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.'"

Comments

Re:In the

[Monkeedude1212]

What what?

Jury Nullification

[John Hasler]

If the letter of the law is what convicted Terry Childs, then the law is simply wrong.

That is what jury nullification is for. Unfortunately, most jurors don't know about it and the judges refuse to tell them. Thus the FIJA .

Re:Before everybody gets their shorts all twisted

[Ifni]

Really? Then why is it they consider my password and answering a personal question two-factor authentication? It's possible you work at one of the few banks that actually do authentication properly, but to generalize about the whole banking industry taking security seriously when they pull crap like that, and all but encourage identity theft is a little disingenuous.