Earlier this week we wrote about Terry Childs,  the network architect and administrator alleged to have held San Francisco's WLAN hostage for nine days in a professional disagreement with his manager.

We have read scanned copies of original court documents on Terry Childs' case. We also read most of the articles on the Internet and in print about this case.

We have some sympathy for Terry Childs having to work and not getting paid neither money nor personal recognition. We were on a team for nine years that did those kinds of long hours in the 1980s-90s. It is a lousy, no-win deal, and you get low pay with practically no recognition from those individuals that receive a lot of benefit from your group’s nearly free labor and technical knowledge.

As we read the court documents, we came to the conclusion that the City of San Francisco's Information Technology (IT) management folks are fundamentally inept at doing their jobs.

Our interpretation of the court documents is:

First; Mr. Child’s immediate boss lacked hands-on administration knowledge of the WLAN and, it appears, the technical expertise to be in that management position.  Secondly; the lady security person’s qualifications are not spelled out and she just might be a political appointee. Third; we would bet that Terry Childs doesn't get along with women as co-workers, nor as his boss.  Fourth; there are claims by Mr. Childs’ attorney that several fellow employees and managers were trying to get Childs to react badly by provoking him. Childs claims that one fellow employee sabotaged the WLAN with a 'virus server'.

Last, but most importantly; the whole fiasco was created because the City of San Francisco's IT organization did not follow what are called 'industry best practices'.

The City's IT management comes off as what a retired Veterans Administration Regional IT manager calls 'Deliberate Luddites'. Those are bosses who still want the management world to have 1950's secretaries and layers of folks to protect them from making any decisions; let alone the really hard ones. Hard ones such as writing employee job descriptions which shared the knowledge base and work load, thereby making sure there was no one person who was a lynch pin that could blackmail everyone by not cooperating. Their worst oversight was the outright failure to document and safely store password information for easy access to restore the network instead of being hog tied until nine days after having to jail the sole administrator for the WLAN.

The fundamental question left unanswered by the court accusations against Mr. Childs: Why did San Francisco's IT management allow only two people to have total control of the network architecture design? Where are the signed-off documents for work flow, network schematics, router passwords, hardware inventory with locations, etc. etc. etc.

There appears to be nearly zero implementation of industry best practices network configuration management techniques. That failure is laid directly at the feet of those highly paid city IT managers and the various department IT managers who depended on their bandwidth from the city's WLAN.

Why was it allowed to proceed that only one person was responsible for bringing the whole system back online when a fault occurred. That is basically a ridiculous management-allowed procedure that guarantees a failure will eventually happen.

Instead of being a professional organization made up of highly trained technical members who shared goals, shared responsibilities, and shared knowledge, the whole organization acted like a leaderless rabble who collected their paychecks and did not care what happened.

We may take exception to the claims made by the arresting officer in his write up for the arrest warrant. We may think the prosecutor's office was inept by posting 150 usernames and passwords in their original court filings. We may think that comments by Mr. Childs’ co-workers and managers are self-serving and after-the-fact. The fact remains that Mr. Childs is in jail on four felony counts. 

Now we turn to Terry Childs’ observable behavior. Court documents portray him as someone who has slipped off the beaten path and is mired in an emotional cesspool of distrusting nearly everyone. Mr. Childs comes off in the court documents as nearly anti-social and totally self-absorbed in his kingdom of techy toys, his own and those he was hired to take care of and operate in the best interest of the public. The public comprised of tax paying, faceless citizens that trust the City's VoIP network to work in Police and Fire Dispatch as well as the other dozens of San Francisco City Departments.

Childs comes off in the court documents as if he sees himself as some sort of comic-book-like character who is guardian of technology that the rest of the world is too stupid to operate. In addition, Childs is portrayed in the court documents as if he has shifted his perspective to the point of view that his co-workers have a jealous and malicious intent to destroy all his years of hard work.

The day before his arrest Childs drove to Sparks, Nevada; a round trip of nearly 300 miles, where he looked for a rental storage space. When he was arrested, he had $10,000 in cash in his pockets. That amount of money raises federal prosecution red flags too. Mr. Childs as a teenager was arrested and served jail time. Of course, the arresting officer had a cop-on-the-beat attitude towards a person with a prior arrest record. Rehabilitation is not a theory most law enforcement beat cops embrace.

If, and this is a big if, it is possible to prove in a court of law that everybody is out to get Terry Childs: Terry Childs, then, is the ultimate techy champion for those who work in the dark dungeons of bits, bytes, arcane router jargon of cryptic network terminology and odd passwords changed often, and, the 24/7/365 real fear that somebody will reconfigure something and screw up the whole house of cards called a network.

However, should Mr. Childs lose in court, he is probably going to jail for a few years. If he loses, he also will have a difficult time finding another IT job involving passwords. For that matter, if he wins he will probably not be welcomed back to a similar position with open arms either.

This saga is not over. Mr. Childs will sit in the San Francisco County jail until September 24 for his next court hearing. There will eventually be more career casualties and no one will come out looking like a winner in this one.

Everybody looks bad when their dirty laundry is hung out to dry on a street corner. X