Do your job, land in jail and pay $1.5 million?
itmanagerdaily.comThere are lot of details that don't make it into most press reports of the Childs case, but that are very important. Many of these are covered in this:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/042910-terry-childs-ju...
which is an interview with juror #4, who in addition to having heard all of those details, also happens to be a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) and is a senior network engineer at ADP (the giant payroll company).
who locked San Francisco out of its main computer network for 12 days
Childs claimed he never intended any harm, but did not trust his superiors with the passwords. He eventually gave the passwords to then-Mayor Gavin Newsom in a jail cell visit
This doesn't really pass the smell test as just some silly misunderstanding. Twelve days to hand over the information?
He refused to hand it over to anyone except the mayor due to his interpretation of the rules he was under. Had the mayor showed up in 5 minutes, he would only have held them for 5 minutes.
He claims his ethics prevented him from doing anything other than exactly what he did. And if he really felt that only the Mayor could be trusted with the password, he was honor-bound to hand them only to him.
The entire system not only allowed him to get into this situation, but it practically forced it on him thanks to budget cuts and ridiculous decisions. Not that he was complaining at the time.
It will serve as a good reminder as to why you should not only act ethically, but demand that your bosses act ethically as well. It was unconscionable that they let a single person have this much power over their network. Had he died, they would have had a hard time getting that password back.
$1.5MM sounds overly vindictive, but "He said he was first asked for the passwords by people who weren’t authorized to have them."? For twelve days?
Everything about this stinks.
Not knowing the details, it becomes difficult to analyze fully and fairly.
Still, if you get a request in writing, from a superior, which would exculpate you from possible negligence for allegedly improperly divulging information, if that's what he truly believed, that should have alleviated the issue.
Instead, from the outside, at least, it seemed as if he was unreasonably steadfast in his stance, despite pleas from the mayor (pre-jailhouse visit). It was as though he thought his interpretation of policy superseded the authority of the people or office who/which set out the policy.
As I recall the events, it was almost as though he became a prisoner of his own doing. Once he made a stance, it become very difficult for him to back down. As if saving face was a very important aspect of the ordeal. Of course, that's just my personal projection, perhaps.
Four years and 1.5 million is too harsh, in my view. Yet, he did deserve some punishment for his actions.
There are more details in the interview tzs linked to [1].
>It was as though he thought his interpretation of policy superseded the authority of the people or office who/which set out the policy.
It's worse than that. According to the juror in the interview, there was no policy on who could get the passwords. So it wasn't a matter of interpretation; it was purely pulled out of his posterior data storage unit.
"what would have happened if Childs had been hit by a bus?"
I call for the EFF, the ACLU and the FSF to create a "Programmer's Hit By A Bus" fund. We would all contribute, according to the degree of bus-danger we put ourselves in to. For instance, I actually ride Denver RTD buses, so I would contribute the maximum amount. Some programmer living in a municipality without buses would pay only a nominal amount.
We could build up a large fund to take care of the estates, widows and orphans left behind by the heinous plague of Programmers getting Hit By A Bus.