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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 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.
/. 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?
Like I said, a
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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.
At first I thought the citizens were going to have to pay for the cleanup and fixing of all the problems, along with the trial and all that. Now that I know this criminal with no job prospects will be paying the $1.5M I can sleep better at night.
My personal ideas about job integrity end at or a little before the threat of getting arrested so I could argue I don't think what he did was wise (I would've made the guy wanting the passwords put it in writing and then quietly laughed when they broke things), but I don't think the punishment fits the crime at all. Why is there never a middle ground in the justice system between ruining someones life and letting them go free?
And why can't the city just let this one go? They won a long time ago.. back when he was fired, jailed, etc and he surrendered the passwords without the network ever going down.
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.
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.
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.
"...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.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
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.