Give everyone the Passwords or got to jail!
Does that SOUND weird. I thought is is should be like this:
"Reveal passwords to outsiders and wind up in jail."

Instead, so we are told, the San Francisco Network administrator was told by his superiors to give the passwords to a group of MANAGERS, attorneys and policemen in a room.
He refused. He went to jail.

That was back in JULY. Just now he has made a comment on the case, but is not allowed to give details.
Hard to believe? Just do a Google on
Terry Childs
I'm not going to google it...who's PROSECUTING him and why ? ?This is actually an old story, or is still ongoing. It's a case of this admin thinking only he knows how to operate this network, which is partly true because from what I remember he has it booby trapped so nobody else can access it without crashing the network, which is a San Francisco City Network.

He sees it as "his" network.

The city of San Fransisco is prosecuting him. It was in local papers last summer. He has been in jail these months and just now told part of his side of the story.

They claim he tampered with the new network system the city set up. He is thier administrator for the network. Several officials he locked out of the system. Some time back he had an issue with them. They wanted to fire him, but his contract terms, somehow, made it hard to do. The say his was unproductive.

Now the strange thin is he was arrested because he would not give up the passwords. Odd, he tampered with the system so you would think they would make a case based on the tampering. So the say, he tampered the system, but arrested him for not revealing the passwords to a crowd of people.
Most of the newspaper articles paint him as a 'roue' and show him as the bad guy.How does an under productive employee get the keys to the system?

But my thought is why would they put so much trust in just one person? Did not the city fathers know what they were doing when they hired this man and gave him so much power? They need to arrest some more people in City Hall for some reason. Maybe it should be a crime for City administrators not to know something about computers.

PCWorld has covered this story. Hare is the latest:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/159717/accused_rogue_admin_terry_childs_makes_his_case.html
he's being paid to keep the network running for the city. It doesn't make it his. I imagine it's mostly hubris on his part watching all these city workers go about their networking tasks as if it's all completely automated, completely ignoring his contribution. Doesn't justify it though.

And if it's true that they arrested him because of refusal to give passwords, I don't see what that falls under? the tampering would definitely be against the law, but at the same time what tampering?

Who else thinks there is a small chance that these people he supposedly "locked out" simply forgot their password, and got chuckled at by the admin since it was the third time that week that they needed their password reset...One of the old articles mentioned that there have been other admins like him. They become so protective of the network that they won't let anybody else access it.

Imagine letting a 5 year old fire up your brand new build and start downloading torrents. Not gonna happen right? That's how these guys feel about their network...