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Judge Orders Former San Francisco Admin Terry Childs To Pay $1.5M

Posted by timothy on from the rough-justice dept.

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?"

7 of 488 comments (clear)

  1. Queue the dude who was on the jury by L4t3r4lu5 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I forget a lot of what he said, but one of the points which stuck out for me was that Terry kept the keys / passwords out of the key management system, which was against policy. He kept the Keys to the Kingdom in his head, which is just bad IT policy. He also cleaned the backup configs on switches so that any reboots would essentially wipe them clean.

    Like I said, a /. poster was on the jury. He'll chip in with better information than anyone else. As for the fine... Well, if he doesn't have that money, he'll default like everyone else would and live off welfare. Shows the system works, eh?

    --
    Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
    1. Re:Queue the dude who was on the jury by DrgnDancer · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The problem often comes in determining at what point "marginal and mistreated" ends and "sociopathic desire to hurt anyone who slights me" begins. For every anecdote like yours, there's another about a geek who was simply paranoid or antisocial enough to *feel* victimized by the normal churn of the day. A guy (or girl) who wrote your kill script, or something worse, with the full intention of using it. It's not even hard to imagine such a person (your old boss seems the type). Which is more common? Really hard to say, ask employees and they'll probably say your situation, ask managers, they'll probably say the opposite. Most people can't point to more than a handful of examples of either situation though.

      Businesses and governments clearly need to watch out for and prepare for either situation. Ironically, your anecdote shows that at least in the first of your two cases, your company was doing exactly that. Someone did notice your boss' bad behavior and did something about it. Management isn't *always* incompetent or out to get you. In this case their actions both protected the marginalized and mistreated workers, and hopefully avoided a future Terry Childs situation on the form of your obviously immature and potentially dangerous boss.

      In the case of Child's himself, there's a significant disconnect as to whether he was a marginalized victim, or a childish asshat lashing out at perceived injustice. To hear him talk sometimes, he was the former. Other times, he seems a lot more like the latter (obviously management thought he was the latter). I'm inclined to believe that, while he probably doesn't deserve the level of punishment he's gotten, his actions were blameworthy.

      --
      I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
  2. Re:Take that Terry Childs by Moryath · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's probably billing him for the temerity to actually take his case to trial.

    You know, exercising his constitutional rights. That's something the "justice" system has to punish at all costs.

    Here's some info for you.
    Here's more.

    Or, to put it in a more sinister way: You get a heavier sentence if you insist on asserting your constitutional rights to a trial, to confront your accusers, to privacy from searches without probable cause, to avoid incriminating yourself, etc.

  3. A fine example of American justice by seniorcoder · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Terry Childs was clearly on an excessive one-man power trip. I don't think too many on /. think that deserves jail time though. A firing for unprofessional conduct: sure. A $1.5M fine? This just adds to the farce. I'm sure the head of the IMF will get a fair trial. He has already been convicted (by the media) and is in jail. ... now all we need to do is to get most of Wall Street in jail. They have been tried in the media but not put in jail.

  4. what really happened? by doperative · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Mr. Childs clashed with the new Security Manager on the subject of authentication and control, which led to poor formal review.

    Sorting out fact from fiction in the Terry Childs case

  5. Re:I thought the exact same thing by hesiod · · Score: 4, Interesting

    he's paying it to the department of technology, not justice

    Just because it's not a court-ordered bribe doesn't mean it's definitely not a punishment verdict.

  6. Re:Take that Terry Childs by Richard_at_work · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How much is a full review of the network, from the bare bones upward, including reflashing all firmware, and checking all servers going to cost in a city wide network?

    $1.5m would be cheap for that.