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Terry Childs Found Guilty
A jury in San Francisco found Terry Childs guilty of one felony count of computer tampering. The trial lasted four months. Childs now faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
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Ok the real lesson, sorry to say is: if the Feds want you they will have you. There is a reason why 95+% of indictees plead out. How do I know this? I just emerged from a five year fed sentence at a lovely FCI in Ohio.
Without getting too detailed...I was a media consultant for a major media multinational. The Feds did not like that my focus was piracy but I would not divulge IPs, nyms or rat anyone. After some rather appalling disinformation was seeded (see Darknet...an utter load of made up BS) I was accused of damaging a portable toilet (I am not making this up) and faced life for 18 USC 844(i) and 18 USC 924(c). I was forced to plead out to a mandatory minimum of five years, which I just finished. (in fact, I'm still in a halfway house).
The charges and the character assasination were ALL bullshit. But would you have thrown the dice with a jury and risked life? Me neither.
The feds hate geeks, unless we work for them. Be VERY afraid and very careful. I'll get my life back but the past 52 months were not fun.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
A lot of differing opinions being tossed around here.
But, Slashdot, can we please stop accepting "fuck off" as acceptable debate discourse? And then cheerfully modding it up?
We're adults here, I think we can debate the pros and cons of this situation intellectually without resorting to hurling epithets at eachother.
Thank you in advance for not modding me "Troll" and "Offtopic".
Lets try this from the other persepective:
Your Employer: Give me the password.
You: But you told me I'd be liable for anything that happens if I give it to you.
Your Employer: Give me the password!!
You: No. I don't want to be liable.
Your Employer: You're fired!!!
You: Fine.
Your Employer: Give me the password!!!!
You: I don't work for you anymore. And I still don't want to be liable.
Your Employer: Peon!!!! I own you!!!!!! I'll grind you into dust!!!!! Lawyers! Destroy him!!!
And they did.
You know what the moral of this story is? Don't work for anyone.
May the Maths Be with you!
Now that I am able to speak about this case, I can give you my take on the matter as having been a juror on it. Having not been able to read about the case during its duration, I can't replay to everything that's been said about it, but I will at least provide my perspective.
This case should have never come to be. Management in the city's IT organization was terrible. There were no adopted security policies or procedures in place. This was a situation that management allowed to develop until it came to this unfortunate point. They did everything wrong that they possibly could have to create this situation. However, the city was not on trial, but Terry Childs was. And when we went into that jury room, we had very explicit instructions on what laws we were to apply and what definitions we were to follow in applying those laws.
This jury was not made up of incompetent people or idiots. Every single person on there was very educated and well-spoken. I myself am a network engineer with a CCIE and thirteen years experience in the field.
This was not a verdict that we came to lightly. There were very difficult points to overcome in reaching it. We were not allowed to let our emotions or biases determine the matter, because if they could there may have been a different outcome. Quite simply, we followed the law. I personally, and many of the other juror, felt terrible coming to this verdict. Terry Childs turned his life around and educated himself in the networking field on very complex technologies. One different decision by him, or more effective management by the city could have completely avoided this entire scenario. But those are not factors we could consider as a jury. We applied the law as it was provided to us and our verdict was the unfortunate, but inevitable result.
I'm sure many people posting are of the mindset that he's not guilty because he shouldn't reveal the passwords, some policy says this or that, or whatever. You're entitled to your opinion, but let me tell you that I sat through FIVE MONTHS of testimony, saw over 300 exhibits, and personally wrote over 200 pages of notes. I will guarantee you that no matter what you think of the matter, you do not have the full story, or even 10% of it. I am confident that we reached the correct verdict, whether I like it or not.
Allow me to elucidate this for you. I won't give the full details, but essentially this juror went into deliberations, had already made up his mind, informed the rest of the jurors that he had thought about the matter on his own and made up his mind, and didn't want to hear anything more about it. This is before we even went through all the questions we were required to examine per the jury instructions! Furthermore, he would not explain his position to the other eleven jurors.
He was not released for "having his own opinion" or being "a lone holdout". In fact, we welcomed a lively debate from both sides of the argument as that's a necessary part of jury deliberations. He was dismissed for other reasons, including outright refusal to follow the jury instructions and the law as provided to us by the judge.
It was more difficult because there is no legal definition of "authorized user", and in that case we are left to use a common sense definition of the term. That may be easy to do, but the harder part is determining who those people are, because in different companies and organizations, policies in place many time determine who they are. So now we have another problem here in that there was no formal policy or procedure in place to determine who is an "authorized user", so we had to use the evidence available to us to determine who Terry Childs would reasonably believe an authorized user would be.
To do that, we had to look through a lot of testimony, in addition to pieces of evidence which showed who he had previously determined to be "authorized users". In the end it was our determination that he knew the person requesting access was authorized to have it. Like I said, this was really the hardest question for us to answer, but after examining job descriptions, job vacancy bulletins, performance appraisals, numerous emails, etc., we were able to reach the conclusion we did.
Terry Childs already had this knowledge (as evidenced in the emails). We had to spend the time to sift through all the information to make sure we were beyond a reasonable doubt about this conclusion.