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Ex-SF Admin Terry Childs Gets 4-Year Sentence
Robert McMillan writes "You remember Terry Childs, right? He was
finally sentenced Friday. Childs got four years in prison for refusing to hand over passwords to his bosses. This is a denial of service under California law."
This just goes to show how asinine most "anti-hacking" laws are. Most were written in the 1980s during a big moral panic about "hackers" bringing down the telephone network, corporate networks, and western civilisation as we know it. You can very easily get more time in jail for, what most would consider a prank, than for rape or other violent crimes.
It is interesting that in this case Terry Childs did very little actual damage but got 4 years. In fact more damage was done when the prosecutor decided to publish a list of working passwords for the cities computer network. Just goes to show the kind of technophobic old people working in the city offices and in law.
I know this sounds very arrogant, but I would love to see trials change so you're actually judged by your peers instead of members of the public, so for example doctors by doctors, network admin by other network admin, and such. That way you can get a bunch of people who know how far this person has stepped out of line.
Just for clarity, what Terry Childs did was wrong - but he certainly didn't deserve jail. Even if he did deserve jail he already spent a year inside before the trial (for some ungodly reason) and that was more than enough time served for this. The only reason they kept pushing this is to avoid the huge lawsuit if they failed to get a sentence longer than the time he already spent inside.
Well I'm just not sure how to respond to such obstinance. There is plenty of information out there as to why the jury voted as they did and what law was broken and so on. If you are unwilling to read and understand that, I can't help you. Some people just want to be paranoid, I guess.
Also this "Luddite boss" thing really reeks of ego mania. Far too many sysadmins think they are the Smartest Motherfuckers in the Universe and that there is no way their boss could possibly understand any of this because he's not as good at tech. Turns out that's often not the case, a manager may understand technology and more important the limits of their own knowledge about technology just fine. They may well be an intelligent individual, just with some different skills than yourself.
I'm not saying some aren't dumbassess, but then so are some sysadmins. I'm just saying this attitude of "Only tech people can possibly understand," is extremely arrogant.
So when they had had to shut down the city VPN for days because of the morons that put all the passwords in court documents...that was a "denial of service" as well. Why haven't those people been arrested?
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
I'm just saying this attitude of "Only tech people can possibly understand," is extremely arrogant.
It's also bad engineering. If the system is so fragile that you're the only one who can work on it, then you're doing a bad job. What if you get hit by a bus? What if you decide to quit so you can accept your dream job? Whatever you build should be (at least mostly) maintainable by any other average practitioner with similar credentials.