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The computer admin who brought the San Francisco's computer system to its knees, has had bail set at 5 million. In other words, he's effectively been denied bail.
I approve. Obviously he is the dastardly evil SUPER HACKER and only by keeping him imprisoned can his l33t hacking skillz be kept from pwning San Francisco.
"You fools! You should have kept me in jail! You had your chance, but it's too late now! I have unleashed my doomsday VIRUS. San Francisco will BURN. No one can stop me! Muahahahaha".
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Aloha, Ian!
Hi Ian.
TRex has a big announcement over at the treehouse. Treehouse 2.0 debuts in a few hours.
judas forking priest, ian. what ever happened to that presumed innocent and right of reasonable bail?
It would appear that the covert repeal of the Fourth Amendment has reached the local level now.
What are you, some kind of farking Communist?
dayam, i’m a liberal pinko commie who supports the constitution of the people by the people for the people.
Odd. I recall way back in the dim, dark reaches of time if you were that good you’d be snapped up by Bell Labs…
Okay, then, fair enough.
I don’t think even the 4th allows you to put a secret password on your employer’s computer and then refuse to tell what it is. This guy just shut the place down.
So that is your one for the night.
No. I am the farking Communist around here.
Thanks for the link. I’d been wondering why the hell every time I climbed up into the treehouse I never saw TRex. A book?? WAAAY great…
Wow, you’ve truly completed the journey over from the Darkside then, Suz! ;-)
No, it does not. But doing so does not revoke your right to bail.
I know we never got “edit” back. Is there any hope that “show text” will ever return? We Firefox users are getting desperate!
true but that’s a high bail reserved for murderers, child molesters and those who are truly a high risk to society or an extremely high flight risk.
even after he gave up the password to the mayor, they refused to lower this draconian bail.
True. This guy sounds a little off to me.
yes sir maam sir
you can be the commie, i’ll be the liberal pinko commie.
City held hostage.
payroll
systems
pensions
sanitation
etc
That bail may be low.
This is a different Ian from the one I remember in Chicago. wazzup?
Probably wouldn’t take him much to totally screw up the court’s computer system too.
This is America and you have the right to be a monumental asshat. Of course you also have the right to pay a proportionate penalty for being a diabolical asshat. The issue is proportionate. $5 million bail is not proportional in the absence of evidence that the person is an ongoing threat to society or a flight risk.
Think what this guy could do to the voting machines….or has.
He sounds way more than a little off to me, but that in itself does not justify bail this high.
Which is why back in the day folks like this would have their legal fees paid for by people who wanted to know how they did it and learn how to protect against it. Putting him in jail means nobody learns how he did it and nobody knows how to protect against it.
He will be working in the pentagon next week in the cyber slueth Dept
Give him an enormous amount of community service. Let him teach seniors how to use computers. I doubt he’d be training up new hackers in that community.
yeah, my spouse has early Alzheimers… our computers are networked… but said spouse knows that passwords need to be changed periodically… those changes are NOT denial of services… they’re a pain in the as* for me as I play catchup… the San Francisco hacker, by having a required password change after power outages is NOT necessarily a villain.
Technology is great… most of the time… but I need to know a bit more about motives here… before I can conclude locking out “superiors” is insidious activity…
He can be an asshat all he wants to but he does not have the right to trash other people who can’t get paid, etc. I also think this was a warning to others who might think this was a cute kind of thing to do - severe penalties.
Hell, he will be in charge of the NSA data mining project by the end of the month.
As I said, waaaay back in the day he’d have been snapped up by Bell Labs.
i’m not saying what he did was good. the aclu fights to protect the rights of everyone, including the worst of the worst of our society, so that all our rights are protected.
the entire legal system is based on being fair and balanced in the non-fox meaning. the question of bail should be balanced by the defendant’s constitutionally guaranteed right to bail and the right of the citizenry have a safe society.
just because the judge is pissed off because the judge is an employee of the city and county of san francisco, as the district attorney herself is, and they and there staff were therefore were impacted by the acts of the defendant is no reason to issue such an extraordinary high bail.
Maybe he could even teach McCain
You obviously do not know some of the seniors I do. ;-)
Maybe he can teach McThuselah how to do “the google.”
Hmm, who’s worse, the hackers or the spammers? I’d love to write a show of some sort where the antagonists of the story are in prison and they learn that one of their fellow prisoners is a …gasp…a spammer!!! Ooh! The awful things they’d do to that guy!
Hmm, yeah, we’d have to then cut to a scene where they simply describe the torments he went through. And yes, phone/voicemail spammers are indistinguishable from computer spammers. They’re all just as bad!
I you are that good
1. you aren’t caught
2. you have never had an ‘admin’ job
3. you will be snapped up by the Chinese or more likely the Russian/Romanian/etc mafia
I have no problem with severe penalties and agree that if he did it, then he needs to be hung out the window by his nutsack. The problem right now is that he has not been convicted of anything and is still technically innocent.
