San Francisco Just As Guilty In Terry Childs Case

snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia follows up on the Terry Childs sentencing, stating that the City of San Francisco is as much at fault in this case as Childs is. 'The way that the San Francisco IT department has been run is nothing short of abysmal, and that has been pointed out time and again by anyone paying attention to this case,' Venezia writes. 'Plenty of dirty laundry was aired out in court as well, yet through it all, the city has had a full-court press on Childs, and being both the plaintiff and the prosecution it spared no expense to drill Childs into the ground.' Worse, perhaps, is the disproportion of the sentence, when compared with recent convictions for intended malfeasance on the part of several notable rogue IT admins."

Comments

Re:It's a question of policy

[david_thornley]

By that time, he'd already committed what he was convicted of.

Childs refused to record passwords, in direct violation of policy. When being moved from his current job, he refused to hand over passwords etc. in any environment, again in direct violation of policy. He then prepared to leave town without handing them over.

No competent sysadmin sets things up so he's the only person with the passwords, so that the network is simply screwed if he's hit by a bus. Childs went one further: he had the password for a file on his personal laptop that had the passwords in it. Had his laptop been destroyed, or the file system corrupted, the passwords would be lost.

Re:Custodial sentences for non violent crimes

[PCM2]

But the United States the trend seems to be regressing thanks to grandstanding politicians and bloodthirsty voters who won't countenance even the slightest hint of being "soft on crime".

That's not even the end of the story. Don't forget that a growing number of prisons in the United States are being privatized. There have already been cases of judges who have been convicted for imposing harsh sentences without appropriate judicial review, because they were accepting kick-backs from the prison industrial complex.