hope he isn't supposed to be supporting a family.
This is addressed in a preceeding post. He was not following the information security policy, plain and simple.