Posted on 07/22/2008 8:55:44 PM PDT by SmithL
SAN FRANCISCO -- "The first thing I want you to know, Mr. Mayor, is that when you walk out of this room, you will have the computer codes."
Those words - delivered to Mayor Gavin Newsom by imprisoned city computer tech Terry Childs in a small, fourth-floor room at city jail Monday - signaled the beginning of the end of the weeklong standoff in which San Francisco officials found themselves in the embarrassing position of being locked out of their own computer system.
Childs - whom some have described as a friendly, hard worker at the city Technology Department, and others have labeled an over-the-top control freak - has been sitting in jail since July 13 on $5 million bail, after being arrested for reconfiguring key passwords in the city's computer system.
A team of code crackers brought in from Cisco Systems had been working around the clock to try to decipher Childs' codes, but with only marginal success.
"It wasn't cheap and I just couldn't see us keep spending that kind of money," Newsom said.
Then, out of the blue, Childs' lawyer, Erin Crane, called the mayor's officer Monday afternoon, offering a jailhouse meeting.
Childs, according to the lawyer, was ready to give up the codes - but only to the mayor, who had gone out of his way in his public comments not to portray Childs as some sort of monster.
Newsom didn't hesitate. Without asking the city attorney for an opinion or giving a heads up to police or the district attorney, he was at the Hall of Justice in half an hour.
With Crane by his side, Childs told Newsom about the computer system he'd set up and how all the current problems sprang from a series of misunderstandings.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Don’t think I’d have given Newsom the codes. Course I don’t know if I’d have put myself in the situation this guy did.
Was it a conjugal visit?
.
ping...
Course I don’t know if I’d have put myself in the situation this guy did.
Some purportedly insider-based information paints a very plausible layout of how this might have happened. Best practice is even the security officer does not possess unaudited access to passwords; i.e., first of all, the passwords are somehow protected, and if the officer demands the password to use it, it leaves a visible trail, whether it is a log entry by a human guard, a broken envelope, or anything deemed sufficient to indicate the password has been used.
If Childs perceived the security officer was politically-appointed and not appointed by merit, and was not aware of this basic best practice, then it was entirely reasonable to challenge the demand for possessing the password. His mistake was not escalating to management immediately with a clear paper trail, so he can wash his hands of liability. He could have implemented automated version control snapshots of the IOS config dumps for example, and busted anyone on unauthorized changes after washing his hands of liability.
I predict Newsom will not spend any political capital to get Childs' case dismissed, and leave Childs out to hang. If so, I'm hiring him on contract when he is able to get out of jail; I need a network engineer with those kind of chops who can tell me straight up what is going on.
In the future Hollywood movie version:
Mayor provides sexual favors to jailed computer tech, in exchange for codes
Mayor passes codes to Cisco techs
Turns out codes aren’t passwords at all - they initiate a self-destruct reformatting that wipes clean all of the city’s hard drives, tape drives, etc.
Result: Embarrassed and publicly humiliated Mayor has provided prisoner with sexual favors and instead of achieving goal of re-acquisition of control of city computers, all storage and memory has been wiped out
Jailed computer tech is still jailed but very happy
That would be an entertaining thriller!!
In the movie, the bad guy will be illegal and he’ll be released from jail and live in the mayor’s guest house.
I think I know who the inside source is in that article, a colleague of mine. I used to have the job that Terry now has (I'm retired now). Everything in that article mirrors what I believe to be true. Terry Childs is not as bad as the media is portraying him. I had a chuckle reading "Even the network architect left it to Terry to actually figure out implementation. Terry felt that his direct superior was intrusive, incompetent, and obstructive, and that the managers above him had no real idea of what was going on, and were more interested in office politics than in getting anything done."
I worked with the city network architect for years. He was penny-wise and pound-foolish, always making bone-head decisions that steered the city on the wrong course, and engineers would have to save the day. Shortly after City Hall was damaged during the 1989 earthquake, we had to move the data center out of City Hall. I was tasked with supervising technicians in wiring LANs at four major move sites. The network architect spec'd CAT3 wiring with single ports at each cubicle, to save money. I argued for CAT5 and four ports, but lost the arguments. We had major problems after the move, and ended up rewiring everything as CAT5 with four ports, cost big money.
