The Incompetence Of San Francisco City “Leadership”
San Francisco is proceeding with plans to prosecute a mal-content that hijacked one of the city’s computer networks, and that’s good.
Before retiring in 2000 I spent 45 years in senior positions of “Information Technology” (i.e., Data Processing, Information Systems, etc.) with some of America’s largest and most prestigious corporations. I feel strongly that I had some influence on what computers mean in today’s world and I’m very proud of that. Ergo, it sets me off, severely, when some fruitcake can pull a stunt like the one described:
SF engineer to stand trial in hijacked network
A network administrator will stand trial for allegedly hijacking the network he designed and maintained for the city of San Francisco.
A superior court judge ruled Wednesday that there was enough evidence to hold Terry Childs for trial on four felony charges of tampering with a computer network, denying other authorized users access to the network, and causing more than $200,000 in losses, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle. Childs, who has been in custody since July 13, had worked at San Francisco’s Department of Telecommunication Information Services for five years. Childs, 44, is being held on $5 million bail and is scheduled to be arraigned on January 13.
Childs is accused of tampering with the city’s Fiber Wide Area Network after allegedly being disciplined for poor performance. He was also accused of electronically spying on his supervisors and their attempt to fire him.
Childs allegedly denied other administrators access to the system, which maintains law enforcement, payroll, and jail-booking records. Childs reportedly refused to surrender secret codes that would allow access to the system.
However, after a week in the city’s jail, Childs agreed to give the access codes to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom during a secret jail house visit. The meeting reportedly was so secret that the police department and district attorney were not informed of the meeting ahead of time.
Childs’ attorney has claimed that there was no destructive intent and that Childs was merely protecting the network from incompetent city officials who were trying to force him out of his job.
“Mr. Childs had good reason to be protective of the password,” Erin Crane argued in an unsuccessful attempt to lower his client’s bail. “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.”
Aside from the obvious, i.e., that the lying lawyer (last paragraph) should be tried first and given a death sentence for insulting the intelligence if humankind, there’s another problem with the story: where was the fruitcake’s IT Director?
Surely San Francisco can afford to employ competent managers that know how to implement multi-layered security so that passwords (access codes) can only be setup, changed and used with more than one authority.
Can you imagine a bank where one person could set up and control the security for wire transfers of large amounts of money?
What about the potential of terrorist infiltration of the city’s IT departments?
Based on the disparate city functions effected by the crimes, somebody needs to investigate the upper echelons of SF’s management. I would suggest starting in the mayor’s and commissioner’s offices.
Of course the city is in California so nothing will change. Hell, the jury might even give the guy a medal for thinking outside the box even though good managers have known how to guard against such shenanigans since the first commercial computer was put in service more than 60 years ago.
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"The Incompetence Of San Francisco City “Leadership”"