I’m willing to bet this dude is either completely apolitical or is a Democrat!
Good point, Suz! Maybe they should’ve recused themselves…!
As much fun as this is, I’ve got to totter off to bed. Sleep well, pups.
I think with his cleverness it is not hard to think him a flight risk. Or maybe if so many people were effected, for his own safety. But flight is a better reason, I suppose.
Aloha, Marion!
Night Marion.
Read the article - not a hacker - a worker bee with admin rights
I concur that this is mostly a personnel issue.
Think if the 3rd shift city hall janitor changed the locks out.
The scary thing (for a techie) is that prosecutor could scare a judge into thinking this person was really a threat.
Still have to agree with Suzanne, that the bail seems exorbitant for the offense.
g’nite marion
the dude planted some melt-down code or some such. no sympathy from me if I were an SF taxpayer.
Let’s hear it for the students in New Zealand!
It must have been all that talk about shopping that ticked them off.
Bail was initially set at the DA’s request at FIVE MILLION DOLLARS. Then, the judge yesterday did not see fit to reduce it. Terry Childs’ next hearing will be in late September, which imprisons the guy until then — making his contribution to his defense almost impossible.
There’s gotta be something here we can’t see, and I wonder if it has to do with Boy Mayor’s 15 minute visit, during which he got all the key codes.
I mean, do they think he’s Magneto, or The Joker?
I suppose he is clever but I think hackers are the lowest of the low. They see no reason why they shouldn’t destroy the work of others just because they feel like it. I have no sympathy for this person at all and would certainly be enraged if my house burned down because I couldn’t get the fire dept.
not just techies. anyone can now be portrayed as a terrorist or a threat
Nothing was shut down.
He shut everyone out. There’s a big difference.
And he has surrendered the key codes. So he can now access nothing.
It feels like a huge extortion plot that got preempted.
Ugh. That woman is really. something. else.
(I can’t say it.)
All systems ran fine. Had there been an interruption, restoration would have been difficult, or perhaps impossible.
But we shouldn’t exaggerate the difficulty this guy created just because the media doesn’t try to understand the technology.
Did anybody catch this little bombshell…
True. The judge could easily imposed restrictions (like no computer use) as a condition of bail to protect the interests of the city.
We will probably start hearing from his neighbors about what a nice quiet kid he is, but didn’t seem to have any friends. Who ever would have thought he would do something like this? I love that line: of course, no one woudl have thought it.
We gave the Telcoms a pass for hacking.
What’s with the $5 mil? What constitutes a Super Hacker?
Which hacker, of thousands, gets the brass kling?
The media never rests.
and surrender of his passport if they were concerned about flight. or an ankle bracelet for monitoring.
As long as she waves getting on and off the plane
I know this person shut people OUT but you just said it might have been impossible to get IN - what about an emergency situation? Don’t mean to sound too harsh but people like this who mess with other people’s stuff just drive me nuts. He had no right.
I think it’s more about that he totally pwnd the big guys. it’s an embarrassment issue on top of the “threat”.
I’m glad to know they didn’t “gitmo” him.
And I think bail should still be reasonable. there’s something third world banana republic about imprisonment with little to no or impossible recourse. but that’s just me.
Teddy, get a load of this BS…!
I can attest to the high-functioning of the fire department and other city services during this “crisis.” People seem not to be getting the point that nothing happened. No damage was done. There was no crisis.
Even our irritating citywide sirens that remind us every week that it’s noon on Tuesday worked just fine throughout this non-event.
The judge is being scammed by the prosecutor. Did anybody read “Little Brother” and participate in the Book Salon this weekend? Don’t we have any sympathy for the accused hereabouts?
Preemptive pretrial imprisonment is something I thought we were AGAINST here….
So glad I looked. What amazing career advice for young women. She has no shame.
the pd i worked at was one of the first to use computer aided dispatching back in the 80’s. when i left in 2004, they still had access to the old time stamping machine method they used prior to the computer systems.
all public safety have backups for use in case of power outages, natural disasters and other disruptions - there were many times we were dispatched manually because the CAD system was down or being upgraded and the like.
What does that have to do with anything? The issue is this: is he a flight risk, or is he a danger to the public. If he’s not, then he should be given reasonable bail. That’s how bail is set, how “bad” the crime was is not an issue if he is not a flight risk or likely to be a repeat offender. Look, folks who have done a lot worse things than him get bail all the time.
Again, provided that he actually did it and given what I have I heard I don’t doubt that he did. None-the-less, under the law, he is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law by a jury of his peers and must be treated as such (within reasonable limits). The law protects the guilty and the innocent alike.
And guys like Rove get to roam around the world
The average murderer or rapist gets bail that is a fraction of that.
