Posted on 07/23/2008 11:13:39 AM PDT by nickcarraway
The mayor of San Francisco has obtained the password to the city's multimillion-dollar computer network password from a disgruntled employee during a secret jailhouse visit, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
On Monday night, Mayor Gavin Newsom met Terry Childs, a Department of Telecommunications and Information Services employee charged with computer tampering, in a secret meeting and walked away with the password to the city's new FiberWAN (Wide Area Network), the Chronicle said.
The system stores such records as officials' e-mails, city payroll files, confidential law enforcement documents and jail bookings.
Childs has been held since July 13 and had reportedly refused to give officials the password to the multimillion-dollar system. Officials said Childs had been disciplined for poor performance in recent months and that higher-ups wanted him fired.
Childs' lawyer Erin Crane said in court documents that Childs was withholding the password to protect the system from "malicious" damage, the Chronicle said.
"Mr. Childs had good reason to be protective of the password," Crane said. "His co-workers and supervisors had in the past maliciously damaged the system themselves, hindered his ability to maintain it ... and shown complete indifference to maintaining it themselves.
"He was the only person in that department capable of running that system," Crane said in the document. "There have been no established policies in place to even dictate who would be the appropriate person to hand over the password to."
Newsom's spokesman, Nathan Ballard, told the Chronicle that the mayor figured the secret Monday meeting "was worth a shot, because although Childs is not a Boy Scout, he's not Al Capone either."
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
I left my password in San Fran . . . .
What’s the big deal...oh I know...they couldn’t process all those gay marriage certificates!
So, did Gavin sleep with him for it?
Ping
"Newsom's spokesman, Nathan Ballard, told the Chronicle that the mayor figured the secret Monday meeting "was worth a shot, because although Childs is not a Boy Scout, he's not Al Capone either.""
Considering the city and this mayor perhaps using the phrase "worth a shot" might not have been the best turn of phrase...
Good. Now fire the guy and send him home. The guy was a jerk and I don’t want my taxes paying for his salary but in a city where you can murder a police officer without fear of the death penalty I really don’t think someone should be sent to jail for refusing hand over network passwords.
Fire his superiors too. They are the ones who didn’t have proper security policies in place and they are the ones who are responsible for this mess and should really be punished.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5...the kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage...
It’s free and it works. Of course these are two reasons why SF’s IT department would never use it.
think of what would have happened if this guy off’d himself. san fran would be screwed!
When software geeks attack?
Hey, that’s the combination to my briefcase!
San Fran Mayor Gets City's Network Password From Disgruntled Employee in Secret Jailhouse Meetings/b
San Fran Mayor Gets City's Network Safeword From Disgruntled Employee in Secret Jailhouse MeetingI hate to think what "disgruntled" indicates in SF...
So... was the password ‘bugger’?
Not so fast.
How do you know that this guy wasn't the only truly sane person in that department?? Think about it: what are the odds that truly sane people will outnumber nutcases in government jobs in the government offices of the City and County of San Francisco??
Knowing that open-air asylum as I do, I'm quite readily inclined to assign the tag "sane" to those in the minority position, and w/resp to this story, that'd be the beleaguered IT guy.
Now, only time will tell whether he cut a good deal giving up the password at this stage of the game. He might have done better holding onto it until the D.A. agreed to drop all charges and close the case in return for it.
Don't think that could happen?
Think again. The only other option would have been to prosecute the guy, never get the password, and be forced to replace literally millions of dollars worth of network hardware.
I think the D.A. might well have caved, if the guy had the nerve to hold out for his own complete exoneration.
After all, it's not like he actually harmed anyone, and it is at least admissible that his actions prevented harm.
We shall see.
I think the guy is sane and that he felt beleaguered but what we have here is a classic case of CCIE arrogance.
You can make the argument that any organization that lets this sort of thing happens deserves it but what he did was dead wrong.
There would be no need to buy any new hardware. I’d be willing to bet that if Gavin called Johnny Chambers and asked to borrow some hardware he’d get it quick.
That doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be a little disruption - “All” they’d have to do is completely mirror the network and bring it up in parallel (with no documentation), debug every config and ACL, wipe the original hardware, transfer the configs from the loaner gear to the original hardware, debug again and you’d be good to go (except for a few little uglies that weren’t caught in the first round of testing). 911 Emergency Services, police, fire and other critical departments probably wouldn’t be down for more that a few days max.
Then again, wanna bet Cisco can’t get around a block on password recovery?
The bottom line is, the guy and his superiors all deserve to be fired. And no, I don’t want any of their jobs.
It seems that the password is a term never used in San Francisco....missionary.
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