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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."

7 of 330 comments (clear)

  1. A better link by mcgrew · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Printable version". TFS's link is to a two page version with six paragraphs per page.

    Worse offenders -- even murderers -- get less jail time than Childs
    Consider then, the case of Steven Barnes, the former IT manager for Blue Falcon Networks in San Mateo, Calif. Barnes was convicted of sabotaging Blue Falcon's IT infrastructure in 2008 [4], receiving a sentence of one year and one day in prison and $54,000 in restitution to the company. While Childs' actions caused no disruptions, Barnes deleted all company email, caused the email servers to spew out spam, and intentionally crippled at least some servers, rendering them inoperable. He received a much lighter sentence than Childs -- and in the same court district.

  2. Re:Not Surprising by MightyMartian · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Did a good job? The guy was keeping passwords and router configs in his head. He may be the best IOS programmer around, but that isn't the mark of a good job, that's the mark of an incredible idiot.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  3. More than one person to blame -- that's unamerican by whoever57 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wow, a nuanced view of the problems.

    Before this post gets modded as a troll or flamebait, it is my humble and sincere view as someone born and raised outside the USA, that Americans are often obsessed by finding a single cause for a problem and the idea that there might be multiple causes is rarely explored.

    --
    The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
  4. Re:More than one person to blame -- that's unameri by Yaa+101 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The problem lies in that most US people seem to equal justice with revenge.

  5. Re:It's a question of policy by jythie · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I am not even sure I would call the punishment legal. They really shoehorned a law designed for something else into this case. In many ways he is getting punished for following his employer's rules when politics said he should have broken them.

  6. Re:It's a question of policy by MightyMartian · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Precisely. Whatever else Childs is, he's a shitty administrator. Do you think the city's chief comptroller has the only set of keys to important confidential accounting files? Do you think the city's chief personnel/HR officer has the only set of keys to personnel files?

    As much as all of us IT guys have our moments of self-delusional self-importance, we are, at the end of the day, simply another aspect of any given organization's total infrastructure, and are bound by the same rules, and by the same basic set of good practices. You keep copies of keys, passwords, pass codes, whatever in a secured place. You don't keep them on laptops. You don't keep them in your head. You make damned good and sure that if you were hit by lightning the next morning your employer can assure continuity of operations. That is the most fundamental job anyone in a position of any kind of managerial authority in any organization has.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  7. Re:More than one person to blame -- that's unameri by Grygus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You mean kind of like how a lot of non-Americans like to find the property of "being an American" as somehow intrinsically to blame in so many situations?

    All people need to simplify. You will never understand everything, so you research carefully the things that interest you, and everything else needs to be ignored or fit into a bite-sized piece of intellectualism that you don't need to give any thought to. Nationality has nothing to do with it.