It was his job. He was the IT supervisor. He shut out people he thought were using the system improperly. Does that sound like someone who had malicious intent, or like someone who was trying to blow a whistle?
He didn’t “hack in.” As a trusted employee with powers previously given to him by his employers, he **locked others out.**
I just would urge folks to not jump to conclusions — the press here has been very, very quiet about this. I think we may learn more, perhaps.
I would hope that in a situation pitting an all-powerful judicial system against an accused, we would have some sympathy for the accused and some skepticism about the media reports, spoonfed by the prosecution.
designer handcuffs come to mind.
Mack, you’ve got it … WHAT is the real threat here?
I don’t mind reasonable bail - but the early thoughts here seemed to be that this wasn’t important and I think it is.
That is so pre-9/11 thinking.
The law does whatever the suits want it to, now.
i’m tellin ya. it was the “egg on the face of The Man” that did him in. and what he did doesn’t offend me an inkling as much as the data gathering secret rooms in the AT&T offices around the country!
planted a melt down code, you think??? like he’d been told to do???
like he’d been hired to do???
it’s latenight (at least on my coast) and not our usual level of research and discernment applied to this story. I appreciate Ian’s thinking that we focus on more serious stuff, but my brain, for one, ceases to function well at this hour. I need silly or at least light weight before bed. So I guess it’s time to just check out and let those who are more awake and tuned in fight this one out.
i don’t understand why the ca ag wasn’t brought in - the ca charter specifically allows the ca ag to investigate and prosecute in cases where there is an obvious conflict of interest.
Hope you don’t mind, Ian…
sleep well revdeb
that’s odd.
I don’t recall “Marriage 101″ at any level in any school of my education. Who teaches THAT?
weird.
And people in surprising places (ahem!) support the law when it acts that way.
Aloha, Rev!
That is exactly what I am talking about. Nobody has the right to do this. I think you said it better than I did.
I frankly do not no whether it was serious or not - Teddy raises some significant issues here. There were, in the reports I saw, indications that it could have been serious. That has not been anybody’s issue that I have seen. The issue has been whether $5 million bail is reasonable in the circumstances and nothing I have seen would indicate that it is.
Oh, I am quite sure you are right about that.
Twain, just HOW did Child’s activity prevent you from getting the fire department?
Was there some time warp pushing you back to the days before telephone ??? Do you always contact the fire department through their web pages?
One of those offices is right here, if you’ll recall — right on Folsom Street.
Does anyone else find it odd that this incident occurred right after the President signed the telecom immunity, in the same city where the newly immunized lawbreaking occurred?
/tinfoil off
Eh, it was mostly supposed to be a fun story. Didn’t expect it to turn into a fight.
I hate explaining humor (it shows I’ve failed) but the point of the piece is that unless you think he is a super hacker who will do horrible things if let loose, effective denial of bail (which is what 5 million bail is) is excessive in this case. He’s not much of a threat to repeat offend, and we have no reason to believe he’s a flight risk.
But see, if he was a super hacker, well then, 5 million would be justified.
Now, having shot my joke repeatedly in the face by explaining it, I will note that a new threat is up, wherein I praise someone for standing up to the Governator and put up an ugly picture of the wax figure in Madame Tussaud’s of the Terminator as played by said Governator.
I swear they’re grasping at straws to scare the Californians…!
And Bob Novak only got a $50 buck citation. Hmn.
No lie, man. Who to trust to have your back? Hard to tell, anymore.
mmm we will probably start hearing from RevBev’s neighbors about what a nice…. but she’s certainly not my friend, burning jailbirds before their trials…
yeah and WHERE are the “Hit and Run” charges we would’ve gotten had that been a body splayed across one of OUR windshields???!
Did not mean to make this thread un-fun.
It’s only eight pm here!
and why is someone who was complicit in the outing of a CIA operative (treason) driving around in a damned vet anyway???
THAT alone pissed me right off!
link to ian’s new thread upstairs
If one assumes there was a “rational” reason for this “release” it had to be because the body guard had turned into a very important informant and Hamdan’s identification may have lead to other detainees at Git’mo targeting him as a sell-out. So they had to extricate the bodyguard.
Of course, if the bodyguard hadn’t really “turned” then Hamdan would be really screwed, wouldn’t he. In fact, by releasing this information now it pretty much makes him a marked man to Al Qaida and their sympathisers.
i’ve been gone for a couple of days. it’s been nice to be here and see you guys tonight.
i missed ya’all.
*shy smile*
have a great night.
you are all appreciated in my life!!!!
Dugg.
Thanks Ian! G’night LurkingMod!
:)
Hmmm.
That does put a different slant on things.
Hmmm, I wonder ‘who’ in particular he was trying to keep out…
‘As a trusted employee with powers previously given to him by his employers, he **locked others out.**’