It was a busy Friday; Mark Hurd's shock resignation, followed by Apple's mobile hardware boss but one bit of news slipped by almost unnoticed. Terry Childs, the San Francisco government network administrator who locked his bosses out of the FiberWAN municipal network over a job dispute in 2008, was jailed.

Childs has been sentenced to four years in prison for his failure to hand over the codes to the network to anyone except the mayor. The prosecution wisely dropped the wiretapping charges against him after it was pointed out that every IT administrator has remote access privileges.

"Terry Childs violated the public trust and used his technical know-how to hold the city hostage," San Francisco district attorney Kamala Harris said in a statement.

"The four-year prison sentence reflects the magnitude of harm he caused the city and county of San Francisco."

The city of San Francisco spent $900,000 hiring consultants to regain control of the network, which took around 12 days. Sleuth was here at the time and the world didn't come to an end, no government systems were reported to have failed and no breaches were mentioned in the trial.

Under the circumstances four years sems rather harsh. Government sources have reportedly said that as Childs has already spent nearly two years in jail waiting for the verdict he will be out in four to six months. Even so, it's an awful lot of time for an IT manager who just couldn't let go.

09 Aug 2010