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Terry Childs Denied Motion For Retrial
snydeq writes "The former San Francisco network administrator who refused to hand over passwords for one of the city's networks has been denied a new trial and is expected to be sentenced Aug. 6. Terry Childs had been due for sentencing Friday but the court instead heard two defense motions, one requesting a new trial and the other for arrested judgment — essentially to have his original conviction overturned. The motions were both denied but the court then ran out of time before the sentencing phase could be conducted."
Given the byzantine nature of the case, I have little doubt it will be appealed until his lawyers realize he's run out of money.
Withhold a password, go to jail.
Not really sure that justice was served here but the guy really was a first-rate dickhead.
This ain't rocket surgery.
When you've got more pressing legal matters to preside over other than some self-righteous dickhead with a God-complex locking a whole city out of their own network, you will quickly find that you're running out of time.
The legal system is overloaded enough as-is. Just because His Holiness the Network Administrator doesn't want to go to federal PMITA prison is no good reason to cram more stupid shit into our crowded legal system.
"He does his job AFTER he's fired?" HUH?!?!
When you're fired, your job is OVER. Your right to exercise control over the City's stuff is DONE.
Terry Childs is a stupid, neurotic fool. But there's no indication that he's a thief or a scumbag. He's been punished way more than enough by now. I hope the judge gives him credit for time served and ends this.
"He does his job AFTER he's fired?" HUH?!?!
When you're fired, your job is OVER.
... then you are no longer under any obligation to provide passwords or anything else related to your previous job whatsoever.
You can't have it both ways. Was his job OVER or not?
Said passwords were company property he was holding on to.
His job wasn't over at first. He was told that he was being reassigned and should hand over the password. After he refused to do that he was told to create new administrator accounts for the people taking over. It was only after refusing to do that and trying to leave the state that he was arrested and lost his job.
that is the high security mode that is used some times and they did not use this he just turned off the password recovery forcing you to do a full reset to get back in.
A couple summations:
Let's see:
Terry Childs:
City of San Fran
So I recommend that Terry Childs be put to death just for being a jerk and to make sure non of us ever have to work with him again/interact with him again. Then we fire the City of San Fran CIO and forbid him from ever working in IT again.
(bangs gavel)
Advice: on VPS providers
Sorry, but that's retarded. It's like saying you don't have to return a company laptop when you're fired if they forget to take it from your office before they throw you out of the building.
Just because your job is over doesn't mean you are allowed to hold on to things that do not belong to you. These aren't his passwords and it's not his network. It never was, despite what he obviously thinks in his little mind, but it certainly isn't anymore.
Was sentencing delayed because Friday was System Administrator Appreciation Day?
August 6, 2010 will be exactly 65 years after the first Atom Bomb was used in war.
Are you trying to imply that Terry Childs kept the SF wifi network root password to prevent Gavin Newsom from nuking Japan again? And only on the day of his sentencing will Darth Gavin have the power to destroy the world?
It seems plausible enough. Gavin seems very unlikely to have plans for world domination, which of course means that they are no longer mere plans.
In a black and white world maybe.
But both you and OP are being silly.
When your job is over that does not mean that legal obligations end.
I suppose my boss could invite me out for lunch, fire me, and then keep my car, which is parked on company property and accessible via a locked gate with a keycard. My keycard would no longer work, and he'd be under no obligation to do anything for me, a non-employee. Heck, my iPod in my desk drawer. Gone.
The law is rarely black and white and this case is no exception.
Child's went to lenghts to ensure that no one else had the passwords and to ensure that only HE could access the networks. Read some of the juror comments from the trial. This was not a black and white case.
>Terry Childs is a stupid, neurotic fool. But there's no indication that he's a thief or a scumbag. He's been punished way more than enough by now. I hope the judge gives him credit for time served and ends this.
He probably could have cut a deal for time served, if he wanted to at any time. However, he has now seriously pissed off the judge, the prosecutors, and probably the folks writing the pre-sentencing probation report. Not a good percentage play.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Happens all the time. There are very fixed time allowances on appeals. For example, if you plead or are found guilty in federal court, you have ten days to file an appeal, or at least preserve your right to appeal. If you do not file within that ten days (even if you tell your lawyer to do so and he does not) you effectively waive your right to appeal. You may collaterally attack but collateral attacks are civil actions and you are no longer entitled to counsel.
Think that's unfair? There are cases that would blow your minds. How about a death row inmate who filed his pro se appeal late, and was denied appeal of his death sentence. He finally got heard in the US Supreme Court but Scalia and Thomas dissented, saying "too late, too bad, so sad.."
Time limit injustice is way too common, (and tolling is not often granted) but this injustice is not often discussed, because as I often say, citizens in the US know NOTHING about the system that can suck them in at a moment's notice.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
They also want workers that will give access to authorised personnel. Terry didn't do that. Withholding his password is fine, but he also refused to give admin access to people he _knew_ were authorised for it.
I once had a co-worker that disabled admin rights for me (and some others) to the network switches and routers at work. He wanted to lock it down just to people that maintained it (his justification), although I learnt that he had given access to his clique, which included people that were certainly not responsible for network maintenance. Anyway, this prevented me from debugging issues that were handed to me to solve. I tried dealing with him directly, but he was frustratingly obstinate, dismissing out of hand any argument that I gave for my access. I eventually had to ask management to talk with him. Access was grudgingly given back to me.
Thankfully, the guy has now left the company. He caused me enough grief. If he had been like Terry Childs though, it would have been worse.
These kinds of (defense) motions are pretty much rote - and for that reason rarely granted. Don't make too much of the fact that they weren't granted.
