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?"

Comments

Re:Take that Terry Childs

[Richard_at_work]

Some of us do and some of us do consider Childs to be guilty. He acted like a prick and suffered for it, but imho he was guilty of what he was found guilty of.

Re:Cost

[erroneus]

He did not care about security other than his own job security. He was one of 'those' types of IT people. You know the ones I mean -- they think "job security" means keeping all the secrets locked away so that only he can fix things when they are broken. Furthermore, they tend to behave as if they own the networks and servers they maintain and they tend to hide their limitations of knowledge and experience from others as well as being unwilling to share what little knowledge they actually have. There might have been a time when that was common enough to be acceptable, but today's business and government leaders see through this.

Good riddance to bad rubbish. "Vendor lock-in" is evil regardless of who practices it.

Re:Inflammatory summary, anyone?

[SJHillman]

The problem isn't that we're defending him. Most people on Slashdot think he's an idiot and a criminal. The problem is the $1.5 million fine. That's around 20 years of his salary (at a comfortable $75k/yr). It's not a matter of whether or not he's guilty or deserves punishment, it's a matter of letting the punishment fit the crime. That pesky eighth amendment that mentions no excessive fines.

Two entirely separate issues

[goldspider]

"...unless they're billing Terry Childs for the City's own failure to set up division of responsibility and standby emergency access procedures?"

What exactly is being insinuated here? That it's the City's fault that Childs decided to commit a crime?

Sorry, pal, it doesn't work that way. Yes, the city has a lot of work to do to clean up its IT policies, but that has no bearing whatsoever on Childs' decision to commit a criminal act.