A furious computer engineer has taken over San Francisco's new multimillion-dollar computer network while he sits in jail. Terry Childs, a computer network administrator, has been charged with four counts of computer tampering and is scheduled to be appear in court today.

The court will hear that Childs, who works in the Department of Technology, fiddled with the city's new FiberWAN (Wide Area Network) and created a password that gave him total control of the system. Child was miffed that his supervisors were trying to fire him and set up the passwords as his insurance.

He also engineered a tracing system to monitor what other administrators were saying about him. He effectively has control of all officials' e-mails, city payroll files, confidential law enforcement documents and jail inmates' bookings.

Now he has been arrested he is refusing to hand over the passwords which means that the system is working for now but cannot be shut down. Officials fear that he also put other booby traps into the network which are being controlled by a third party which could be destroying hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents. X

Check out
SF Gate