Posted on 07/22/2008 8:35:33 PM PDT by SmithL
SAN FRANCISCO -- The San Francisco computer engineer accused of withholding access codes to the city's network surrendered the password during an unusual jailhouse visit by Mayor Gavin Newsom, authorities said Tuesday.
Newsom came away with the access codes Monday night after talking with Terry Childs, 43, of Pittsburg, who has been held since July 13 on four felony counts stemming from what prosecutors describe as an effort to block administrative access to the network that handles 60 percent of the city's information, including sensitive law enforcement, payroll and jail booking records.
Childs had given officials what turned out to be bogus passwords and then had refused to give the correct ones, even when threatened with arrest, authorities say. But Monday, Childs' defense attorney Erin Crane contacted the mayor's office, setting in motion the secret visit.
The visit was so secret that the mayor did not tell District Attorney Kamala Harris' office or police about it. Newsom decided on his own to accept Crane's invitation, mayoral spokesman Nathan Ballard said.
Harris' office had no immediate comment. Police declined to answer questions, citing a continuing investigation into Childs' actions on the job at the city Technology Department.
Newsom "figured it was worth a shot, because although Childs is not a Boy Scout, he's not Al Capone either," Ballard said.
Last week, Newsom described Childs, who has worked for the Technology Department for five years, as someone who had been well-liked and was "very good at what he did," but who had lately become "a bit maniacal."
Ron Vinson, the chief administrative officer for the Technology Department, said Newsom hadn't told him about the jail visit in advance. "But we are glad he was successful in getting the codes,
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
In her motion to reduce bail, Crane said Childs had been the victim of a "bad faith" effort to force him out of his post by incompetent city officials whose meddling was jeopardizing the network Childs had built. At one point, she said, Childs discovered that the network was at risk of being infected with a computer virus introduced by a colleague.There doesn't seem to be anything here to contradict what you said.
It’s pretty funny that they hadn’t brute forced or hashed the passwords yet....but then again, they made a freak a super-admin without a secondary protocol.
Maybe the mayor did Mr.Childs a little favor or gave him a little sumthin sumthim. You know he has been in jail awhile. And it is San Fran after all.
he locked it all down after they accessed his personnel file....apparently the supervisors in SF have been doing that regularly to blackmail employees
To paraphrase Chris Rock...
As an IT guy, I’ll say that he shouldn’t have done that... but I understand.
If that was true, I would have never given the codes back. Let SF twist in the wind. Truly SF got FITA’d - or for you boys in the hood, FIDA’d!
F#$KED IN THE (DA) A$$...
No, no, no...you misunderstand. The sentence that I quoted made it sound like the man was jailed without being arrested.
Maybe it was a lucky guess:
User: linksys Pwd: password
I think I know who the inside source is in that article, a colleague of mine. 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. Hopefully, the mayor will get the charges dropped against Terry, or reduced substantially.
Disregard my post #13...I looked at some other FR pages and you obviously have. Quite a story in Baghdad by the Bay...yes, I’m an ol Herb Caen fan.
Terry did stumble upon dirt. The newly hired security manager broke some rules, and Terry caught her in the act. They had a run-in with each other. Terry gathered evidence of her wrong-doing. At the same time, the female security manager was spying on Terry. Apparently, she installed key-logger software on Terry's personal workstation PC, as well as on other engineers workstations, and was gathering data onto her workstation PC. She was trying to capture passwords and login information to critical systems. This is forbidden and is not her role. I believe that Terry also secretly captured digital photos of her doing incriminating activities (at least that's one of the rumors I heard). One of those activities included her removing a hard drive and sending it to a friend outside of the city in order to decipher confidential information, an illegal activity (again, another rumor).
Terry had a sniffer on the network and traced her attempts to capture information. Managers don't like to hear that engineers have sniffers, but it's a reality of the job, as they're very useful and we would never use it to spy on anyone (Terry felt an imperative in this situation).
Anyway, the security manager (okay, let's call her Gina), supposedly panicked and called the district attorney and tried to implicate Terry as a bad guy. She did not go up the chain of command to the department director, who has regular meetings with the mayor. The DA is at odds with the mayor, keeps him in the dark and the DA goes public to the media and has Terry arrested. All this could have been handled in house without the public knowing. Next move is between the mayor and the DA on how to save face.
OPE=POE..
Hey Road, you think he will prove himself innocent of being a “rogue’ and drop the goods on the other person we discussed the other day?
I wonder if those people are reading FR? LOL!
For those of you who think the System Admin was a creep for doing this, it sounds like you’re all WAY off the mark and he was doing his JOB correctly and his superiors are the ones who are screwed up.
I’d do the SAME THING to protect National Security.
The msm is off the mark on their reporting (so what else is new), and have gotten several things wrong - they're not checking their sources. For example, it was reported that he was earning $150g. Not true - the civil service charter forbids the system engineer classes from earning cash for overtime. We got compensatory time, to be used elsewhere in the year for time off. Only problem is, when you ask for time off the managers often deny you the use of it because you're a critical asset; and there are limits on keeping it so you end up losing hundreds of hours of your time without pay. So Terry had a fixed pay of about $126K. These are set by formulas, arrived at by comparing wages with other counties and private companies. The kicker is that managers above automatically get a +5% differential for each level above the engineers, without having to demonstrate any ability for performance. So there are high-paid idiot managers. The engineers work their butts off, often without compensation.
Another thing is that many technicians are afraid to speak out, because they are classified temporary (almost the same as perpetual probation), or have a small number of years of service that won't qualify them for a pension. There's a climate of fear put into everyone, that they can be fired at any time for anything.
I've put myself out on a limb numerous times when others wouldn't, but never to that extent that Terry did. I got some managers to resign - what a good feeling that became. But usually I got reassigned for speaking out, and higher-ups covered for each other. They'd put out some flowery memo that bore no resemblance to the truth.
Terry is a brave soul for speaking out. But things spiraled out of control for him.
All of that sounds suspiciously like being a government contractor. lol
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