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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."
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.
Except if you had done that in this particular case you would of been rebuilding the entire network from the ground up. Terry Childs deleted the startup-config on most of the network equipment so that the only copy was in running-config. He kept the configuration of every device in an encrypted drive on his laptop. If a network device was restarted or power cycled, he would log into the device and copy over the running-config.
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.
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.
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..