45-year-old Terry Childs, a former sysadmin for the city of San Francisco, was sentenced Friday to four years in prison for refusing to hand over administrative passwords to the city’s FiberWAN network back in July 2008. A judge convicted Childs in April of violating state hacking laws.

Although the city’s network continued to run during the 12 days that Childs refused to hand over control, jurors found that by denying the city the administrative control to its own network, Childs had violated state law.Childs defended his actions during a long court trial, saying that he was only doing his job, and that his supervisor, Department of Technology and Information Services Chief Operations Officer Richard Robinson, was unqualified to have access to the passwords. Childs eventually handed over the passwords to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Prosecutors characterized the former network administrator as a power hungry control freak who couldn’t be managed.

Source

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