Former SF network admin Terry Childs sentenced to prison

After a drawn out trial that saw City of San Francisco administrator Terry Childs being convicted of violating California state hacking laws by deliberately locking the authorities out of the city’s FiberWAN network by refusing to disclose administrative passwords, he has finally been sentenced on Friday to four years in prison.

Childs has been held in county jail since his arrest, so he has already served 755 days, which will make him eligible for parole in four to six months.

However, time in prison may not be the only thing that will be required of him to settle his debt with society – he will find out next week if he will also be required to reimburse to the city the $900,000 it spent on trying to repossess the network.

According to Computerworld, during the trial the prosecution characterized Childs as a “power hungry control freak who couldn’t be managed.”

Childs himself maintained that he was only doing his job and that his immediate supervisor was not qualified to be given the passwords. After 12 days of refusing to surrender them, he eventually surrendered the passwords to Gavin Newsom, the mayor of the city.