Nope. Wasn't his job anymore. Before he was fired he was reassigned to a different job. He was still employed by his job responsibilities no longer included maintaining that equipment. He was introduced to the new person that had that job and asked to give over the passwords. He didn't. It turned out he had booby trapped all the equipment so that only he could make any changes or repair the equipment if it lost power. Still, they were working with him to turn over the passwords to the new guy which he refused to do. The city was setting up another meeting to discuss this even when he decided to withdraw lots of cash and make signals that he was fleeing the country. That's when fed agents decided to arrest him. That's when he was fired. Only then did he say he would turn over the passwords to the mayor when he previously refused to turn them over to anybody because he was playing the "You can't fire me because I have all the passwords." routine a little to hardball. This was not a case of a worried system admin, it was a case of extortion. Perhaps a case of extortion because he is a paranoid nutcase rather than money, but still extortion.
Still, all of that is IIRC. Go back and look at the replies by one of the jurors here on /. who answered everybody's questions about the case and their decision and decide for yourself.
When terminated, he has to rescind said property.
Biometric systems would simply need to be reconfigured on the last day of employment.
Refusal to do so is criminal.
It's no different than being told to "clean our your desk by Tuesday", and then locking the keys to your desk inside the desk.
He is criminally at fault and he is liable to pay to fix it. The fact that he was given the option to fix it himself (relinquish the passwords) has no legal bearing. He was actually given a break by his employees (as he would have been financially broken if he had been forced to cover the costs of having it "fixed" by a third party).
Let's try a car analogy.
You take your car into the dealer to have it serviced.
You don't like the work they do because it's taking to long, they're increasing the estimate, etc. and you decide to take the car somewhere else.
You go to pick up your car and the dealership thinks you're a jerk.
They lock the keys in the car and tell you to fuck off.
Nope. He was arrested for failing to return City property -- namely the password(s), but in searching his house, he still had other City property. (the facts are far more complicated than we'll ever know.) Had he simply turned over the password(s) (in person, in writing) upon termination, there'd be no story. Instead, he was an ass and refused to give the password(s) to any of his "idiot" (former) coworkers/bosses. To be fair, his boss(es) do share some of the blame for letting things get like this to begin with.
snydeq, tell your puppetmasters at InfoWorld to just give this a rest, won't you? Childs was the kind of uber-dickhead SysAdmin that even normal, run-of-the-mill garden-variety dickhead SysAdmins are afraid to associate with lest they appear as parodies of the type.
He didn't have a higher calling. He's not Batman. This ain't no Ayn Rand novel. He was fired and refused to release property that belonged to his former employer. Period, end of story.
And it *would* be the end of the story if the friggin' Drama Club at InfoWorld would stop flogging it on slashdot..
He was a front-lines IT grunt. His job was to do whatever his superiors told him to do, barring any requests to do something illegal. If his superiors order him to open the admin interface to the outside world, and change the password to "password"... other than requesting that the demand be put in e-mail to protect his name, he is supposed to do so.
Exactly what criminal law would not allow him to turn passwords over to his management on request, no matter how unqualified they are? None.
Holding your employer's equipment hostage pending an audience with the mayor? Yeah, that was, and is, criminal. It's called extortion.
SirWired
... then you are no longer under any obligation to provide passwords or anything else related to your previous job whatsoever.
You can't have it both ways. Was his job OVER or not?
Your assessment is incorrect. You're implying a second option where none exists. Unless the terms of hiring Terry Childs consisted of a complete transfer of ownership of the entire network from the City of San Francisco to Terry Childs himself, he had zero right to withhold any account credentials, both during his employment tenure and after his job was terminated. He also had no right to go through their network and booby trap the systems so only he could gain administrative access to them, rendering the entire system useless to anyone who might be filling his position in the future.
I work in IT for a mid-sized business involved in healthcare. Security is my top priority as it relates to our network and infrastructure and I stringently control who has access to what. However, if the person who signs my paycheck comes to me and informs me of a shift in my responsibilities away from the network or is terminating my position and demands that I hand over security credentials so the person coming in after me can do the job, I'll hand it over. I'll ask politely to be given a written request to cover my own ass before turning any information over, a reasonable request that any employer would probably willingly fulfill, be they government or not. But I don't have the right to go out of my way to sabotage the infrastructure to prevent future IT administrators from doing their job, even if I'm being terminated.
I seriously suspect you are trolling, sexconker, but let's analyse your statement just for the fun of it.
Knowledge is not property. There is no no law in the world which claims that the knowledge of something belongs to someone. Even the most draconian "intellectual property" laws in the world do not claim that it is illegal to, for example, tell the ending of a novel to your friend. "Copyright" is just what it sounds like: the exclusive right to manufacture copies of something. That right is the only thing you own when you own the copyright. You don't own the novel in itself. You don't own the information in it.
There are instances in which it is illegal to spread knowledge, for example, exposing military secrets, but that is not because the military "owns" the information. It is illegal because the information is classified and disseminating it would damage the country, regardless of who could be said to "own" it.
They lock the keys in the car and tell you to fuck off.
In my jurisdiction, this is not theft, because the car dealer does not appropriate the car for himself. However, it could still be illegal, on the grounds that the car dealer handles your property without your consent in a way which interferes with your own use of it.
However, information is not property, and having a secret password in your head doesn't mean you have your employer's property in your possession. Refusing to tell your employer the password is not legally equivalent to refusing to return the employer's property. It could be illegal to not tell the password, if the employer is legally obligated to be loyal to his employer or to follow its orders. It could also be breach of contract if he signed an employment agreement.