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Rough Justice For Terry Childs
snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia sees significant negative ramifications for IT admins in the wake of yesterday's guilty verdict for Terry Childs on a count of 'denial of service.' Assuming the verdict is correct, Venezia writes, 'shouldn't the letter of the law be applied to other "denial of service" problems caused by the city while they pursued this case? In particular, to the person or persons who released hundreds of passwords in public court filings in 2008 for causing a denial of service for the city's widespread VPN services? After all, once the story broke that a large list of usernames and passwords had been released to the public, the city had to take down its VPN services for days while they reset every password and communicated those changes to the users.' Worse, if upheld on appeal, the verdict puts a vast number of IT admins at risk. 'There are suddenly thousands of IT workers all over the country that are now guilty of this crime in a vast number of ways. If the letter of the law is what convicted Terry Childs, then the law is simply wrong.'"
The juror has been interviewed some already, and is even on /.
I had many bad assumptions myself. But if the juror is being at all truthful...this guy did some bad things.
@see http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1633482&cid=32010078
If you've never built a large network, it's easy to underestimate what I'm saying. It's not just the passwords, but also how to use them. This isn't like sitting down in front of a Linux box and logging in. It probably includes needing to know the topology of the network, such as "if jonesville router 1a is down, its console is connected to the aux port on jonesville router 1b, but to get to that when the routing protocol has imploded, you might need to first dial in to the out-of-band modem on barton router 2a, ssh over to barton router 1b, then use the link address of jonesville router 1b to ssh to, then connect up to the console port."
As for harm, what actual harm did he actually do? Did he down the entire network? Did he allow criminals access to their network? Take a look at the "harm" claimed and see what portions of it you can actually attribute to him INSTEAD of the city.
His boss can head to jail for the very same reason he is; his boss caused denial of service by failing to guarantee that the city had unimpeded access to the network. What's good for the goose is good for the gander and all that.