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Judge Orders Former San Francisco Admin Terry Childs To Pay $1.5M
0WaitState writes "A judge Tuesday ordered a former city worker who locked San Francisco out of its main computer network for 12 days in 2008 to pay nearly $1.5 million in restitution, prosecutors said.' Keep in mind the network never went down and no user services were denied, and given that Terry Childs was the only one who had admin access (for years prior) it is difficult to understand how they came up in $1.5 million in costs, unless they're billing Terry Childs for the City's own failure to set up division of responsibility and standby emergency access procedures?"
I just RTFA. It says the money is to
repay the city for its efforts in trying to regain control over the FiberWAN network and later test it for vulnerabilities. City officials had been worried that Childs, who helped set up the network but clashed with his supervisors, might try to sabotage it.
Mind, he already spent 2 years in custody and was convicted to 4 years of jail.
so I looked myself and found this article
http://sfappeal.com/news/2011/05/sf-network-engineer-convicted-of-witholding-passwords-ordered-to-pay-15-million-restitution.php
"No city services were ever affected, but officials said they could have been crippled if power had somehow been shut off.
A jury convicted Childs in April 2010 of a computer tampering-related charge, and today San Francisco Superior Court Judge Teri Jackson ordered him to pay $1,485,791 in restitution to the Department of Technology,"
he's paying it to the department of technology, not justice.. so... no...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Not really, just a financial ruin sentence. You can't get out of legal penalties by declaring bankruptcy :(
yes, withhold passwords on a network resulting in no measurable loss, get 20yrs of income as fine. Damage and destroy an ecosystem causing loss of animal life and depressing an entire area economically; get fines that amount to about 7~mos of income. That's called justice.
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
I don't think too many on /. think that deserves jail time though. A firing for unprofessional conduct: sure.
As I understand it, what transformed his case from an employment issue to a criminal issue was when he decided to try to flee the state while still in possession of the passwords and configuration backups that he was keeping from everyone else. If he had just stuck around and worked with his employer to resolve the issue, he likely wouldn't ever have seen the inside of a jail cell.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Why is there never a middle ground in the justice system between ruining someones life and letting them go free?
Just to be clear, there is a middle ground, and the middle ground is used in the vast majority of prosecutions. It's called a plea bargain. Most people charged with crimes are guilty, and most guilt can be demonstrated at trial. So, everyone can save a lot of trouble with a guilty plea, and a negotiated punishment. That's the middle ground.
Some people are guilty and yet won't bargain. In this case, prosecutors will generally take a big sigh and go to trial, demonstrate guilt, and try to get the maximum punishment. That's NOT the middle ground, because the middle ground was already passed by.
There is plenty of room for legitimate criticism of the system, but there are sliding scales in the different dimensions of justice.
The punishment for not doing your job or doing it wrong by violating procedures or otherwise is getting fired. He was fired, that's plenty of punishment.
Anything else they are adding on top of it is a violation of his 8th amendment protections, any competent lawyer should get these extra penalties overturned.
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Justice served.