I worked for the same direct superior as Terry, and he was indeed intrusive and incompetent. I and the other engineers faced constant stress. And because they brought in an incompetent new security chief, that was the straw that broke Terry. My feeling is that Terry spoke at length to Mayor Newsom about wrong-doing by the new security chief. She needs to be in jail, not Terry. Hopefully, the mayor will get the charges dropped against Terry, or reduced substantially. There are some very talented technicians working for the city. Unfortunately there are some very bad managers as their bosses, and the politics are very thick.
What you read in "Dilbert" comics happens daily in our department. For instance, years ago, one higher-up manager demanded weekly statistics on the number of lines of code added, modified, etc. And would then parrot back grand totals in weekly meetings. The higher the numbers, the more excited he became. So we got together before meetings and made up numbers for him; and could barely contain chuckles during the meetings. We did some serious work, and managers were clueless.
Thank you for bringing clarity to a murky situation in San Francisco. I acknowledge that the brilliant engineers like you were directed by dense and sluggish supervisors. I shall pray for Terry. The situation is similar to Disneyland in Burbank: the brilliant engineers are directed by a lady who moved to Burbank from the retail department in Anaheim. Numerous engineers quit and Roy Disney worked for three years to get Michael Eisner fired. Roy won.
When is it coming out(pun intended)? Now that is one movie I would PAY to see!
Terry's situation is not just about dense and sluggish supervisors. There's some Dr. Evil in some of them. Here's a situation that happened to me years ago. We had a failure of a router at a major site where most of our applications programmers resided. I had been demanding to have spare routers on hand for critical sites. My boss denied my requests (he later became the city's network architect). His argument was that our contract with Cisco provided for 4-hour turnaround on replacement equipment. My experience was that salesmen tell you anything to cement the deal, but reality often differs from contractual obligations. This was the early days of Cisco, when I had to do updates by swapping ROM chips (no flash updates via the internet).
Sure enough, when I confirmed with Cisco that the router was dead, they said they would speed a replacement to me. Hours went by, still no router. Then Cisco told me there were none on the West Coast, and they would try to fly one out from the East. I didn't get a replacement until the next day. So much for 4-hour contracts.
Meanwhile, the department director was trying to get information from me, so she could respond to the mayor's inquiries. My boss screamed and demanded that I tell her nothing, and threatened to fire me. This is the kind of crap that Terry probably has to put up with, and why he wanted to talk personally with Mayor Newsom.
“What you read in “Dilbert” comics happens daily in our department. For instance, years ago, one higher-up manager demanded weekly statistics on the number of lines of code added, modified, etc. And would then parrot back grand totals in weekly meetings. The higher the numbers, the more excited he became. So we got together before meetings and made up numbers for him; and could barely contain chuckles during the meetings.”
Back in 84, I was working as a software developer and we ended up getting a new manager for our group. Our previous manager was a techie and was brilliant. The new manager , not so much. It so happens, we had a leak in the roof causing water to start flooding the computer room. Raised floor, bus cables, etc. He requested the operations staff to find umbrellas to put over the equipment. UnF*ing believable. BTW, I have a cousin that worked with Scott at PacBell. He started writing the Dilbert comic while he was still employed at PacBell and after Dilbert was syndicated, was asked to leave because Dilbert hit a raw nerve. Scott didn’t have to make any of this up.
Yeah, a lot of that stuff in Dilbert really happens! Back in the 80s, I helped startup a new mainframe center for department of public health, was one of two system engineers running it. Of course since it was civil service, they had idiot managers put in charge. Hospitals wanted it up 24/7, even in emergencies. Me and my colleague suggested monthly testing of power-out conditions, but the manager shot down the idea, says the contractors who built it covered emergency situations and he had procedures and we couldn't afford any downtime.
Shortly after we went live production, we had a city-wide power outage, the mainframe and all equipment went down cold after a short time. The battery back-up systems in the basement had died. The diesel generator had failed to kick-in and charge the batteries. Turns out the generator had very little fuel, and there were no supplies of diesel fuel on hand. And it wasn't in the procedures. After that incident, monthly testing of power-out conditions became a regular ritual. Oh, also, we found out that all the backup tapes were bad, as the contractors erred in their setups. They gave us shoddy documentation and we had to reverse-engineer everything to fix it. The manager had signed off on everything with the contractors before talking to me and my colleague.
What fool’s we suffer.
This is funny because most executives haven’t a clue about their computer systems because, “That’s just technical stuff. You know...boring.” They refuse to use even the least amount of common sense to help ensure their computer systems are safe and operational. About the only thing these feeble minded executives know is that they can access their email from their crackberry.
Ouch...that's a low blow...
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