Juror Explains Guilty Vote In Terry Childs Case

alphadogg writes "Terry Childs, the San Francisco network administrator who refused to hand over passwords to his boss, was found guilty of one felony count of denying computer services, a jury found Tuesday. Now, one of those jurors (Jason Chilton, juror #4) is speaking out in an interview with IDG News Service's Bob McMillan: 'The questions were, first, did the defendant know he caused a disruption or a denial of computer service. It was rather easy for us to answer, "Yes there was a denial of service." And that service was the ability to administer the routers and switches of the FiberWAN. That was the first aspect of it. The second aspect was the denial to an authorized user. And for us that's what we really had to spend the most time on, defining who an authorized user was. Because that wasn't one of the definitions given to us.'"

Comments

Re:Hah!

[Yamata no Orochi]

Let me put it this way.

Who are you and why do we care?

Re:Take some time and think

[CorporateSuit]

Leaving a company locked out of their equipment is not leaving them in working order, nor does it constitute a "lack of damage."

as another poster pointed out, the passwords were retrievable. Also, he was willing to give the passwords to the mayor, as was allowed and expected in his guidelines.

if you can be that wrong, there's not much point in addressing the other ways your "interpretation" of the facts is wrong.

Now you've got me curious. What is the crime, exactly, that You committed? They haven't caught you yet, have they? Do they know what you've done without connecting the case to you, or did they let you off the hook? It wasn't spur of the moment/just happened, was it? It was completely premeditated. You condemn this man with all your power, without solid evidence, and act as if you know something that we don't -- which means you think he did it because YOU did it, and got off the hook for it.

If you were simply lashing out because some sysadmin did the same to YOU and YOUR systems, then you would be able to tell the difference between an act of malice and an anti-social nerd who doesn't know how to quit without burning a bridge. If I am mistaken, and you are, in fact, lashing out against your own previous admin, then I must confess, it was not a conscious betrayal -- he was just ungraceful in quitting and you read too much into it.

But really, you're acting like you're hiding something. Now that I'm onto you, does that mean I'm next? ;)

Re:Passive Denial of Service is a Bad Precedent

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

More accurately,

No, that is not more accurately - in fact it isn't even a more precise analogy - keys being physical property so failure to return them is simple theft, no actual damage occurred in Child's case, etc.

In fact, it misses the entire point, which was NOT to make an analogy at all. It was to show how the same principle of criminalization of inaction is contrary to the spirit of denial of service laws as they were popularized and probably as most legislators understood them, if they understood them at all, when they were written.