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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.'"
I've worked in the public sector a while and what I learned is - if the agency head(s) ask you to do something job related, even if it's against the policy that's printed out, you do it.
If the superintendent of a school district says - "Whats the password for root on the server?" You tell them.
I have zero sympathy for Childs, he took ownership of something that didn't belong to him, sure he designed it, but it was bought and paid for by the City of San Francisco, and he turned into a control freak. When someone higher up the food chain started poking around "his" stuff he got whacky and tried to stand up to one of the biggest cities in the US. Well guess what, you will lose that fight.
Poor Terry Childs. Exactly the kind of personality that would have him be able to design a system resistant to sustained, vicious attack is what landed him in jail.
Childs' only crime was exposing the ignorance and impotence of those who imagine themselves superior.
The comments in the earlier thread reveal this was a case that called out for jury nullification. Sadly, this did not happen.
Law is most fundamentally not about "justice," but about enforcing the rule of the powerful.
Your right... Childs thought the network was "his"... he was wrong. The passwords are intellectual property and as such he isnt allowed to keep it. He is however allowed to "forget" the passwords. Then there would have been nothing they could have done to him. His problem was he had an ego, and that ego will get him time in prison. In short, the guy mad a bad judgement call based oh his miscalculated self importance. He deliberately and purposely hid intellectual property. It has been in every employment agreement I have ever signed that you must surrender all passwords, notes, documents, sketches upon termination. Everything you design and implement on company time and on company systems is company property. That includes the passwords. Oh well. Looks like he will learn the hard way to read what you sign.
even if it was a case of him thinking lives were in danger, he could always just claim he didn't remember them.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Child's boss is a public servant delegated the job by the mayor. that's how government works. what you think the mayor handles everything personally? how much more of a thinking fail can you have...
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Maybe... but they had access to the machines... so he wasn't really fucking them over. Even an incompotent IT guy would know that it isn't a big deal.
your all missing the point by a wide margin. if someone else screws up, why would child's care. if you read into the story you'll actually see the guy was a fucking control freak, that was his only concern.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....