• Childs is said to have access to email, 311 service, and law-enforcement applications. He only had the power to block network access to these apps, not to log into them.
• Childs had a list of 150 VPN groupnames and passwords. These were part of his job, not something he'd stolen. Ironically, these passwords were entered into court documents, making them publicly-accessible information.
• When Childs was arrested, he had documentation of the city network, including configurations, maps, and diagrams of the FiberWAN and possibly other networks in his possession. Again, knowing this info is part of his job.
• He had configured some number of routers to disable password recovery, but did not write the device configurations to flash memory on some number of routers. This would cause them to fail if power-cycled. City officials claim this was a "booby trap" designed to disable their data center at One Market Street during a forthcoming planned power outage. I think they're giving him too much credit for plan-within-plan cleverness here. Disabling password recovery is a standard security procedure for routers. More likely Childs just forgot to save to flash.

You can read a longer, wonkier takedown of the city's claims at IT World.

The most damning charge, technically speaking, is that Childs had several modems hooked up to computers in his workspace. It appears that he used these modems to access the network remotely without leaving an audit trail back to himself.

What an amateur.

The Childs case backs up a point I've been making to clients for years. City officials have admitted — in public! — that "not only was Childs the only admin, he was always on call, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. As the only admin with the knowledge and access to the FiberWAN, he had no help. During the past few years, the DTIS staff has been significantly reduced due to budget cuts, keeping the city dependent on a sole admin for its core network."

Overwork your techs and bad stuff will happen. Maybe Childs is happy to be in jail. He can get some sleep there.

(Photo by Robert McMillan)

Infoworld has an insider report on the tech side of the story from another San Francisco IT staffer. The Chronicle report by Matier & Ross is more people-oriented:

A team of code crackers brought in from Cisco Systems had been working around the clock to try to decipher Childs' codes, but with only marginal success.

"It wasn't cheap and I just couldn't see us keep spending that kind of money," Newsom said.

Then, out of the blue, Childs' lawyer, Erin Crane, called the mayor's office Monday afternoon, offering a jailhouse meeting.

Childs, according to the lawyer, was ready to give up the codes - but only to the mayor, who had gone out of his way in his public comments not to portray Childs as some sort of monster.

Newsom didn't hesitate. Without asking the city attorney for an opinion or giving a heads up to police or the district attorney, he was at the Hall of Justice in half an hour.

With Crane by his side, Childs told Newsom about the computer system he'd set up and how all the current problems sprang from a series of misunderstandings.

Crane didn't let him go on for too long, and Childs got to the business at hand, asking for a pen.

He then wrote out a very long computer code.

"This better be right," Newsom said.

"It is," Childs assured him, but asked the mayor to deliver it in person to the Cisco specialists — not to the city's computer brass.

Newsom took the code to the city computer center and gave it to a Cisco techie, who found that it didn't work — prompting a call-back to Crane.

"He said you would be calling and you would be upset," the lawyer said. "He forgot to give you the protocols to go along with the code" — and she read the accompanying computer prompters to the mayor over the phone.

By Tuesday morning, the system was back in the hands of the city.

(Photo by AP/Eric Risburg)